Reading is one of the channels through which individuals can obtain information. Just like walking in an underground pipe, there will always be a process from the dark to the light, from ignorance to clear path, and how long this path is, how far away from seeing the dawn, really can only depend on their own understanding.
The books I read in 2021 are actually about fifty books. There is indeed burnout. The books I have read are very cluttered, and there is no fixed direction for the scope of the hunt. From these fifty or so books, I want to summarize how this reading trajectory has brought me, and the information I can learn.
Then, I will divide the information conveyed to me by these books into three aspects: knowing myself, understanding the relationship between the sexes, and understanding the world to introduce the relevant reading situation.
About knowing your own heart
I remember reading one of the most impressive sentences I read last year: True strength is the courage to face and express one's vulnerability.
The psychology books I read in 2021 include "Dr. Toad Goes to the Psychiatrist", "Maybe You Should Talk to Someone", "Our Inner Conflict", "Through Loneliness", "Embrace Your Sensitive Emotions", "Fearless: Subverting Your Inner Vulnerability", etc., all of which have in common a way to lead readers to know their own hearts.
Due to the influence of the original family, the blessing of social concepts and other reasons, people will gradually put on a "strong" armor as they grow older, to cope with external social interactions, to escape inner conflicts.
It seems that as long as we do a good disguise, we can become this disguise. But many people can't do it, so in the dead of night, they always wonder if their true face is real.
Fearless: Subverting Your Inner Vulnerability is about this seemingly hard vulnerability. Some say that adult collapses are often only in an instant. Does that mean we can only express our emotions when they burst? Or we can also acknowledge our vulnerability, gradually exercise our hearts from mutual help, from small daily things, and make it gradually stronger.
How do I do mutual aid? "Maybe you should talk to someone" is one way to solve it. The author is a counselor and a client in counseling. From the various visiting stories told by the author in the book, we can see the men who are addicted to the pain of the past, who seem to be realistic and mean and cannot face the reality, and we can also see the women who cannot get out of the pain of lost love. In each consultation, in each face of their own inner fears, the client also gradually sees his own heart. "Strong" is a word we often hang on our lips, but to be truly strong, it is not the indifference disguised by appearance, but the real vulnerability to ourselves. Not having a single mouth in the heart will bring deeper contradictions and struggles in the heart.
Regarding inner conflict, "Our Inner Conflict" describes the alienation of human behavior under inner conflict. Some people rely too much on obedience to others, some people turn their inner dissatisfaction into aggression, some people are alienated from others, and some people attribute their own problems to the outside world. People take various ways to escape their inner feelings, and people only want solutions, rather than facing and understanding the root of the problem.
But the resolution of inner conflicts is not about what means to use, but about "facing" and "bearing".
The original family is one of the sources of inner conflict, so "Toad Doctor Goes to the Psychiatrist" is a gradual analysis of such a source. The attitude of the members of the original family towards us is likely to be internalized into our own attitude towards ourselves. And because children are so weak, they easily blame themselves. Such changes in values may be unconscious, and those invisible transformations of personal values affect the thinking patterns after growing up.
The difficulty of integration of individuals and societies can be reflected in the way of dealing with "loneliness". "Crossing Loneliness" is from the perspective of a psychological counselor to see film and television works, visitors and the loneliness that people face at different stages. Film and television works reflect the loneliness of characters through the shaping of character behavior, but in our daily life, it is difficult for us to open the perspective of God to analyze our every move, so people surrounded by loneliness often find it difficult to clearly analyze themselves. One of the things that impressed me in this book was the "failure" of the counselor. The client was eventually unable to face his own loneliness and terminated the counseling.
This is probably the norm. In the end, people can only rely on themselves to overcome their own problems, and others can only take the handle. If you don't have the determination to face the problem, the enthusiastic help of others will be futile.
On recognizing gender relations
Last year spent a lot of time reading many feminist-related books. Including "The Second Sex", Li Yinhe's "Feminism", "Male Domination", "Misogyny", "A Room of Your Own" and so on. This year, I am reading Fei Xiaotong's "Fertility System". Finding these books basically gives me a picture of the entanglement of men and women for thousands of years. Nowadays, gender relations have been pushed to the cusp of the storm, in fact, it also shows that people's pluralistic values are developing, it is not limited to a single way of life, but gradually develop a variety of lifestyles, and recognize and respect such a way of life.
From "Marriage for Love", we can see how men and women have developed step by step into patriarchal society since ancient times, and how marriage between men and women has suddenly become related to love. The division of labor and cooperation was originally the mutual cooperation between men and women, but with the swimming of power, gradually formed a gender class of male superiority and female inferiority, the establishment of patriarchy deprived women of the means of production that can live independently, but after the establishment of the work system, women gradually regained their independent survival, and the struggle between the sexes also sounded the horn.
What "A Room of Your Own" advocates is that women need to have the capital to survive independently. When a woman must survive on others, she is a puppet who lacks an independent personality. This book does not advocate the antagonistic attitude of men and women, but starts from "independence" and calls on women to be independent and self-reliant.
"The Second Sex" focuses on the role of the "other" embodied by women. The woman, as the other, is also an object, and the woman does not have a foothold in society as one of the subjects, but is merely a vassal of the man. Beauvoir describes the conceptual indoctrination, behavioral restrictions, and power deprivation of women in patriarchal societies from the perspective of the physical and psychological differences between men and women, the process of socialization of children, and the current situation of women in adulthood.
