[vjktyu]

+1 for the Gervais principle. It's a short book that makes you depressed for a week, but also makes it very clear why our societies work this way. The book doesn't say anything new, but it explains with examples a few simple facts about us.

However, the Gervais principle book is a very shallow version of lamrim that aims at explaining how the real world works. It also puts people into 3 categories: the clueless majority driven by forces, the small minority that's trying to escape these forces and the those who've largely escaped them and are now free. The sociopaths from the gervais principle are on the right track in general, but they make a common mistake on this path that lamrim discussed at length and so they slide into the nihilism dead end.

[blaser-waffle]

> However, the Gervais principle book is a very shallow version of lamrim that aims at explaining how the real world works. It also puts people into 3 categories: the clueless majority driven by forces, the small minority that's trying to escape these forces and the those who've largely escaped them and are now free. The sociopaths from the gervais principle are on the right track in general, but they make a common mistake on this path that lamrim discussed at length and so they slide into the nihilism dead end.

Bingo. That's also the best explanation of the concept I've seen.

It's a good read, in an entertainment sense, and there are some lesson to be gleaned -- but the same is true with the Bible, the Koran, or the Rig Vedas.