Reading has become a form of identity maintenance.
We don’t pick up most books because we’re uncertain, or because we want to challenge our own thinking. That’s a lovely conceit! But for most of us, it’s just not the case.
We pick them up because we’ve already decided what kind of people we are, and the books we choose confirm that identity. The progressive reads the progressive canon; the libertarian reads Hayek and Sowell; the rationalist reads Kahneman and Pinker; the tech optimist reads whichever Silicon Valley founder just published their manifesto. We finish each book feeling more fully ourselves, more certain that we’ve understood the world correctly, more armored against the discomfort of being wrong.
Whether or not that’s true...
Well.
