The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx…
Which was supposed to be progressive and utopian…
Then a bunch of Authoritarians came up with a fucked up interpretations of it and gave rise to Stalinism and Maoism and the CCP…
So that lead to the Cold War and the world nearly ended… but humanity is still here thanks to the heroes like Vasily Arkhipov and Stannislav Petrov amonst various others who prevented global nuclear war.
And then the CCP made the One Child Policy and I almost got forcibly aborted by the CCP because of that policy…
I wasn’t supposed to exist. I’m supposed to be an aborted fetus… 💀
Marx is just rolling in his grave
That’s a great example.
Glad you made it.
Euclid’s Elements (13 books)
Isaac Newton - Principia Mathematica. For example, so much of our modern world would not be possible without calculus.
Assuming you’re counting their impact throughout history, and not just the contemporary world:
Xenophon’s Cyropaedia
Ptolemy’s Almagest
Al-Khwarizmi’s Al-Jabr
Newton’s PrincipiaThe Very Hungry Caterpillar
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
It coined the word “meme” in 1976!
Gotta be the medical journal that had the paper “Hey doc before you slice open that guy over there and wiggle your fingers around inside them, wash your fucking hands!” Or the medical journal that published the paper “Doc eats pens every meal until their piss kills the tiny little demons conspirering against the USA. Calls it penicillin.”
In a similar vein, the scientific journal that described the Haber Process, a chemical process that could be used to synthesize ammonia, which could then be used as a fertilizer to provide nitrogen to crops.
The cheap availability of nitrogen fertilizers was probably the biggest contributer to the “Green Revolution” in the mid 20th century, which massively increased agricultural yeilds. And those massive increases in agricultural yeilds are why, worldwide, hunger has dropped to historically low levels in the last century.
The Origin of the Species, of course.
Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. It’s philosophy developed in a concentration camp, and it’s still as relevant today. "He who has a why to live can bare almost any how.
I know you said no religious books… but I feel like I have to mention the Gutenberg Bible. Not for the religious aspects itself, but for the impact it had on the world via creating the means and purpose for an average person to gain literacy, and because it then caused the Protestant reformation.
1984
The Art of War
I doubt it. From what I’ve heard, art of war wasn’t really anything groundbreaking in terms of strategy. It was more about putting the basics in an understandable format for the useless nobles who were put in charge on armies from pure nepotism.
Lord of the Rings
I’d say Smith’s Wealth of Nations, but you said no religious books.
Damn, that means Atlas Shrugged is out too.
