The medium (books, tv, social media, video games) shouldn't matter so long as it is forcing you to challenge preconceived notions.
And that's where I think the current malaise lies - reward systems that are basically min-max with extra steps will not reward challenging or risk taking content. That's the downside of removing friction.
I don't think most people who own it have actually read more than a chapter or two, but that's ok. Its essential function turned out to be to inspire and unlock a part of the young intellectual mind.
Not saying these are universal masterpieces. To every reader slightly different books will be the most enriching. It's true that at a certain age, there is often a transformation from the young adult interest in self to interest in the wider world. But the self is still what humans have, so it's not like it ever ceases to be relevant for one's experience.
While there is something romantic in finding a subculture, even one just slightly adjacent to the mainstream, [being] more chancy, on reflection I'm glad we no longer have it like that. (In fact, we probably regressed a little bit because of the decline of open internet and Google, and the move to group chats.) But today's youth can find and pirate whatever they want. The establishment is founded more on pure concentration of money and financing for legacy institutions, not actual technological hurdles like it used to be.
Isn't the whole novel a joke on the formal yet perhaps empty intellectualism of the developing modern world? The character latches onto the formal structures of the elaborate hierarchy, climbs the ladder and reaches its zenith. All the while being the expert in a game that seems like the sort of game two hallucinating LLMs would invent as a game/language to understand humans.
Spoiler. Having reached the highest in his order, he begins to see the emptiness of his order and realises that teaching the (elite) youth from the real world is the grandest aspiration one can have, and promptly dies after jumping in a lake and having a heart attack, before even giving one formal lesson to the youth.
Keeping in mind that Hesse fled Nazi Germany.
That said, it was the "Glass Bead Game" which captured my cupidity.
My impression after reading most of the book was that Knecht's life was pretty good. I couldn't shake the feeling that, whether or not the Game was worth dedicating so many lives to, the act of dedication was giving the players a great many benefits. I knew there were a bunch of pages remaining, and I expected the book to make some kind of statement of similarity between dedication to pointless academia vs tangible life.
And then Hesse killed him off by drowning him in a pond, and followed it up with a bunch of doubly fictional essays.
But along with Tolkein the "spec fic"' on this list might well include Robert Heinlein (and Frank Herbert if he wasn't mentioned).
Heinlein made precisely one of the promises well articulated: that beyond the apparently venal and banal world of one's own surroundings, a richer adult world, indeed at a "higher pitch."
In Heinlein's case this was a somewhat narrow world reflective in an oblique way. of some real-world problems: exclusivity. In his world, a particular set of political and moral ideas (his ideas about sexuality were are also arguably not re-readable) is often collectively arrived at by his precocious characters, who trade knowingly in it, and have a relationship to the normies that is at best charitable or pitying and often caustic.
It was quite a thing to realize as I aged past 16 that he was painting not just a fantasy, but one which was not just not awaiting around the corner, but literally un-realizable,
because the attitudes and behaviors of his characters however good on the page, are completely absent from lived experience—at least, in anything like the way he promises. It's not just that the ideas and value he enshrines are not widely held; it's that they cannot are arguably not sustainable and are almost certainly incompatible with both individual human psychology and potential... and do not and cannot serve as a foundation for the sorts of exclusive societies he imagines.
In many of his earlier works, progressive sexually liberated intellectually liberal but socially formal cultures have naturally, inevitably, become the norm; and humanity has thereby thrived, leaving behind what he contends is its primitive imperfections.
By his later works, he tacitly acknowledged and indeed made central the struggle between the embrace of such values and social and political structures; and a "normie" culture permanently mired in those imperfections.
Moving here to the Bay Area in the 90s I met a lot of people who had encountered these ideas at the same impressionable age; and who like me, to some real degree expected to find (or make) communities adopting many of those ideas.
Indeed there's probably another more somber essay here: tracing the history of those specific ideas from their source, in a through-line to crypto-utopian effective altruism and its dream of libertarian city states unshackled from the normie masses, down into the ugly mire of resurgent openly racist zero-sum class war fascism and the shrill ideas of Curtis Yarvin.
It is easy to imagine disappointment then anger at the non-existent (sexually liberated) libertarian gun-owning utopia of genteel Heinlein,
metastasizing into what its adherents understand as Randian "Will" to make it so. To build, damn the consequences, move fast and break things—most of all the ugly banal venal complexities and inherent pluralism and ambiguities of the normies' world.
It must seem like a noble fight, in pursuit of a shared vision,
but it's a vision that as described ITA is fundamentally and only an adolescent one.
Those books come from the times when the counterculture barely started getting commercialized. The market niche for the angsty teenagers, who self-identify as intellectuals, is quite filled with YA, movies and games. One modern outlet that comes to mind is the rationalist community - it provides a distinct perspective to view the world, together with the feeling that you see it better than others.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but doesn't everyone at a certain age stop caring about which books they read, and how the reading of certain books is perceived by others?
pvg•11h ago