The world is changing rapidly. My daily work is filled with strategy, artificial intelligence, and optimizing organizational structures for the rapidly changing way people are working both together. In the past, half of the books I read were skill-based - books on leadership, strategy, technology etc while the others were personal interest, philosophy, classics, and history mostly.

I set out to compile a reading list for our current time, most notably to focus on power structures and the rise and fall of institutions as the US undergoes serious changes on all fronts. Understanding the control of information, dis-information, and the economy were my primary motivations - those topics in my view cannot be adequately understood without also understanding the inner world, the psychology, mythology, and religions that shape our respective worldviews as societies and inviduals. I'm also a fan of Jung and formally studied Jungian Psychology for two years over a decade ago, so I'm re-reading these texts for the third and fourth time (you pick up different things during different stages of life, at 47 it's a different book than I read in my 30s).

During Covid lockdown, I read Jordan Peterson's recommended reading list which was a bit smaller than it is now. While fascinating, but mostly terrifying, I found myself often in deep reflection and reference the passages often trying to make sense of the world. Some are included here again.

A co-worker recommended Brendan McCord's philosopher-entrepreneur reading list built around political philosophy, economics, and epistemology. It's an inspiring list but missing a critical aspect - the individual in context of the outside world. I don't see how you can separate political philosophy and individual identity for example. In fact, Jung's concepts of identity are a more likely an explanation of the current political polarization in the US than any well thought out political philosophy on either side. Dostoevsky is in much the same boat, with a unique power to personify philosophy and psychology - it reads different adjacent to treatise on the political and psychological ideas.

I had been building a list for the past year around depth psychology, sacred texts, and classic literature. I realized that my list and McCord's each had gaps. Together, sequenced deliberately, they cover the outer world — power, institutions, knowledge, systems — and the inner one — self, meaning, myth, consciousness.

I'm trying to read an hour a day however even with that, it's likely going to bleed into 2027. After some research, a bit of AI reorganization and justification I put together a sequence of the books I was most interested in.The order is intentional, and each book should hand something to the next one.

AI recommended the particular versions listed below, and I spot checked them. Please reach out to me if you have better options. I stopped using my kindle a couple years ago in favor of real books, mostly to support libraries and independent bookstores. You'll want to own these books, consider buying from Bookshop.org or even better your local independent bookstore.

The threads

Outer world — How power actually works. How knowledge is distributed and why central authority can't hold it. How institutions form, rot, and self-organize. How paradigms shift. How to build systems that gain from disorder rather than just survive it.

Inner world — How the self is structured. What mythology and sacred texts have been saying across cultures. Where meaning comes from when circumstances strip everything else away. How the Jungian psyche maps. How to individuate rather than just develop.

Literature — Dostoevsky and Tolstoy do something philosophy can't: they make these arguments through lives rather than propositions. They belong throughout, not at the end.

Foundation

Establish both frameworks simultaneously.

  • Crime and Punishment — Dostoevsky. I was already reading this when I started making the list, but a smart first step on accident and impetus to expand the selection.

  • History of the Peloponnesian War — Thucydides. Strassler Landmark edition. The foundational text on power and institutional collapse.

  • Enchiridion — Epictetus. Read alongside Thucydides. Thucydides shows what the world does to you; Epictetus tells you what to do about it.

  • Man and His Symbols — Carl Jung. Entry point into depth psychology. Written for a general reader — opens the vocabulary for the Jung thread.

Knowledge & the Self

How knowledge works. How the self is structured.

  • The Use of Knowledge in Society + Constitution of Liberty Ch. 2 — Hayek. The essay is 15 pages and free at econlib.org. The epistemological argument against central planning.

  • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — Kuhn. 50th Anniversary edition. Paradigm shifts aren't won by evidence — they're sociological events.

  • The Republic — Plato. Bloom translation. After Hayek and Kuhn on the limits of reason, Plato's case for philosopher-kings is the serious counter-position.

  • Jung's Map of the Soul — Murray Stein. Best secondary guide to Jung's architecture — ego, shadow, anima/animus, Self.

  • The Major World Religions — John Bowker. Read before the primary texts. Use it as a map before entering the territory.

Sacred Texts & Moral Foundations

Primary sources of how most humans understand meaning. Not coverage — depth.

  • Bhagavad Gita. Mitchell or Easwaran translation. Shortest and most immediately actionable. Dharma, duty, detached action.

  • Dhammapada. Buddharakkhita or Fronsdal translation. Short, aphoristic. Pairs well with Epictetus.

  • Upanishads (selected). Easwaran translation. Focus on Isha, Kena, Mundaka, Mandukya — together under 50 pages, contain the whole argument.

  • The Bible (selected). ESV or NRSV. Genesis, Job, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Matthew, Romans. Job alone is worth a week.

  • The Quran (selected). Abdel Haleem translation. Al-Fatiha, Al-Baqarah, Surah 3, 4, 12, 36, 55.

  • Democracy in America (selected) — Tocqueville. Mayer/Lawrence translation. Vol. 2 Part 4 on soft despotism + Vol. 1 on associations.

Moral Collapse & Meaning

What ideologies do to people. Where meaning comes from in extremity.

