Why Most Books Make You Dumber – And the Three That Sharpen the Mind
11/01/2026
OVERUNITY ELECTRICITY
I almost walked straight into a chair the other day.
That tends to happen when your mind is juggling five things at once. When attention is fragmented, awareness collapses. That’s also how I managed to slice my heel badly a few hours earlier – a nail sticking out from the basement stairs, focus elsewhere, pain immediately follows.
That small incident sums up something much larger: modern life has trained us to think reactively instead of consciously.
I still carry a University of Kentucky library card. I go there occasionally, though fewer and fewer people do. I can usually pick up a book I’ve never read before and, within thirty seconds, know whether it’s worth my time. If it’s truly good, I pause longer. Most books don’t survive even that first test.
And that’s the problem.
The Death of Bookstores and the Decline of Thought
I recently visited the Joseph-Beth bookstore in Lexington – a massive two-story store I hadn’t stepped into for nearly twenty years. What I found was depressing. Trinkets. Doodads. Lifestyle junk. Very few real books.
The philosophy section? A thin shelf of the usual suspects: Kant, Hume, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. That’s not philosophy – that’s intellectual minimalism packaged as depth.
People argue, “You can get everything online now.” I agree. I’m a heavy PDF user. I scan books, digitize them, archive them, restore them. I’ve been doing that for decades. Access isn’t the issue.
Desire for understanding is.
Bad Books Don’t Just Fail to Teach – They Unteach
There are books so bad they don’t merely waste your time – they actively drain your ability to think. They don’t expand your mind; they hollow it out. You finish them less capable of deep reasoning than when you started.
Standing on the shoulders of giants lets you see farther.
Standing on the shoulders of small thinkers? You don’t rise – you sink. Sometimes it’s not even standing; it’s crawling into a hole.
That’s why, when people ask me for book recommendations, I don’t list what’s “entertaining.” I list what restructures cognition.
After long consideration, I always return to the same three works.
1. The Enneads – Plotinus
Plotinus doesn’t just inform you – he rewires you.
Reading the Enneads forces the mind to operate several steps ahead, much like chess. It cultivates non-reactive thinking, something almost entirely absent from modern education.
This is ancient Greek philosophical shorthand layered on top of metaphysics, particularly emanationism – a framework few people today even possess the vocabulary to approach. That’s why it’s difficult. That’s also why it’s invaluable.
This is not casual reading. It is mental training.
2. Periphyseon – John Scotus Eriugena
I’ve had hundreds of people tell me the same thing after reading Periphyseon:
“I should have read this instead of spending four years in college.”
This book teaches clarity. Logical necessity. Precision in thought. You start to see when arguments don’t actually follow from their premises. You become harder to manipulate – intellectually and psychologically.
In a society that increasingly confuses emotion with truth, that ability is rare – and dangerous in the best possible way.
3. The Universal One – Walter Russell
This is the book I return to again and again.
The Universal One is dense, diagram-heavy, and written in a symbolic language Russell developed himself. He uses directional metaphors – east–west, north–south – to describe centrifugal and centripetal forces. Once you see through the terminology, the structure underneath is astonishing.
Russell was not flawless. He misunderstood aspects of electricity and field theory. That doesn’t negate his central insight: light does not travel.
That idea alone puts him closer to truth than many modern materialists. Even Nikola Tesla suggested that some of Russell’s work was too advanced for his time.
I personally digitized this book and made it widely available. You can now find it across the internet – intentionally.
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Wisdom Is the Only Non-Negotiable Value
You won’t take your gadgets, money, or online persona with you. Neither will I. The only thing worth storing – like a squirrel storing acorns – is what transcends the body and its illusions.
Nothing is higher than wisdom.
And no one can logically argue otherwise.
These books don’t hand you wisdom on a plate. They give you the keys – access to insight, metaphysics, and principles that exist beyond the mirage of modern life.
If that still matters to you, start here.
