I am not sure every reader I have is aware of Ran Prieur, but they should be. He is my favorite living writer (I have only read his blog... so note to self: I should read his novels soon). For years now, I have given his blog my “home” spot on my browsers. The content changes often enough to be interesting, but but does not hit me like news does. And I find that if something is important enough, it lands on his blog eventually, after which I can then find out about the world using search terms [1].
In an odd state induced by a) my sleep being messed up from my most recent trip, b) caffeine over-consumption to try to compensate and c) that wild session with chatGPT that felt deeply cathartic on my end... I dashed off an email that boiled down to “here’s my blog. I’m finally not bad at writing. Please validate me.” Now that I’m not in that state, but instead properly rested and even coming off my first day of work in over a year, I am asking myself “why did I do that?” but since Ran graciously replied, and not only that did so in a way that shows he read through the bulk of it, I am glad I did.
About my reading list from when I followed a disciplined path to study history, I wrote “No one gives a shit -- those with credentials only want to listen to others with credentials, and 100% of those without credentials (to a rounding error) want history to either be intuitive or self-serving.”
In one his paragraphs, Ran started
“i actually am interested in all the history books you read... ”
Well, that’s why the internet is a net boon (oh, pun accepted!) to weirdos like myself; good to find my people somewhere, anywhere. Unfortunately, Ran also had a question I cannot answer:
anyway, i once heard about a quote by martin luther, that it's better for the princes to rule badly than for the people to rule well. and that does sound like something he would say, but i looked and couldn't find it, so i'm wondering if you came across it.
It doesn’t surprise me that I didn’t, as my method of getting books was what was available in the library system or public domain, and neither of the two books I read on Martin Luther were all that intellectually deep nor factually dense.
The “Unreformed Mart Luther” has the subtitle of "A Serious (and Not So Serious) Look at the Man Behind the Myths,” and it was structured in very short chapters around myths, many of them I was completely unaware of, so I had to learn from inference. And the other of the other book , Metaxas, hosts a right-wing talk show. I don’t think his hand here was all that heavy, but on Wikipedia it is written that the NY Times review:
accused Metaxas of doing naive Whig history, portraying Luther as "a titanic figure who single-handedly slays the dragon of the Dark Ages, rescues God from an interpretive dungeon, invents individual freedom and ushers in modernity."
So while I do agree that quote against democracy does sound like something Luther would say, neither of my books would be likely to highlight it.
Conclusion (for now).
But now someone, somewhere -- let alone the living thinker I respect the most -- has said they are interested in the reading list, so I’ve got an idea for at least one more piece on it. I also have two other comments Ran made on other pieces to write about. So stay tuned...
[1] I wish I was disciplined enough about my media diet that I had used his site as my source that Trump had won (again), but it is close to that... Though there are also newspaper front pages at check-out lines and on racks at the library.
Let me wax a little more poetically on Ran. He is my news filter, the optimist to my hardcore pessimist, but still doing the work to figure things out. A righteous dude. The link is probably not the one you think -- click it; I dare you.
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Conversation I had with GPT that starts with a reflection on this writing. It goes deeply, darkly into my psychology.
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