Are Books Always a Force for Good?

Editors, writers, and readers tend to be pollyannish about the power of books and their capacity to change minds, lives…the world! And that’s with generally solid reasoning. Aside from all the benefits of reading as a gateway to knowledge and imagination, yada, yada, the John Waters quote comes to mind that’s fairly popular on book merch these days “If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don’t f*** 'em!”. That’s a crude, clever way of saying people who hold some value in books are a little more worth trusting— they’re people you want to be around, people you want to...you know…But are books always a force for good?

The biggest news in the US this week, but also, strangely, in books is Luigi Mangione, the suspected assassin of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare. As people raced to find answers for Mangione’s motivation, they looked at his online presence, including his reading habits. The most interesting fact dredged up from his Goodreads account is that Mangione rated the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto four-stars. Kaczynski is also a notable, Ivy-League-educated murderer whose motives were based on a political philosophy. One is tempted to joke about Mangione’s rating — and many already have — but what is odd is that this is not abnormally high for the book, which has a depressingly high 3.87 rating (Miranda July’s All Fours, one of the best novels of this year—The New York Times thinks so too—has a lower Goodreads rating).

What does this all mean? As always, one of my favorite writers on the culture of internet puts it pretty succinctly: “…but it is simply not very interesting anymore that an alleged murderer would be using the internet. Lots of them do!” In other words, while these stories excavating any personal information on a high-profile killer, Goodreads included, will probably generate traffic, they ultimately tell us very little, if nothing. The publishing news website LitHub asked the same question and found the same answer.

The most uncomfortable fact that Mangione’s reading habit brings us to is that the influence of books and reading is not a blanketly good thing. As I’ve observed before here, books hold a special reverence and powerful symbolism. Sometimes this symbolism is for public show — politicians carry their pocket Constitutions, wayward young men throw On the Road in the backseat before heading West, edgy young women take Joan Didion to the café. Mangione himself had two of the most well-known public show authors on his “want to read” list: Ayn Rand and Infinite Jest.

There is, perhaps, an even stronger power that books hold than as tools for peacocking our values to each other, and that is the internal gravity and justification books give to our own internal beliefs. The convictions we hold in private. It is why self-help remains a popular and functional genre despite the reality that the advice these books contain hasn’t really been new in decades. Atomic Habits has been on the bestseller list seemingly forever. Its basic message is that you should develop habits to do the stuff you intend to do and get in the routine of doing that stuff. I’m sure plenty of people swear that it has helped them and it probably has. One of Atomic Habits precursors in the genre told people to make lists of priorities (but divided the to-dos in quadrants so it sounded more official than making a list, I guess). Books can confirm simple truths that people already believe or want to believe. Reading a book can act as a transference of the natural authority that a book has to get you to act on those beliefs—wake up a little earlier in the morning, exercise, or get a little more productive at work. Self-help can be slightly insidious in that way, making you pay for things you already know. But there is a much, much darker side to the beliefs books can validate, with religious texts being the start and end example of how a book can be used to justify evil and good equally. Book people may be by and large a good type of people to be around, but books are also a common tool for people to justify and carry out their most extreme actions.

But wait…

Sorry that this newsletter got incredibly dark, but it really only kind of gets worse than that when it comes to the book world’s connection to last week’s shooting. The most obvious answer turned out to be right when it came to the shooter’s motives for killing a health insurance CEO, when the bullet casings used in the murder were found inscribed with “delay”, “deny” and “depose”, a riff off of the common saying used to describe health insurers’ tactics of denying legitimate insurance claims in the name of profit. As it turns out this saying is nearly identical to the title of a book called Delay Deny Defend. It’s unlikely that Mangione read the book, although outlets of course quickly jumped to the wrong conclusion that it motivated him. From the description available it appears the book isn’t even about health insurance at all—the description mentions only Allstate and State Farm, whose main lines of business aren’t in health insurance. The book also seems consumer focused and was published by Portfolio, an imprint known for its right-of-center business and self-help books (they’ve published Jordan Peterson, Ryan Holiday, etc.), so it’s highly unlikely the book is a takedown of the privatized health insurance industry.

However, the more sobering fact that this book brings to light is that it was published first in 2010 and has been long out of print. Even if the book itself isn’t about health insurance, it’s a phrase that’s been in the popular zeitgeist for more than 15 years. The practices of health insurers to delay paying for treatment, deny coverage, and go to court to defend themselves rather than settling in order to exact maximum pain to discourage other customers from fighting them, is basically commonly accepted knowledge. Michael Moore’s (who Mangione referenced directly in the remarks he’s made since being taken into custody) documentary Sicko about the U.S.’s broken healthcare system came out in 2007. There are books about these common insurance tactics that have been published and gone out of print already. If there’s one more fact darkening your door about books, it’s that gaining knowledge from reading is no guarantee of change. Knowing the 7 Habits does not necessarily make you a highly effective person.

Should This Be a Book?

This is the reflective question that editors and publishers are trained to ask when anything newsworthy happens. Someone out there is no doubt interested in publishing Mangione’s book and will do it one day if he wants to—after all, infamously, even the most sensationalist version of this kind of book, If I Did It by O.J. Simpson, nearly happened. But, as Mangione also said in his remarks, he’s no expert on the subject of healthcare. There are plenty of books still to be written — much less salacious ones — on the wrongs of the health insurance system and the people who commit those wrongs. Maybe that’s not as attention-grabbing as a killer’s confession, but the way to change things for the better isn’t usually in a manifesto. Instead, we must take simple steps, we must act on what we already know to be true, even if those steps and truths are quite boring and have been around forever.