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Indispensable Goods: Thoughts on Ideology, Agency, the Meaning of Life, and Other Somewhat Important Things
In our age of global capitalism we face enormous challenges. Most of us feel overwhelmed, unable to decide what to do or just unmotivated to make any attempt to change the world. This book takes the form of a father’s philosophical advice to his children as they graduate college, encouraging them to continue to learn what college was never meant to teach them. With chapters on free will, language, reason, the nature of the mind, economics, and many other topics, Pepper tries to explain to his daughters, and to anyone else who might be interested, why our basic assumptions about the world are fundamentally mistaken. If we hope to recover any agency, we will need to rethink our conceptions of ourselves and the world. The aim of this book is to begin that reorientation, with the hope that the next generation can save themselves and the planet from the mess they have been left with. Focusing on the theory of ideology, and making a case for the positive understanding of that often maligned concept, Pepper explores thinking ranging from ancient Greek and Buddhist philosophies to contemporary science and economics, always attempting to address an audience likely unprepared for such thought by the current system of higher education. The result is a challenge to the younger generation not to give up on thought, but to do it better than their parents or grandparents did.
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Published March 26, 2020
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November 6, 2020
There are probably few things as repellant to the prospective reader of any book than the rhapsodic, dewey-eyed review of a queasy young dilettante. Yet rhapsodise I must, for this book has shaken something in me deeply. I am compelled to try to make sense of it here and, more importantly, to convince someone - anyone - to read this book.
Indispensable Goods by Tom Pepper is, without even remote competition, the most important book I have read in my life (though bear in mind, I'm only 26, and certainly not even nearly well-read enough for my age).
So where do I begin with this?
I first encountered Pepper's brilliant, pugnacious writing online. So beguiled was I by his extraordinary erudition and scintillating, acerbic prose that I found myself routinely tracking his writings across various blogs, often dating several years back. Only through some recent (routine) snooping online did I discover Mr. Pepper's book: this remarkable, sumptuous, invigorating volume.
From the opening salvo of Indispensable Goods, I was gripped. The honest-to-goodness life was shaken out of me. As a recent graduate of (cover your eyes and ears, Tom Pepper, I plead!) psychology, I found the entire field swiftly upended by Pepper's scrutinous reasoning and philosophical exposé. And yet the authenticity of his argument rang through to my soul. Having graduated with the sour taste of resentment lingering on my ill-educated lips, I knew I needed someone, something, to explain just why I felt so bereaved by my university education in psychology. Why did I feel the entire field was philosophically and intellectually fraudulent, so pointless, so ill-equipped to meet any of the needs of the human beings it purports to be its metier? I had encountered the usual arguments before, those from a critical theory perspective etc., and even once or twice vaguely trotted out by some insiders in the field - 'psychologists' - who alluded, sotto voce, to the grave faults rotting away at the core of this torturous discipline.
Yet the philosophical roots of this reality were never explicitly traced for me, possibly because the implicit assumptions are so embedded in the field that practitioners couldn't possibly own up to them. Alas, my greatest fears and greatest desires, were fulfilled in this book. Psychology as I know it is a wasteland, its few meagre fruits rotten and fetid on the vine. I will scream it from the rooftops! on my soapbox! standing outside the cognitive neuroscience labs of Trinity College Dublin! and Indispensable Goods will be my craw-thumping gospel.
Anyway, enough about my personal blood feud with psychology.
This book has a distinct ambition. Pepper asks nothing less of the reader than a complete re-examination and re-constitution of the implicit assumptions that are foundational to our intellectual traditions and indeed to our very ways of living and being in the world. We explore language, reason, emotions, economics, history, art, and psychoanalysis from engaging new perspectives. We are invited to critically re-discover these fields and to find in them something far more interesting, powerful, and exquisitely useful than we were ever shown throughout school and university (institutions which are the subject of much ideological critique by Pepper, and which has been one of the more validating and revitalising aspects for me, after my first reading of the book)
Pepper addresses and dedicates the book to his daughters, who are presumably around my own age or younger. He wishes for them, and us, our entire generation, to critically re-evaluate everything we think we know, and to establish better ideological frameworks from which to live and better social practices to collectively engage in. There is something so comforting and re-assuring in the sagely way Pepper leads us gradually through the book, deconstructing (if you will) accepted convention and the apparently 'natural' organisation of our lives, culminating in an impassioned clarion call to action. He challenges us, gives us just what we need to begin the work, provides practical examples throughout, and offers further readings. It is very difficult work, but work we must, for this is not a treatise of nebulous philosophising and arm chair speculation. Pepper is calling us to something great, something far greater than ourselves yet which necessarily demands our full, vitalised participation.
