A self-education in power, systems, and human nature
I came to the United States from China with a degree in mathematics and an appetite for systems. Not political systems. Not philosophical ones. The kind you could model: inputs, outputs, feedback loops, edge cases. I understood mathematical modeling before I understood Montesquieu. I could write code before I could read Rousseau.
That changed when I decided to fill in the gaps. I kept running into walls in my own thinking. I could see how systems behaved, but I could not articulate why they were built the way they were. I could feel when power shifted in a room, and yet I had no language for how power actually works. So I started reading. Systematically, the way I would approach any problem worth solving.
What followed was less an education than a series of confrontations. Every book I picked up made a claim about human nature, or power, or freedom, and I found myself arguing back, testing the ideas against what I had actually seen, in two very different countries, in systems, and in myself.
The books I gravitated toward all orbited the same question, even when they pretended to be about something else: What are the actual rules? The rules that determine who gets what, who decides, and what happens when someone tries to change the arrangement. The answers, I found, almost always pointed to the same place: structure and incentives.
Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century answered with data. When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth, wealth concentrates. It does not matter what the political system says it believes. Math does not negotiate with ideology. I found this persuasive not because it was surprising, but because it matched what I already saw in markets. Returns compound. Advantages compound. The system does not self-correct toward fairness unless something forces it to.
Chomsky and Herman's Manufacturing Consent argued about who controls the frame. Less about what is said than about what is thinkable. The propaganda model does not require conspiracy. It only requires that the institutions producing information share structural incentives. Ownership, advertising, sourcing, ideology. The filters are architectural, which is precisely what makes them so durable.
I saw this play out recently at a scale so mundane it almost proved the point better than any geopolitical example could. I discovered I had been signed into a personal training program I never agreed to. No signature I recognized, no copy of the contract provided. When I tried to get a refund, every person I encountered became an obstacle. The coach deflected. The general manager cited policy. The front desk had no authority. Even the bank made the dispute process quietly exhausting. None of these people were malicious. Each one was simply being rational within a structure where revenue is the organizing principle and retention is the metric that matters. When a system makes ethical behavior and rational self-interest point in opposite directions, you do not need bad people to produce bad outcomes. You just need the structure to hold.
That same logic scales. In China, the mechanism is visible. You know where the boundaries are because someone drew them explicitly. In America, the boundaries exist too, but they are drawn in softer ink. The effect is subtler and, in some ways, more effective, because people inside the frame genuinely believe they are thinking freely.
Structures do not design themselves. Underneath every system is a theory of human nature, an assumption about what people are and what they will do if left to their own devices. The philosophers who stayed with me longest were the ones who made that assumption explicit.
Rousseau's distinction between amour de soi and amour-propre felt like it was written for this century. The first is simple self-preservation, the instinct to take care of yourself. The second is the need to be seen, to compare, to define yourself through the eyes of others. Rousseau argued that civilization did not create human flourishing so much as it created amour-propre, and with it, a new species of suffering.
I think about this when I watch traders. Or when I watch social media. Or when I notice the specific anxiety that comes from optimizing a life for external legibility rather than internal coherence. Rousseau saw, three hundred years ago, what Instagram would monetize.
Machiavelli refused to describe the world as it should be and instead described it as it is. The Prince reads less as a manual for cruelty than as a manual for seeing clearly. The separation of appearance from reality, the understanding that perception is a form of power, the cold observation that a leader who is feared and loved is ideal but one who must choose should choose fear. Uncomfortable truths. But I have found, in trading and in life, that the people who insist on comfortable ones tend to get surprised.
Hobbes and Plato assumed that order must be imposed from above, that without authority the human animal would either tear itself apart or drift toward ignorance. I understand the argument. I have lived under a system that takes this premise very seriously. But I have also seen what happens when the people imposing order become the primary source of disorder. The real question has never been whether authority is necessary. It is what constrains the authority itself.
These thinkers gave me powerful lenses. However, every political philosopher I read seemed to need a fixed theory of human nature to anchor their system. Hobbes needed humans to be fearful and competitive. Rousseau needed them to be naturally good but corruptible. Plato needed most of them to be incapable of wisdom. The entire architecture of each thinker's politics depended on getting this one assumption right.
I do not think any of them got it right, though, because I do not think there is a single answer. But I also understand why they committed to one. To design a social system, you have to pick. You cannot build institutions on a shrug. A constitution requires a premise about what people will do with power. A theory of governance requires a theory of the governed. The philosophers were not naive in choosing. They were doing what any architect does: simplifying in order to build. The question is what gets lost in the simplification.
What I have observed, both in myself and in others, is that human nature exists on a spectrum, and where someone falls on that spectrum depends heavily on context, incentives, and what the system around them rewards. The same person can be generous in one structure and predatory in another. The same trader can be disciplined in one market regime and reckless in the next. The people at that gym were no different from the people at Chomsky's newspapers. Ordinary people, shaped by the structure they operated in.
This is where my Buddhist practice cuts into the conversation. Sitting zazen, you notice something the philosophers tend to skip over: craving is prior to the system, not produced by it. The seeking behavior, the restlessness, the compulsion to grasp at the next thing. Capitalism did not invent this. It may be evolutionary. What systems do is channel craving, give it specific objects and directions. But the engine was running before any philosopher tried to explain it.
Foucault came closest to seeing this. His concept of disciplinary power, the idea that modern control works through normalization, observation, and internalized discipline, resonated with something I already knew from meditation practice. The most effective prison is the one you build inside your own mind. The one where you monitor yourself, judge yourself, and optimize yourself without anyone having to tell you to.
The most valuable thing I took from this reading was the recognition that every framework is partial. Piketty sees capital. Chomsky sees the media. Foucault sees power. Rousseau sees the corruption of natural feeling. Each one illuminates something real. None of them illuminates everything.
I do not recommend these books because they are correct. I recommend them because they are worth arguing with. The best books are the ones that make you more articulate about what you already believe, while simultaneously showing you the edges of what you have not yet considered. They do not settle the question of how to live. They sharpen the question until it becomes useful.
The education I missed in school was the practice of thinking with and against the best minds who have tried to make sense of the same problems I face. I am still catching up. But I notice, now, that the gaps in my thinking have names. And named things are easier to work with than unnamed ones.