HYPERPOLITICS by Anton Jäger (Verso Books, 2026) HOW TO STAY SANE IN AN AGE OF DIVISION by Elif Shafak (Wellcome Collection, 2020)
I am constantly searching for books that make sense of our messed up world.
I don’t imagine for one minute that I am alone in this regard.
Above all, I am looking for some glimmers of optimism when all the evidence seems to indicate that the human race is doomed to repeat errors of the past and make still more calamitous mistakes in the future.
These two short books, 128 pages and 96 pages long respectively, are by writers who well aware of the scale of the task and under no illusions how urgent the predicament is.
The demise of any sense of collective values and rise of narcissistic individualism is vividly documented by Anton Jäger. He writes how “Today’s societies are composed of increasingly atomized and isolated individuals” and links this with the pace of living by observing that “atomization and acceleration go hand in hand.”
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