The indoctrination of patriarchy is described in "Male Domination" as impressive. Since ancient times, our descriptions of the two sexes have been opposites, with male masculine and strong representing strength, while females being feminine and cunning and fragile represent weakness. The opposition between the two binds the image of women, but also creates identity constraints on men. Boys have tears, boys should be self-reliant, which also shows that the responsibility that men need to bear is itself derived from the patriarchal gender identity bondage. Everyone is forced to live the same life, and naturally some people are unwell, and some people want to escape.
Li Yinhe's Feminism does not elaborate any new ideas, but rather lists the development of feminism, the multiple schools of feminism, and the views and flaws advocated by each faction. It turns out to be more than a good book that clarifies the concept of feminism.
About knowing the world
Our understanding of this society, of the world, is limited to our cognitive aspects, our social position, and our existing life experiences. As a result, due to different living environments and different personal values, the remarks of "why not eat meat" often appear. This is indeed an unavoidable cognitive bias, but we can always gradually reduce such cognitive bias by raising the cognitive level.
Last year, I read some good books that refreshed my worldview, including Worldview, The Third Chimpanzee, Philosophy, Science, Common Sense, Facts, A General History of Global Technology, Work, Consumerism, and the New Poor.
If the world is likened to an organism, then the various operating systems it contains are interconnected. Each process of science affects not only the discipline itself, but also the gradual renewal of the entire social system and the change of people's cognition.
Both "World View" and "Philosophy, Science, and Common Sense" describe the gradual questioning of nature and the development of philosophical thought by human society from the belief of the gods and Buddhas. Gradually from the rigorous philosophical attitude to develop a subversive scientific argument, from a scientific point of view to explore the world, explore the universe. From theology to science, people gradually went from being unable to control nature to transforming nature; From the beautiful fantasy of the greatness of the earth to the small sea in the universe; from the dependence on gods and Buddhas to the change of concept of man's victory over heaven, every step has a huge impact on the world. When scientific knowledge that is taken for granted becomes common sense, it may be difficult for us to imagine that people hundreds or even thousands of years ago had completely different ideas from ours. The ideas we take for granted are actually changing all the time.
If the above two books describe the conceptual impact of technology on people, then "Work, Consumerism and the New Poor" is about the great "credit" of capitalism and the alienation of people by the working system. In an agrarian society, people work by setting their own farming goals and controlling the work process. It is difficult to have a uniform standard for the quality of crops and handicrafts, and due to the low yield of self-produced products, the effectiveness of capital expansion is too low. Work as a new form of capital exploitation has gradually become the dominant way of making a living in society. People enter the factory, under the work goals set by the factory, the work process is controlled by the capitalists to work, the fruits of the workers' labor are exploited by the capitalists, and the finished products produced by the workers are sold back to these workers, and a new round of exploitation is completed. In this way, we seem to be fighting for a better material life, but it seems that the logic of this life is still transmitted by the capitalists.
The facts are cruel, but understanding the facts is not to be disappointed in the world, but to better understand the world and face your own life by changing your way of thinking. The book "Facts" is a washing of our inherent thinking. Due to the different social status of the person in which they live (for example, the author of this book is in a developed country like Sweden), their understanding of external things will be a bit off-site. For example, being too pessimistic about poverty in developing countries and ignoring the forces of development and progress; being too afraid of certain social phenomena and overestimating the incidence of these phenomena; and having a different focus on media communication, people who listen to the mono-media arguments may misunderstand events. What we think of as "facts" can be biased by personal feelings and misleading by others. Therefore, multi-dimensional thinking and multi-party confirmation may make us reduce the occurrence of "misunderstandings".
Finally
In addition to the above books, the best book I read this year is "The Metaphor We Live On", a linguistic book that helps us realize the impact of metaphors in language on our cognition.
The 12th edition of Social Animals, a textbook book of social psychology, is a textbook that updates existing research and the impact of new things in society on people. Exploring the impact of society on individuals, this book is well worth reading.
"Lecture Notes on Liu Qing's Western Modern Thought", as a philosophical white, this book is really very easy to read. Unlike traditional philosophical general knowledge books, which are either particularly obscure or particularly superficial, Liu Qing's book introduces many aspects of Western modern thought in a thematic and hierarchical manner, improving the understanding of Western modern philosophy and greatly enhancing the interest in philosophy.
If you've also experienced the "silence of conspiracy," you'll feel particularly empathy for the description in Elephant in the Room. The so-called elephants in the room are those facts that everyone knows, just like the elephants in the room who are obviously blinded, and always avoid talking, do not ask or answer, and even do not allow people in the group to ask questions.
The two books "Brain and Consciousness" and "Brain and Reading" are both studies of the brain. Scientists have a keen interest in how people read and how they come up with different ideas, so they use a large number of experiments to dissect the effects of various divisions of the brain on people. At present, we are not yet able to fully understand how human consciousness arises and changes, but it is definitely not a subject that can be stopped by the phrase "divine gifts".
Last year, in the process of reading, there were many "Aha" moments. This moment made me suddenly enlightened, realized how ignorant I was, far from being sober in the world, from living to understand, and there was still so much room for improvement.
Or, if you come to Japan for a long time, you can continue to learn and continue to make progress.
Thanks for reading