Books that made you look at things differently

[diebitter]

I can think of a few works that made me think differently about stuff, and I think helped me to think more clearly and percieve how things work more closely to reality than previously. Here's some of them:

1. The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins

A titanically great book, this has a final chapter that actually spawned a whole new science: Memetics. Here, Dawkins posits the notion of a meme. As a gene is to genetic evolution, a meme is to cultural evolution. A meme can be an idea, a tune, a phrase, or anything that sits in your head, comes out of your mouth/typings/writings and gets transferred to another brain.

Examples: "Sup, bro", "It's not even close", and so on.

It gave me a fundamentally different view of how society, religion, politics and generally systems of thinking and acting work.

See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme


2+3. 1984 - George Orwell and Dune - Frank Herbert

These two books gave me a good insight into political power, and power groups. The first was really about how power groups try to maintain their power by manipulation of mind and thought, whilst Dune (though a work of Science Fiction) made it very clear that sometimes motives of people are not clear, and their motivations may easily hide very deep intentions. As is said in the book 'Seeing the trap is the first step in avoiding the trap'. A sort of introduction to 2nd and 3rd level thinking.

4. Assorted works of Dilbert - I'm not kidding

I started reading these when I was working for a big outsourcing IT firm. I couldn't believe how much I learnt about stuff going on around me, from being a 'team leader' (which I was, of 25-30 guys + gals!) without actually getting any extra pay, right through to how throwaway comments on your self-assessment pay review forms can and will be dragged out at some later date to justify you not getting a raise.

Any of you had the same?