It can be instructive to pause and reflect that many of these same books would be among the first into the fire. Some people go to the most brutal extremes to keep others from gaining certain kinds of insights and perspectives.
The great economist Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), for example, had to flee members of the National Socialist Party from his home in Vienna. They invaded his apartment and confiscated his personal papers. He had fled to Geneva just shortly before they came for him. These people certainly did not like his academic writings exposing the deep defects of their “enlightened” economic program for managing the economy—so much so that they did not want others to even know of his writings.
Subtler methods than flame are more common. The primary one remaining today is the exclusion of certain books and ideas from state-financed and compulsory curriculums that influence our deepest paradigms about the nature of the social and economic world. This is significant because the vast majority of modern people’s formal education does not extend beyond the content allowed into their school textbooks. These forced curriculums crowd out—from childhood on up—potential learning opportunities that never come into being.
If you want to move closer to the truth in key questions of economics, politics, history, law, and social organization; if you want to meet your own questions with satisfying answers that resonate, you do not have to do it alone. Many have gone before. However, you may have to do much of it on the edges of or outside the confines of the conventional educational world. Fortunately, there are more and more resources readily available to support this approach.