[image by Brian]

Goal for June: Read a book a day. Follow my reading list here.

Green reading tip of the day: If you own books you won’t be rereading, pass said book on — by selling it. I use half.com to sell my books — at least the books that I don’t give away –

Somehow, lots of free books come my way, and not just through the blog. I got my copy of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents through USC, because it was taught in a class vaguely linked to a class I taught. After I finish my degree, I’m totally selling this book –

Civilization and Its Discontents basically asks why people are so neurotic and unhappy, despite all the benefits civilization’s supposed to have brought us. Freud contends that civilization — with its emphasis on community structures and monogamous relationships — frustrates people’s basic desires to fuck lots of different people and treat others like shit.

Of course Freud stops short of putting a judgement value on civilization, though he does draw parallels between it and religious principles (i.e. “Do not commit adultery” and “Love your neighbor”), which he does condemn:

Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner — which presuppposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more.

I wonder if Freud’s popularity and legacy had more to do with a frustration with religious structures and rules than the value of his theories….

BTW, Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, will be at Barnes & Noble Santa Monica on June 25, 2007, at 7:30 pm.

Book read: Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

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