Before I went to college I read two books. I read a book Moral Mazes by Robert Jackall which is a study of how corporations work, and its actually a fascinating book, this sociologist, he just picks a corporation at random and just goes and studies the middle managers, not the people who do any of the grunt work and not the big decision makers, just the people whose job is to make sure that things day to day get done, and he shows how even though theyre all perfectly reasonable people, perfectly nice people youd be happy to meet any of them, all the things that they were accomplishing were just incredibly evil. So you have these people in this average corporation, they were making decisions to blow out their workers eardrums in the factory, to poison the lakes and the lagoons nearby, to make these products that are filled with toxic chemicals that poisoned their customers, not because any of them were bad people and wanted to kill their workers and their neighbourhood and their customers, but just because that was the logic of the situation they were in.Another book I read was a book Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky which kind of took the same sort of analysis but applied it to wider society which you know were in a situation where it may be filled with perfectly good people but theyre in these structures that cause them to continually do evil, to invade countries, to bomb people, to take money from poor people and give it to rich people, to do all these things that are wrong. These books really opened my eyes about just how bad the society we were living in really is.
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About Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz was a 20th-century American computer programmer and activist. Aaron Hillel Swartz, also known as AaronSw, was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. As a programmer, Swartz helped develop the web feed format RSS; the technical architecture for Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to creating copyright licenses; and the Python website framework web.py. Read more on Wikipedia →