This week’s selected media, October 26, 2025: The SCUM Manifesto, The Eye of the Storm, A Class Divided, Dirtbag Billionaire, The White Rose movement
This week I finished:
The SCUM Manifesto, by Valerie Solanas: I’d heard about this book, or manifesto, by the woman who shot Andy Warhol. I listened to a podcast or two about it first. They couldn’t tell if the author was serious and crazy or sarcasm or what.
Seeing as how she shot an innocent person, I’m inclined to think she’s crazy. The diatribe is bizarre. I kept wondering what would happen if a man wrote it with the sexes reversed, would he be locked up.
Mostly I thought of the pattern I can’t prove but seems to apply every time I check: when someone insults someone, they’re describing themselves more than the other person.
Next mostly I thought of the society that could lead to a work like it. What happened to us that someone would be so mean and angry, and that such meanness would be published?
The Eye of the Storm and A Class Divided, about Jane Elliot: I watched other documentaries about Jane Elliot, but these two seem the big ones. For my book, I’m writing of ways people can reliably be induced to act against their values.
Philip Zimbardo’s book, The Lucifer Effect, described Elliot’s informal classroom experiments inducing third-graders to judge each other by eye color. She was motivated by how mainstream news treated people of different skin color differently after Martin Luther King was assassinated relative to when John F. Kennedy was.
She taught her students experientially. I can imagine people today seeing problems with her methods, but the adults students themselves seem to have valued the experience.
I recommend the videos and learning a lot more.
Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouindard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away, by David Gelles: I’ve met David and stood next to Yvon in the cafeteria of Patagonia’s Ventura, CA headquarters. I know several people in the book, including Vincent Stanley, Rick Ridgeway, Jesse Eisinger, and probably a couple others.
When I toured Patagonia’s headquarters in 2018, I was impressed. The company culture was fun but serious. Everyone seemed to be pulling together. They wanted to improve the world while remaining true to their environmental values.
This book made my skin crawl. I have struggled to find words to describe how slimy and revolting it felt. I can’t tell you how much respect this book caused me to lose for Chouinard and Patagonia, as well as Gelles and the New York Times.
Sorry to drop a bomb like that review and not explain why, but it depends on what my next book is covering. I’ll return to the book, the two men, and the two companies after I publish my book and can explain, but I’ll share a couple reasons. The first is that nearly every character in the book behaves as environmentally destructively as nearly anyone you’ve heard of. That they act like they’re the good guys kept making me think of the Malcolm X quote, “You don’t stick a knife in a man’s back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you’re making progress.”
In contrast to my research into people being induced to act against their values, I also keep learning of those who stuck with their values in the face of overwhelming pressure not to.
I also watched a couple videos on Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl, Alexander Schmorell, and the White Rose Movement against the Nazis. I confess I just learned of them and the movement. Once you learn of them, you’ll want to learn more.
Here’s one of the videos: