Freethought Friday Reads — Cat’s Cradle

My recommendation for today’s read is Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. If you’ve somehow never heard of it before, just trust me on this one. This book somehow manages to criticize the military/industrial/congressional complex by imagining a pure scientific discovery with world-destroying potential, parodize religion by imagining one which is both beautiful and benign, all the while sending up colonialism by setting the story in a fictional Caribbean paradise.

Basically, Vonnegut has a go at everything that was really wrong in the world in 1963. It’s sad to see how much of it still applies today, nearly 50 years later, but perhaps these problems are in some sense timeless. Certainly, the struggle for power exemplified by building nuclear weapons to keep whole nations in fear and formulating packages of memes to tyrannize the minds of men and women is an ongoing struggle which I don’t expect to cease any time soon.