When Prophecy Fails
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Book discussion group on Daily Kos
Edward
Jul 27, 2014 03:00PM
I'm starting a book discussion tomorrow in the Daily Kos group Readers and Book Lovers, under the title Grokking Republicans. (Yes, that's a Heinlein reference, to Stranger in a Strange Land.) We will start with the theory and practice of Cognitive Dissonance, the ability of religious and ideological groups to ignore reality and just make stories up, and in some circumstances to grow larger when predictions turn out dead wrong. You can read about the seriesThe Theory of the Leisure Class
at R&BLers: Birth Announcement for Grokking Republicans, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/07...
I'm looking for titles to add to the book list. We prefer scientific studies, but we accept other sharp observations.
The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen, Conspicuous Consumption and the delusion that richer means morally and intellectually superior, at all levels of society, plus slavery and oppression of women
The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer, ideology
Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, by Stanley Milgram, the classic Yale study on getting people to harm others
Conservatives Without Conscience, by John Dean, applying the Milgram experiment results to post-Watergate Republicans
Learned Helplessness: A Theory for the Age of Personal Control, by Christopher Peterson, Steven F. Maier and Martin E. P. Seligman, how animals and people can be taught to be helpless, and also taught not to be, which we will apply to GOTV
The Evolution of Cooperation, by Robert Axelrod, including how non-cooperation and oppression come about and can be undone
The Lucifer Effect, by Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford Prison Experiment; how power and powerlessness both corrupt and damage participants
The Jack Acid Society Black Book, by Walt Kelly, a pointed and comic look at the paranoia of the John Birch Society, which is still very much with us
The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James, which we will use to examine Evangelistic and Creationist claims to own the frame for the religious debate
at R&BLers: Birth Announcement for Grokking Republicans, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/07...I'm looking for titles to add to the book list. We prefer scientific studies, but we accept other sharp observations.
The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen, Conspicuous Consumption and the delusion that richer means morally and intellectually superior, at all levels of society, plus slavery and oppression of women
The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer, ideology
Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, by Stanley Milgram, the classic Yale study on getting people to harm others
Conservatives Without Conscience, by John Dean, applying the Milgram experiment results to post-Watergate Republicans
Learned Helplessness: A Theory for the Age of Personal Control, by Christopher Peterson, Steven F. Maier and Martin E. P. Seligman, how animals and people can be taught to be helpless, and also taught not to be, which we will apply to GOTV
The Evolution of Cooperation, by Robert Axelrod, including how non-cooperation and oppression come about and can be undone
The Lucifer Effect, by Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford Prison Experiment; how power and powerlessness both corrupt and damage participants
The Jack Acid Society Black Book, by Walt Kelly, a pointed and comic look at the paranoia of the John Birch Society, which is still very much with us
The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James, which we will use to examine Evangelistic and Creationist claims to own the frame for the religious debate
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