I can't imagine a more important book for a graduate to read. I have already started flogging it to every one of my fellow travellers in the wasteland of contemporary psychology. But really, anyone with even the slightest disdain for the ideologies that bind us in the present capitalist formation, and who recognises the suffering it engenders to the deepest threads and fibres of our nature, needs to read this book (is this rhapsodic enough?).
I could go on (and on, and on...) but enough is enough. Just go buy it. AND READ IT.
Tom Pepper, I thank you.
Indispensable Goods by Tom Pepper is, without even remote competition, the most important book I have read in my life (though bear in mind, I'm only 26, and certainly not even nearly well-read enough for my age).
So where do I begin with this?
I first encountered Pepper's brilliant, pugnacious writing online. So beguiled was I by his extraordinary erudition and scintillating, acerbic prose that I found myself routinely tracking his writings across various blogs, often dating several years back. Only through some recent (routine) snooping online did I discover Mr. Pepper's book: this remarkable, sumptuous, invigorating volume.
From the opening salvo of Indispensable Goods, I was gripped. The honest-to-goodness life was shaken out of me. As a recent graduate of (cover your eyes and ears, Tom Pepper, I plead!) psychology, I found the entire field swiftly upended by Pepper's scrutinous reasoning and philosophical exposé. And yet the authenticity of his argument rang through to my soul. Having graduated with the sour taste of resentment lingering on my ill-educated lips, I knew I needed someone, something, to explain just why I felt so bereaved by my university education in psychology. Why did I feel the entire field was philosophically and intellectually fraudulent, so pointless, so ill-equipped to meet any of the needs of the human beings it purports to be its metier? I had encountered the usual arguments before, those from a critical theory perspective etc., and even once or twice vaguely trotted out by some insiders in the field - 'psychologists' - who alluded, sotto voce, to the grave faults rotting away at the core of this torturous discipline.
Yet the philosophical roots of this reality were never explicitly traced for me, possibly because the implicit assumptions are so embedded in the field that practitioners couldn't possibly own up to them. Alas, my greatest fears and greatest desires, were fulfilled in this book. Psychology as I know it is a wasteland, its few meagre fruits rotten and fetid on the vine. I will scream it from the rooftops! on my soapbox! standing outside the cognitive neuroscience labs of Trinity College Dublin! and Indispensable Goods will be my craw-thumping gospel.
Anyway, enough about my personal blood feud with psychology.
This book has a distinct ambition. Pepper asks nothing less of the reader than a complete re-examination and re-constitution of the implicit assumptions that are foundational to our intellectual traditions and indeed to our very ways of living and being in the world. We explore language, reason, emotions, economics, history, art, and psychoanalysis from engaging new perspectives. We are invited to critically re-discover these fields and to find in them something far more interesting, powerful, and exquisitely useful than we were ever shown throughout school and university (institutions which are the subject of much ideological critique by Pepper, and which has been one of the more validating and revitalising aspects for me, after my first reading of the book)
Pepper addresses and dedicates the book to his daughters, who are presumably around my own age or younger. He wishes for them, and us, our entire generation, to critically re-evaluate everything we think we know, and to establish better ideological frameworks from which to live and better social practices to collectively engage in. There is something so comforting and re-assuring in the sagely way Pepper leads us gradually through the book, deconstructing (if you will) accepted convention and the apparently 'natural' organisation of our lives, culminating in an impassioned clarion call to action. He challenges us, gives us just what we need to begin the work, provides practical examples throughout, and offers further readings. It is very difficult work, but work we must, for this is not a treatise of nebulous philosophising and arm chair speculation. Pepper is calling us to something great, something far greater than ourselves yet which necessarily demands our full, vitalised participation.
