James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg
One of my favourite books is The Moral Animal. It does a great job of explaining the connection between the mental organs and behaviour, and does justice to the explanatory line on its cover – “why we are the way we are”. I liked it a lot because it did a stellar job of helping me understand the reasons behind my mindset, relationships and interactions with the world at large. While that book helped me understand myself, this one helped me understand the world much better.
Considering that it was published in 1997, this is as much a prediction machine as it is a brilliant book. It took at least till the middle of the last decade for even the internet to manifest itself in the form we are now familiar with. Therefore, accurately predicting the rise of e-commerce and cryptocurrency (referred to as cyber currency) is a feat in itself. The projections are not just in the field of business but cover social, economical, societal, political and even moral aspects as well. For instance, the rise of nationalism, filter bubbles, the twist in increasing income disparity (from between nations to within nations) because of lack of access are all themes that are being played out now.
But as with the other book I mentioned, the admiration for this one too is largely because of the way the ‘why’ has been thought through and explained. From quickly using timeframes of 500 years to show shifts (and reasons) from hunter-gatherer to agricultural to industrial eras, to drawing parallels between the destruction of the Church’s monopoly and the future of the nation state, the book shows patterns and cycles and more importantly, the common forces that have been shaping the world. In the current shift, it explains how the very factors that drove both geopolitics and business in the industrial age will now work against them in the information age. The title refers to the rise of the individual and his/her sovereignty in the scheme of things as monopolies capitulate and he/she becomes less citizen and more consumer of even things like taxation!
I really liked the flow of the book and the largely sequential narrative that drives home the point of why the events and themes that the authors predict are likely to happen. The articulation is top notch and yet, very accessible. In the end, it even gives a bit of a how-to guide in case one believes in the conclusions.
A fantastic read if one is even remotely interested in the system of the world.
P.S. I must admit to a little bias since the book validates one of my favourite hypotheses – the fall of the nation state and its trappings like patriotism!
