A Paradise Built in Hell

Reading Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell changed my views of human nature and expanded my imagination on how societies can be organized. The book is a series of histories of disaster events, natural and human-made. It shows how traditional ideas of what happens to people in crisis - i.e. that it brings out the worst in human nature and people need to be managed, by force if necessary - are wrong and that disaster and hardship create temporary communities that are peaceful, egalitarian, and supportive. In many cases, the experience of working in common to support others was so powerful that it led to profound individual and even structural political transformations. All in all, it's a deeply optimistic view of human nature, one that you rarely see these days.