I can't imagine a more important book for a graduate to read. I have already started flogging it to every one of my fellow travellers in the wasteland of contemporary psychology. But really, anyone with even the slightest disdain for the ideologies that bind us in the present capitalist formation, and who recognises the suffering it engenders to the deepest threads and fibres of our nature, needs to read this book (is this rhapsodic enough?).
I could go on (and on, and on...) but enough is enough. Just go buy it. AND READ IT.
Tom Pepper, I thank you.
May 28, 2023
I'll start with a bold claim: If you want to understand the world better, then you should read this book. This is not, of course, to suggest that it has all of the answers about everything. Still, Tom Pepper's book "Indispensable Goods" does something fundamental: It gives us a chance to rethink the very questions we are asking about the world, to re-examine the assumptions these questions are based on.
Let me use an analogy to illustrate what such a shifting of assumptions can mean. Consider the paradigm shift in astronomy from the Ptolemaic geocentric system to the heliocentric system. Rather than trying to answer puzzling questions on the order of 'Why do planets move around the Earth in this complicated fashion involving epicycles?', "Indispensable Goods" asks us to consider that maybe this question is so hard to answer because it is based on a flawed premise and goes on to suggest another approach to the issue. The book does this for a variety of problems, including human nature, language, the mind, free will, reason, emotion, economics, and history. For example, Pepper presents Galen Strawson's "basic argument" against free will, which shows that the concept of free will does not make sense. As an alternative, Pepper suggests that human agency consists in our ability to improve our understanding of the world and adjust our actions based on this understanding.
However, returning to the analogy of astronomy from above, instead of providing a complete heliocentric theory, what Pepper does is more like presenting the idea that the planets revolve around the sun and briefly arguing that this conceptual approach is more promising. This has the drawback, of course, that after reading the book one will probably still have a lot of questions about the proposed alternatives. (I know I do.) It has the enormous advantage, though, that it allows "Indispensable Goods" to cover a lot of different areas (as mentioned above) in order to bring them together to form a coherent and convincing way of understanding the world and human life. (Each of the areas considered in "Indispensable Goods" would probably require a book of their own to be discussed in more satisfying detail and, indeed, "Indispensable Goods" contains many recommendations for further reading.)
The book's contents are not just an exercise so that we can feel smarter afterwards and go on as we were, though. (German philosopher Richard David Precht essentially suggests this is all philosophy can do in the introduction to "Erkenne die Welt", the first volume of his series of books on the history of philosophy.) But in order to understand what Pepper is trying to encourage us to do beyond understanding new concepts, we have to discuss the central aim of the book.
The reconsideration of a variety of concepts like human nature, language, the mind, free will, reason, etc. makes up most of the book (Chapters 4 to 13) and is fascinating by itself, but it serves another purpose: Tom Pepper sets out to explain Louis Althusser's theory of ideology. Ideology here, does not simply refer to a "false consciousness" or, to take two descriptions from the Online Etymology Dictionary, "a prescriptive doctrine that is not supported by rational argument", or a "systematic set of ideas, doctrines through which the world is interpreted". As Pepper explains, Althusser's concept of ideology has to do with the very way we collectively organize and live our lives. Perhaps this can be clarified a bit by contrasting ideology with science. Science, on this model, is our attempt to understand what the world is like, what things are real and how these things work. Ideology, on the other hand, consists of what we want to do in the world. Thus, ideology in this sense is something we, as human beings, cannot do without. This is surely a very inadequate description, but it should at least convey the significance that ideology has if Pepper and Althusser are correct.
So, how does this affect what we should do? Pepper's crucial contention is that we can - collectively - consciously choose our ideology and thereby improve our lives for the better. Now, it may seem at this point that we would not have any criteria for what 'better' might mean that do not depend on our current ideology. And, I suppose, this is true. However, if we accept as fundamental that it is a good thing to eliminate sources of human suffering, which is itself an ideological belief, then there is also an objective component to our choice of ideologies. This is so, according to Pepper, because some ideologies are better suited to fulfilling our human nature, which, as you may recall, is one of the concepts that is discussed in the book. And this really is the main goal of "Indispensable Goods": to encourage us to do something about human suffering - from obviously global issues like the hunger and poverty in the world or the threat of global warming to apparently individual issues like depression, addiction, or suicide - and explain how we may accomplish this.
So, what can we do to reduce human suffering? "Indispensable Goods" suggests a twofold anser to this question: critiquing existing ideologies and producing new ideologies based on the lessons learned from the critique. To this end, Pepper first outlines three basic forms of ideological critique at the end of Chapter 14. Then, in Chapter 15, he sketches what kind of practices could be employed to consciously produce new ideologies, using the example of community theater. More precisely, Pepper sketches here a production of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" based on the ideas of Bertolt Brecht's epic theater.
If the ideas presented in "Indispensable Goods" are true, then why are they not better known? Pepper attempts to answer this question in Chapters 2 and 3, discussing what he calls the 'ontological collapse' and the 'fear of sociality', respectively. Let me briefly try to explain roughly what these terms mean. Ontological collapse refers to the failure to take seriously both those parts of reality that exist independently of human activity and those parts which are socially constructed. In other words, it is the assumption that only one of these areas of reality, which Pepper calls 'mind-independent' and 'mind-dependent', can be really real. Instead, Pepper suggests that both are completely real, even though they are real in different ways. Fear of sociality, then, refers to the refusal to even consider the possibility that our identities and our very mind are socially constructed. Pepper argues that most of us today make these two errors, which prevent a correct understanding of the world, because they are implicit in the common sense assumptions we grow up with.
To be quite honest, after reading the book, rereading some sections and having read a few (though really just a small fraction) of the recommendations for further reading, I still feel like I do not understand many of the positions advanced in "Indispensable Goods" nearly as well as I would like. While the book itself is very accessible and engagingly written, really understanding what it says takes time and effort. However, this book also shows how enjoyable and satisfying rigorous thinking about the world can be. "Indispensable Goods" makes me really want to better understand the issues it discusses. And, as this review has hopefully made clear, these issues intimately concern all of our lives.
Let me use an analogy to illustrate what such a shifting of assumptions can mean. Consider the paradigm shift in astronomy from the Ptolemaic geocentric system to the heliocentric system. Rather than trying to answer puzzling questions on the order of 'Why do planets move around the Earth in this complicated fashion involving epicycles?', "Indispensable Goods" asks us to consider that maybe this question is so hard to answer because it is based on a flawed premise and goes on to suggest another approach to the issue. The book does this for a variety of problems, including human nature, language, the mind, free will, reason, emotion, economics, and history. For example, Pepper presents Galen Strawson's "basic argument" against free will, which shows that the concept of free will does not make sense. As an alternative, Pepper suggests that human agency consists in our ability to improve our understanding of the world and adjust our actions based on this understanding.
However, returning to the analogy of astronomy from above, instead of providing a complete heliocentric theory, what Pepper does is more like presenting the idea that the planets revolve around the sun and briefly arguing that this conceptual approach is more promising. This has the drawback, of course, that after reading the book one will probably still have a lot of questions about the proposed alternatives. (I know I do.) It has the enormous advantage, though, that it allows "Indispensable Goods" to cover a lot of different areas (as mentioned above) in order to bring them together to form a coherent and convincing way of understanding the world and human life. (Each of the areas considered in "Indispensable Goods" would probably require a book of their own to be discussed in more satisfying detail and, indeed, "Indispensable Goods" contains many recommendations for further reading.)
The book's contents are not just an exercise so that we can feel smarter afterwards and go on as we were, though. (German philosopher Richard David Precht essentially suggests this is all philosophy can do in the introduction to "Erkenne die Welt", the first volume of his series of books on the history of philosophy.) But in order to understand what Pepper is trying to encourage us to do beyond understanding new concepts, we have to discuss the central aim of the book.