  • The Gulag Archipelago (abridged) — Solzhenitsyn. Harper Perennial one-volume. After a quarter of sacred texts, this lands differently.

  • Man's Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl. Beacon Press edition. Read immediately after Solzhenitsyn — same world, different response.

  • Nicomachean Ethics — Aristotle. Irwin translation (Hackett). After Frankl on meaning and Solzhenitsyn on its destruction, Aristotle's account of the good life hits with full force.

  • The Righteous Mind — Jonathan Haidt. End the year here. Moral reasoning is post-hoc rationalization — the cognitive science underneath everything above.

Myth, Depth & the Masculine

Archetypal psychology, individuation, mythological structure.

  • The Hero with a Thousand Faces — Joseph Campbell. New World Library edition. After the primary texts, Campbell's monomyth framework has real evidence behind it.

  • King, Warrior, Magician, Lover — Moore & Gillette. Jungian archetypes applied to masculine development. Read alongside Campbell.

  • The Pregnant Virgin — Marion Woodman. Counterbalances Moore & Gillette — the feminine archetypal lens on the same individuation process.

  • Theory of Positive Disintegration — Kazimierz Dabrowski. Psychological crisis as the mechanism of growth. Why breakdowns precede breakthroughs.

  • The Red Book — Carl Jung. Reader's Edition (W.W. Norton — not the facsimile). Read last in the Jung sequence. Requires everything above to be navigable.

Institutions, Ethics & Love

How self-organizing systems work. How humans connect.

  • Nobel Lecture + Understanding Institutional Diversity — Elinor Ostrom. Lecture free at nobelprize.org; book: Princeton UP. Empirical demolition of both "government must manage" and "privatize everything."

  • Beyond Good and Evil — Nietzsche. Kaufmann translation (Vintage). Read here — after Aristotle, Solzhenitsyn, Haidt, and Jung — not before. The critique of morality reads as serious challenge with full context behind it.

  • The Art of Loving — Erich Fromm. Harper Perennial. Love is a practice, not a feeling. Brief, precise, underrated.

  • The Road Less Traveled — M. Scott Peck. Touchstone. Dated in places; the core argument holds. Life is difficult and growth requires confronting that.

  • Integral Psychology — Ken Wilber. Shambhala. Read last in this quarter — Wilber synthesizes Jung, developmental psychology, and the contemplative traditions. Works best when you've already read what he's synthesizing.

Strategy, Literature & Mysticism

Operating in the world. Narrative truth. The contemplative layer.

  • Anna Karenina — Tolstoy. Pevear/Volokhonsky translation. After two years of philosophy and psychology, Tolstoy makes the argument through lives rather than propositions.

  • The Art of War — Sun Tzu. Cleary translation (Shambhala). Short. Where Thucydides documents how strategy fails in reality, Sun Tzu is the idealized framework. The tension between them is the point.

  • Practical Mysticism — Evelyn Underhill. Dover or Ariel Press. The most accessible serious introduction to the contemplative tradition. By now you have the religious context to understand what she's pointing at.

  • New Age Religion and Western Culture — Wouter Hanegraaff. SUNY Press. Read after Underhill — traces how the Western esoteric tradition became New Age spirituality. The historical-critical framework for evaluating what Underhill draws from.

  • The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — John Koenig. Not a read-through. Keep on the desk — a reminder that language shapes perception.

Synthesis

The culminating texts.

  • The Brothers Karamazov — Dostoevsky. Pevear/Volokhonsky translation. The Grand Inquisitor chapter reads as a live argument after two years of preparation, not a set piece.

  • Emotional Design — Don Norman. Basic Books. How psychological principles translate into designed systems. Practical capstone to the inner-world thread.

  • Antifragile — Taleb. Random House. Read last. After Thucydides, Hayek, Ostrom, Solzhenitsyn, Nietzsche — the framework for operating in disorder is the strategic synthesis of everything.

Why this sequence

The two threads run in parallel but are deliberately cross-wired. Epictetus sits alongside Thucydides because they answer the same question from opposite directions. Solzhenitsyn and Frankl are back-to-back because they occupy the same world with different responses. Nietzsche comes after Aristotle, Haidt, and Jung — read earlier he's more likely to be merely provocative. The Red Book comes last in the Jung sequence because it requires all the preceding Jungian vocabulary to navigate.

The sacred texts are grouped together rather than being scattered. Bowker first as the map, then the primary texts in ascending complexity.

Brothers Karamazov closes the program. Starting Crime and Punishment now and ending with Brothers Karamazov — with everything in between is the idea.

Why Now?

It's a complex time in the world, and the entropy is increasing every day. Our institutions, the educational system, the political landscape, all inevitably create serious questions about identity and meaning. These texts should help both make sense of the world from multiple angles while also providing a foundational perspective for understanding and leading the world forward in a positive way. In many professions, skills won't or already don't matter as much as perspective and judgment. AI can do accounting, and if you're an accountant, you're not going to be any more. AI can't organize and lead people into this new era, through what will certainly be tumultuous times. My intention is that these texts will provide perspective, understanding, and resources as we redefine what it is to be human.

Best of luck, and email me any time.