Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

Unfortunately, Ishmael is a shit book. I knew it was a shit book at the time - it starts as a shit book, has a shit book in the middle, and ends as a shit book. This is because the basic argument put forth by Ishmael is that humans were happier as hunter-gatherers. That's it. That's the whole enchilada. In order to make this argument, however, Daniel Quinn has one character that's nothing but a Socratic questioner of truth and another character that is an I-shit-you-not talking gorilla.

It doesn't take a whole lot of cultural exposure to recognize that Ishmael is to Conrad Lorenz' On Aggression what The Da Vinci Code is to Holy Blood Holy Grail: a deliberate dumbing-down of the key concepts so that people troubled by multi-syllabic words can feel clever. But hey, since Lorenz wrote for German academics who, like him, probably had some troubling Naziism in their pasts while Daniel Quinn wrote for a fucking contest, every third "thought leader" in 1991 was shoving Ishmael down everyone else's throat as if it offered new insights.

Despite the fact that it does not include the quote "The modern human lifestyle is the worst evolutionary adaptation since peacock feathers."

Ishmael was the book where I began to suspect that all these smart adults all around me were just pretending to be smart and that really, there isn't a whole lot of universal expertise. More than that, it's a lot easier to lean into an "expert" than express your own thoughts and feelings because if you beat someone else over the head with an expert, you don't have to put the strength of your own convictions behind the knowledge. Ishmael taught me that really, culture is an endless miasma of one bad idea after another being held up as wisdom until it too can be trashed and cast aside in the constant conflict of ideas that is any free society and the fact that it was such a trite piece of shit goes a long way towards explaining my insufferable cynicism. Because at sixteen years old, every fucking adult I knew was shoving a book about a talking fucking gorilla in my face because it would "blow my mind." Once I finally got to Lorenz (at 23 - because I was keeping cichlids, a fish Lorenz studied at length) it really cemented the notion that we keep rehashing it all without learning.

This contempt only grew when they cast Anthony Hopkins as the gorilla.

I wish I could give you a positive role model. I cannot. There are books I enjoyed greatly, there are books I recommend widely, but the one that changed my life changed it through sucking.