The reconsideration of a variety of concepts like human nature, language, the mind, free will, reason, etc. makes up most of the book (Chapters 4 to 13) and is fascinating by itself, but it serves another purpose: Tom Pepper sets out to explain Louis Althusser's theory of ideology. Ideology here, does not simply refer to a "false consciousness" or, to take two descriptions from the Online Etymology Dictionary, "a prescriptive doctrine that is not supported by rational argument", or a "systematic set of ideas, doctrines through which the world is interpreted". As Pepper explains, Althusser's concept of ideology has to do with the very way we collectively organize and live our lives. Perhaps this can be clarified a bit by contrasting ideology with science. Science, on this model, is our attempt to understand what the world is like, what things are real and how these things work. Ideology, on the other hand, consists of what we want to do in the world. Thus, ideology in this sense is something we, as human beings, cannot do without. This is surely a very inadequate description, but it should at least convey the significance that ideology has if Pepper and Althusser are correct.
So, how does this affect what we should do? Pepper's crucial contention is that we can - collectively - consciously choose our ideology and thereby improve our lives for the better. Now, it may seem at this point that we would not have any criteria for what 'better' might mean that do not depend on our current ideology. And, I suppose, this is true. However, if we accept as fundamental that it is a good thing to eliminate sources of human suffering, which is itself an ideological belief, then there is also an objective component to our choice of ideologies. This is so, according to Pepper, because some ideologies are better suited to fulfilling our human nature, which, as you may recall, is one of the concepts that is discussed in the book. And this really is the main goal of "Indispensable Goods": to encourage us to do something about human suffering - from obviously global issues like the hunger and poverty in the world or the threat of global warming to apparently individual issues like depression, addiction, or suicide - and explain how we may accomplish this.
So, what can we do to reduce human suffering? "Indispensable Goods" suggests a twofold anser to this question: critiquing existing ideologies and producing new ideologies based on the lessons learned from the critique. To this end, Pepper first outlines three basic forms of ideological critique at the end of Chapter 14. Then, in Chapter 15, he sketches what kind of practices could be employed to consciously produce new ideologies, using the example of community theater. More precisely, Pepper sketches here a production of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" based on the ideas of Bertolt Brecht's epic theater.
If the ideas presented in "Indispensable Goods" are true, then why are they not better known? Pepper attempts to answer this question in Chapters 2 and 3, discussing what he calls the 'ontological collapse' and the 'fear of sociality', respectively. Let me briefly try to explain roughly what these terms mean. Ontological collapse refers to the failure to take seriously both those parts of reality that exist independently of human activity and those parts which are socially constructed. In other words, it is the assumption that only one of these areas of reality, which Pepper calls 'mind-independent' and 'mind-dependent', can be really real. Instead, Pepper suggests that both are completely real, even though they are real in different ways. Fear of sociality, then, refers to the refusal to even consider the possibility that our identities and our very mind are socially constructed. Pepper argues that most of us today make these two errors, which prevent a correct understanding of the world, because they are implicit in the common sense assumptions we grow up with.
To be quite honest, after reading the book, rereading some sections and having read a few (though really just a small fraction) of the recommendations for further reading, I still feel like I do not understand many of the positions advanced in "Indispensable Goods" nearly as well as I would like. While the book itself is very accessible and engagingly written, really understanding what it says takes time and effort. However, this book also shows how enjoyable and satisfying rigorous thinking about the world can be. "Indispensable Goods" makes me really want to better understand the issues it discusses. And, as this review has hopefully made clear, these issues intimately concern all of our lives.
November 6, 2021
Well, obviously I think this is a great book. Read it twice, and buy copies for all the recent college grads you know!
April 24, 2025
I'm giving this philosophical guide book 5 stars; to cover the ground it's aimed at adequately in 300 pages alone felt impossible, and for myself as a newcomer to nearly all the lines of thought within, it did a great job on some difficult ideas, most of which I’ve only vaguely encountered in my novice philosophy reading hobby. As someone who had largely bought the idea that capitalism for all it’s problems, is the least-worst solution that brought at least some of humanity out of abject poverty, I feel like I have a lot more to learn.
