📚 Understanding Context
These books, films, and documentaries provide historical and structural context for understanding how economic systems, colonial legacies, and power imbalances shape many modern crises.
This is not a list you are expected to agree with. It is a set of perspectives commonly referenced in discussions about global harm.
How to use this section
- Read critically, not devotionally
- Cross reference claims
- Notice where authors disagree
- Be wary of oversimplification
Warning! This list is intentionally incomplete and open to review. Head over to the humansnot.biz GitHub repository and open a PR if you want to contribute. Meanwhile, I will start, either things I have read or watched, or items on my bucket list 😅
Capitalism
Books
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
How modern market economies reshaped society, labor, and social protections.
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Data driven analysis of wealth inequality and capital accumulation over time.
David Graeber, Debt, The First 5,000 Years
A historical look at debt, obligation, and power across civilizations.
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine
How crises are used to push economic restructuring and deregulation.
Documentaries and films
Colonialism
Books
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Psychological and structural impacts of colonial domination.
Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
An analysis of colonial extraction and long term economic consequences.
Documentaries and films
Power, institutions, and democratic erosion
Books
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
An exploration of labor, work, action, and how political life shapes human freedom and responsibility.
Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times
Portraits of individuals navigating moral responsibility and political reality under oppressive conditions.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die
An analysis of how democratic institutions erode gradually through norms, incentives, and institutional decay.