idk about this one. There's some interesting ideas in here but there's also a bunch of claims and analysis that just felt really dubious to me. The explanation of the protestant reformation felt shallow and distorted, the pop culture "american monomyth" supporting strong man authoritarianism cited tons of examples that very clearly don't actually fit, there's weird stuff about evolutionary psychology and the social history of laws and contracts and urbanism that just seems kind of off to me? Makes me wonder how many other strange distortions I didn't catch because I'm not knowledgeable enough. I was gonna give this three stars but then the conclusion gave some really bizarre policy suggestions like testing public officials for "malignant narcissism"? bad vibe, lost a star for that. The whole thing is also shot through with this tone of unfunny snark that I might have been more forgiving of if the core arguments of the book were more solid, but in this book they just came off as weirdly snide and off-putting