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The origin of the family, private property and the state - Frederick Engels
Disorients the notions of holy political/religious/social hierarchies. He points out that wealth could not be inherited along male lineage without women having a single husband exclusively.
He suggests that the institution of the family arose as a byproduct of trying to concentrate wealth and power along male lines (and he points out that he's not trying to suggest that we should therefore engage in sexual promiscuity).
Essentially, it makes the point that the accumulation of wealth and power is at the heart of some ideas that are commonly thought of as ideals handed down by God.
Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
Disorients the notions of good and bad and good and evil. For example, he suggests that there is significance to the origins of the words good and bad (gut and schlecht) which are from rich and poor (rich is good, poor is bad).
He portrays an aspect of judeo-christian ideology of sticking up for the underdog as peculiar resentment (the word comes from "to feel again"), which he refers to as an obsessive clinging to a sentiment about people (a cherished hatred of the wrong-doer).
So, my take on that relates to something I see in right-wing ideology. I think a lot of people think that agreeing with whomever is in power is positive, while disagreeing is negative, which of course that is true in a sense. Disagreeing is negating something.
If you disagree you are a spoil sport. If you are able to disagree, you are disagreeable.
So, while disagreeing with people who are in power is not evil in an absolute sense, there is a seed of tryanny in rebellion. That notion is critically important I think.
Presumably some hugely powerful person isn't interested in destroying you, they are just willing to destroy to better themselves. On the other hand, opposing that person does involve wanting to destroy that person (or his power or whatever). At that point, the powerful destructive guy is not trying to control you, while you ARE trying to control him. There's the seed of tyranny.
It's been a while since I read it, but that's what I remember. It was one of the only books I've read that had ideas that really astonished me, and that were radically different than what I had thought of before.
Ishmael - Daniel Quinn
Told from the perspective of a gorilla (I know, that sounds lame, but it actually reads well): discusses the notion of "leavers" and "takers", as roles that entities play in an ecosystem.
"Leavers" are hunter-gatherer and nomadic people and most other animals, who live within the scope of a law he sees as: you can be a predator as long as you are prey. "Takers" are those who see the world as belonging to them, as something to be exploited.
"Takers" are unique in tending to intentionaly destroy others, like wipe out all of some species that is competing with them. "Leavers" don't, e.g. the lions don't conspire to exterminate the hyenas.
The book makes a point about the christian bible that seems interesting, but I don't know enough history to judge how accurate it is. He says that the story of the fall from Eden and of Cain and Abel, is a story of the birth of Agriculture. He says it was a piece of Semitic (Leaver) war propaganda that was adopted by the Hebrews (Takers) as their own story.
In the story the agriculturalists are the bad guys who God curses to live by the sweat of their brow and expells them from Eden. He says the agriculturalists were the caucasians, and that the mark of Cain is white skin.
The garden of Eden he says was land in which hunter gatherers and then nomadic herders lived. The garden holds the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
The knowledge of good and evil is the knowledge of who shall live and who shall die. That is, in order to see the world as existing for you to exploit, you would have to feel you have the knowledge of who/what shall live and die.
He portrays the tree of life as representing prosperity or population growth, the life of your group.
In the garden, there are Adam (which means, literally, "man") and Eve (which means, not woman, but "life"). He says Eve has her name in the story because nomadic people have to carefully regulate the proportion of males and females in a group. The more women there are, the more babies there are to feed, and this is limited by how much food you can acquire with the people in your group. So Eve is representing the issue of babies and population growth...
The semites he says were nomadic herders who were being encroached upon by the caucasian agriculturalists. Agriculturalists do not need to be careful about the growth of their familes as much. They can grow their families as large as they want as long as they can keep getting control of more land. So, there is an impetus to control more and more land to increase your wealth and feed your expanding group.
In the story, Adam being tempted by Eve is man seeing that he does not need to control his population growth, that he can pursue limitless growth by taking on the idea that he can decide who shall live and who shall die. Cain represents the encroaching caucasian, he slaughters Abel as the encroaching caucasians supposedly did to the semitic herders. This act is frowned upon by God, and the caucasians are forced to live in what from the semites perspective was misery: life as agriculturalists, living by the sweat of their brow.
I know that there are groups of Ishmael fans, or whatever. I haven't paid any attention to them yet. So, in case they are fanatics, I should point out that I don't know anything about them!! I'm also not religious or I'm religiously anti-religious...
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