There are amongst us, people with differing reading habits.
Some people read voraciously, always nose in the binding. Next there are people
who read infrequently, but generally consider themselves readers. They keep
books around, read a few books a year, would like to read more but it doesn’t
get prioritized as often as they’d prefer. Then there are those who just don’t
read. Those three categories should cover it.
It would be easy to state the obvious and claim that those
who never read are to be considered the most dangerous category. But I don’t
think that is true, and here is why.
Reading a lot of books is the absolute best and highest way
to formulate a balanced and thorough world view. Reading books about a lot of
subjects, books with competing narratives about different subjects, points and
counterpoints. Read as many books about as many things as you can, break out of
channels of thought and read across traditions, read across politically
motivated ideological lines, read stories by people who did things, and read stories
about people who did things. Take in the full breadth of human experience by
reading a vast array of books, and you will find a steady and consistent world
view, you will develop a practical empathy for humanity, a solid rock to stand
on and assess the world around you with a refined perspective, not too heavily
weighted by any one ideology or anecdote, and you will have a decent shot at
clearly assessing events and behaviors around you as you move through time and
space.
The next best reading habit to establish, and this is where
I’ll depart from common wisdom, is the habit of reading no books at all. Next
to reading as many books as you possibly can, reading no books at all is your best
option. The person who reads no books at all, they’re going to have a more
limited window on the greater world and its machinations, but instead will be intimately
involved with the specifics of the immediate present. They need not be
considered unintelligent, quite the contrary, they may be highly trained,
highly capable, and high performing. Those with the least time to read are
likely to be heavily correlated with those most busy in their daily endeavors.
They may have a different path to finding their own global perspective, but the
path of development will be consistently weighted as to the various inputs being
assimilated through the course of their day. Their eventual “adult” or late
life perspective (it takes a good third to half of your life in any case to
establish a decent global perspective regardless of reading habits) will likely
be effectively balanced and broad enough to take in daily occurrences and process
forward projections effectively. This would be enough to manage their life without any
unexpected shocks or disturbances in expectation of, and assimilation of,
ongoing events, and also provide them with an anchored reality that is less easily swayed by intermittent panics or trends.
The person who will have the hardest time in that department
will be those individuals who only read a few books. This is the worst possible
reading habit to establish. When you only read a few books, each book will be
too heavily weighted in your ongoing assimilation of reality. When a person
reads a book once in a while, the time commitment to that endeavor and the lack
of regular exercise of the mental processes used in reading and assimilating
knowledge from books, those two factors collide to give the impression of
something very important happening. The casual reader has a higher likelihood of
considering the material they are consuming to be more important than it
actually may be when considered in a broader world view. If you’re reading a
book that is presenting a powerful new concept for you, something that seems to
grip your psyche with intrigue and importance, your global world view is going
to be highly affected by that book, certainly in the short term, but also
likely in the long term throughout your life. If you have read three more books
in the last couple weeks that also had such highly impactful insights, you are
going to take each one successively in stride, building on each one, less swayed
by each consecutive blow, as you carefully develop a polished and honed
perspective. If this one insightful book is the only thing you’ve read in the
last year or in the last quarter, then your global perspective is going to too affected
by this one incoming perspective, this one book will be too heavily weighted as
your ongoing global perspective calculations occur. You could accidentally
shift your global perspective in a direction that was unintentional. You could accidentally re-structure elements
of your life, your identity, your affiliations, around this inappropriately
weighted information, simply because of its novelty.
So, let us all read more. Let us read differing opinions. Let
us understand the counterpoints to our current belief systems, and let’s check
to see if we’re not accidentally operating on the lingering effects of some
inappropriately weighted content we ingested along the way. Either read it all,
or don’t read any of it. Half informed is far more dangerous than uninformed.
