i am getting so irritated as a If Books Could Kill fan because their weird avoidance of marxism-leninism just gets more and more palpable with each episode. like peter is pretty clearly a cryptocommunist but mike is phobic and berlin-pilled so they cant really take the horse blinders off On The Show....but their whole thing IS supposedly good material analysis. it seems like they are doing the thing almost all western intellectuals do which is: everything they possibly can to avoid talking about the elephant in the room, and that elephants name is KARL MARX!!!
“you know those influencers that are like ‘if you’re the smartest person in tbe room, you’re in the wrong room’? no, dude, why? why? i love to feel smart in a room” NEW MOTTO JUST DROPPED
Weird time in my life to learn that the book my parents tried to strong arm me into reading since I was 8 and never shut the fuck up about til I ran away at 20 was a mass-sold-to-business "novel" about how I should just accept being an eternal lab rat for the rest of my life.
(Context and trauma below, for the old IBCK fans seeing this Sorry???)
I discovered the podcast If Books Could Kill through a tumblr I follow, and I found their episode on "Who Moved My Cheese?" by Spencer Johnson and the same book I'm referencing in the above paragraph. I never knew anything about it before a few minutes ago other than my parents were CONVINCED I needed to read it because it would help me stop being so hard headed and stubborn.
So uh, learning in the first three minutes that it was a demonic book commonly given/recommended to people by the worlds shittiest bosses about how you are an eternal lab rat who needs to submit to your fate is definitely something.
I know my parents were abusive but it's always been difficult for me to ever remember the full extent, plurality and all, but also because my trauma was interlaced with people refusing to ever listen to me or believe I had any right to complain because my parents were rich. So like, I genuinely DID NOT realize how even the stuff I DO know happened is already like super duper fucked up alone. Because until a few months ago, I was still dealing with people seeing the money of my parents first when I talked about my childhood and it's really messed me up since I may have been "used" by my father to make that money when I was young. I don't have a lot of clear memories of those yet and would rather not honestly. I'd rather live in ignorance with that one.
Either way, having another clear cut piece of evidence of the levels of cartoonishly evil shit they had accomplished raising me is always... helpful? I don't really know. I'm contemplating finishing this podcast and leaving it, or maybe getting my own second hand copy of the book and going through it on my own. Its crazy short so I should be fine. I think I might do both honestly. Treat this podcast as a brace for impact briefing of the whole text.
“You can’t ever get any kind of political consciousness out of these people, because they don’t understand themselves as rich people, right? They will never admit it.”
— Michael Hobbbes, If Books Could Kill “The Millionaire Next Door”