A key topic resonated with Rene Girard's idea of mimetic desire, the idea that we may think we are somehow authentic and natural (the romantic lie), but are very much socially constructed. And despite how deeply embarrassing and frightening this is, recognising this may be freeing. If we can see the unwarranted power of this liquid of words and ideas we swim in, then we can alter the flow.
It was a rapid tour through many areas of philosophy, vaguely hinting at a grand coming together at the end - and so like a murder mystery I sped through to reach the conclusion, what was the cure for this terrible state of affairs we are in? I nearly spilt my coffee when the proposed solutions to all the weighty problems were Ok, ok I'll admit there was a wider point!
I made the following (likely naive) notes and questions for myself to follow up on:
- How can we ‘believe in a practice’ without adopting it and proving it first?
- Top down constructed ideologies have risk; there is a danger (e.g. the infamous Great sparrow campaign) of unintended interactions due to opaque material conditions and unforeseeable second order interactions.
- Capitalism is very uncomfortable, but poverty, famine, and war existed long before capitalism. Isn't the psychological problem just that we are more aware of those doing better than us, and it now feels just out of reach?
- We could state a shared goal is to eliminate road rage, but there are material limits, literally, people wish to occupy the same section of road to get where they need to go. How does ideology come into play with material hard truths?
- If the lack of a worthwhile social role is a cause of depression, but also that the social dictates what our idea of a worthwhile social role is, why isn’t depression easier to cure?
- Successful capitalists are people too - so why are our capitalists so selfish and/or ineffective at sharing their success. Where is La noblesse oblige?
My own inkling of what could be fought, is to really try to make having a lot of money and stuff, deeply uncool, as once it seemed to be heading around Gen X times. This steer into the veneration and worship of financial success seemed to occur at around the time of the early 00s, when neoliberalism became dominant aesthetically. I think there was an idea that admitting a shameful wish for riches was somehow authentic and liberating. There was a shift from punk/grunge’s anti-establishment vibes to the sleek consumerism of yuppies, gangsta rap and MTV Cribs. “Greed is good” became an ambient truth.
A key topic resonated with Rene Girard's idea of mimetic desire, the idea that we may think we are somehow authentic and natural (the romantic lie), but are very much socially constructed. And despite how deeply embarrassing and frightening this is, recognising this may be freeing. If we can see the unwarranted power of this liquid of words and ideas we swim in, then we can alter the flow.
It was a rapid tour through many areas of philosophy, vaguely hinting at a grand coming together at the end - and so like a murder mystery I sped through to reach the conclusion, what was the cure for this terrible state of affairs we are in? I nearly spilt my coffee when the proposed solutions to all the weighty problems were Ok, ok I'll admit there was a wider point!
I made the following (likely naive) notes and questions for myself to follow up on:
- How can we ‘believe in a practice’ without adopting it and proving it first?
- Top down constructed ideologies have risk; there is a danger (e.g. the infamous Great sparrow campaign) of unintended interactions due to opaque material conditions and unforeseeable second order interactions.
- Capitalism is very uncomfortable, but poverty, famine, and war existed long before capitalism. Isn't the psychological problem just that we are more aware of those doing better than us, and it now feels just out of reach?
- We could state a shared goal is to eliminate road rage, but there are material limits, literally, people wish to occupy the same section of road to get where they need to go. How does ideology come into play with material hard truths?
- If the lack of a worthwhile social role is a cause of depression, but also that the social dictates what our idea of a worthwhile social role is, why isn’t depression easier to cure?
- Successful capitalists are people too - so why are our capitalists so selfish and/or ineffective at sharing their success. Where is La noblesse oblige?
My own inkling of what could be fought, is to really try to make having a lot of money and stuff, deeply uncool, as once it seemed to be heading around Gen X times. This steer into the veneration and worship of financial success seemed to occur at around the time of the early 00s, when neoliberalism became dominant aesthetically. I think there was an idea that admitting a shameful wish for riches was somehow authentic and liberating. There was a shift from punk/grunge’s anti-establishment vibes to the sleek consumerism of yuppies, gangsta rap and MTV Cribs. “Greed is good” became an ambient truth.
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