I'm also pretty sure that reading *a lot* of books had a great deal to do with it - I was certainly exposed to a vast range of human possibilities, and they certainly did not all agree with each other. I just wonder, sometimes, if I'd read different books, would I now be a closeted, xenophobic, fundamentalist Christian with a highly conservative worldview, or would I have come out a radical anyway?
I strongly suspect you would have been a radical anyway. What you would not have had was the theory behind it and the support of knowing how many other people felt the same way you did.
I say that in part because you said you were a rebellious child anyway (though I don't quite see how you could have been that and not angry, but anyway) and in part because I think if I had read those different books you mention, however much I might have been influenced by the arguments those theorists used, in practice I would have hated the regimentation and conformity that goes along with the fundamentalist world-view.
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branchandroot
Re: Books and Values
Date: 2006-09-05 12:46 am (UTC)I strongly suspect you would have been a radical anyway. What you would not have had was the theory behind it and the support of knowing how many other people felt the same way you did.
I say that in part because you said you were a rebellious child anyway (though I don't quite see how you could have been that and not angry, but anyway) and in part because I think if I had read those different books you mention, however much I might have been influenced by the arguments those theorists used, in practice I would have hated the regimentation and conformity that goes along with the fundamentalist world-view.