The Worst Book Ever Read

“What is the best book you've ever read?” From the dorm room to the senior center, I love to play this game. You can learn a ton about a person from their answer, or answers. And you can tell a lot about ‘the person you’ve made yourself to be’ (there’s a hint) by noting how your own answers morph over time.

For me, the two titles that consistently emerge are The Gospel of John and James Joyce’s Ulysses, often joined by Whitehead’s Process and Reality and/or Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. 

I own hundreds of books (yes, I have read most of them) but these 4 stand out. But what about the worst book ever? OMG…so much trash, so little time! Let’s exclude books that are just badly written, counter factual, morally repugnant, or boring as dried paint. (We only have 85 years after all!) 

I might change my mind next month but right now I have a clear winner in mind; it’s a book written by Anders Indset, a wonderful person I’m sure, and published in 2020: The Quantum Economy. In just over 300 pages, this book manages to recycle just about every bad idea since stale bread, panzanella notwithstanding.

No, I didn’t read it all…I couldn’t do that to my poor Pooh brain! But I’ll step aside now, for the most part at least, and let the book speak for itself. Prepare yourself…now let the adventure begin: 

 “The Old Economy is dead. So is the New Economy…and 2019 might go down in human history as the high water mark.” 

See what I mean. Who in his right mind could imagine 2019 as the apex of human civilization? But, in the immortal words of the Carpenters, “We’ve only just begun!”

“We must move toward the unification of the natural and social sciences to create a society of understanding…We need a new enlightenment. But how do you enlighten people who don’t know they need enlightenment?” He means you, Muggle! Be grateful for small graces: the worst ideas often come wrapped in elitist packaging. Elitists just can’t help themselves; they tell you who they are…right up front and in your face. So it turns out, sometimes you can tell a book by its cover.

“…Maybe we will succeed in creating a digital direct democracy, in which every voice can be heard without the sclerotic structures of party politics.”

What a great idea! Put everyone in individual, hermetically sealed booths and ask them to govern. That ensures that public policy will enshrine the special interests of the ideological class, i.e. the media, the educational establishment, etc. Why didn’t Uncle Joe Stalin think of this…or did he?

Human beings do not function in isolation. We only thrive in society with others: family members, neighbors, classmates, work colleagues, drinking buddies, monastic communities, etc. We form our opinions in dialog with others. Otherwise, we just recycle memes created en masse and promulgated for us by others. ‘Disempower the People!’ is not my definition of democracy.

Brace yourself (if you’re not teetotal this might be a good time to pour): “How can we repeat the political masterpiece of European reconciliation and confidence building at a global scale?” 

Surely this must be a misprint. Perhaps he meant Tolkien’s Middle Earth, a label sometimes applied to Europe on ancient maps. He can’t mean the ‘Europe’ from which the UK recently seceded? Or the ‘Europe’ that voters are rejecting in droves in favor of right wing, nationalist parties? Or the ‘Europe’ that continues to suffer from decades of stagflation? Surely not that Europe! 

Like a ‘60s idealist, Indset sees the increasing prominence of ‘women’ in the workplace and the coming of age of ‘a (depopulated) younger generation’ as drivers of a future Quantopia (aka Quantum Utopia). Kill everyone over 30?

Intriguingly, he predicts, offering no supporting evidence or argument, the demise of the nation state replaced by ‘the unstoppable rise of cities’ and ‘a new kind of regional tribal society’. Is Indset nostalgic for the warring independent city states that pock marked Northern Italy during the Renaissance?

Although claiming to embrace a technology-rich future, there is more than a whiff of the Luddite in The Quantum Economy: “…Can we achieve freedom if our genes are altered by AI and biotech?”

Wow! There’s a lot to unpack here. “Achieve freedom?” So we’re not free now. How will we know we are free when we are free and what will it take to get us there? A victory by the Social Democrats in the next round of national elections?

Is Indset really saying that our existential freedom is a function of our genetic code? If so, where does he think that code came from in the first place? (I doubt he thinks that God typed it out on his cosmic super computer.) Or did human freedom emerge out of whole cloth only to be extinguished by the process of evolution, i.e. natural selection? To borrow from Edwin Starr, “Freedom – what is it good for?”

Earlier I mentioned books by John, Joyce, Whitehead and Sartre. Those books have one theme in common: Freedom! -  it’s an inalienable feature of the human condition. Sorry Anders!

“We don’t just need IQ, we need to harness WeQ: the potential of collective cognition…methods that serve both the individual and the collective.” No better word characterizes Indset’s vision than ‘collectivization’. 

We know what that looks like: Stalin’s ‘collective farms’, Star Trek’s ‘Borg Collective’. We don’t need collectives, we need ‘Q’ (the Q Continuum), rescuer of Capt. Picard, sworn enemy of the Borg, Trekkies’ antidote for the poison of the collective.

Toward the end of the book, Indset spells out his view of the human person. He does so in bold type, thank you, Anders…and it’s not pretty:

“Every single one of us has a much greater potential to influence our career, our path in life, our personal development, and our emotions than most of us are aware of.”

Potential? Influence? Where does Indset think our career, our path, our person, our emotions come from? From Marxist ‘history’, from our ‘class identity’? How quintessentially European! How utterly wrong!

Let’s get this straight, once and for all. We are not born into a career. Our path is not handed to us at birth like a map. We fashion our own career, we choose our own life path, we create our own person, we live our own emotions. We are solely responsible for who we are, who we become, and what we do.

Sure, we inherit an Actual World (Whitehead). We are a product of a specific genetic code. We begin life at a certain starting gate. But this is all just raw material. What we do with that raw material is entirely up to us, it is solely our own responsibility. We don’t ‘influence’ it, we create it!

And so, the judges (me) are unanimous! The award for The Worst Book Ever Read goes to…The Quantum Economy. Read it yourself, draw your own conclusion…but only if you have a very strong stomach. 

***

Klein, Yves. The Phenomenon of Floating in Space. 1960, photograph by Harry Shunk, Yves Klein Archives, Paris. This work satirizes the illusion of control in a spectacle-driven, science-wrapped world — echoing Indset’s lofty but ungrounded vision in The Quantum Economy.