(2025-01-01) The Whirl Bookshelf

Mark McGrath: The Whirl Bookshelf. The Whirl of ReOrientation did not drop out of the sky. It rests on tight concepts from brilliant thinkers that rewired how we see strategy, economics, media, and the human condition. This page is the spine of The Whirl. If you want to understand why we talk the way we speak here, this is where it starts.

The order is not academic. It follows the path I actually walked

all wrestling with a single problem:
How do human beings make sense of reality, choose, act, and adapt when everything is moving? (sense-making, orientation)

These are not “nice to have” titles. If you want to operate differently from your competitors in chaotic environments, they are basic kit.

1. The Art of Contrary Thinking by Humphrey B. Neill

Neill writes for investors, but he is really writing about perception and crowd psychology

You read Neill to learn the habit of standing off to the side. He teaches you to separate facts from the emotional comfort wrapped around them and to ask a question most people never touch:
What if everyone thinking alike is wrong?

2. Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd – Frans P. B. Osinga

Discourse on Winning and Losing is John Boyd’s raw briefing room. With Science, Strategy, and War, Frans Osinga gives us a long, careful walk-through of the concepts he taught. He ties Boyd’s work to physics, biology, epistemology, systems thinking, and military history

He maps Orientation to its scientific and philosophical roots and shows that it is not a step in a cycle, but the living core of how we generate hypotheses, test them, and learn. He brings in thermodynamics, evolution, and complexity theory, and then brings them back to practical strategy

3. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man – Marshall McLuhan.

Marshall McLuhan overturns the way most people think about communication, but that’s only part of it. He argues that the form of a medium shapes perception and society far more than the slogans and stories that run through it

You read McLuhan to stop being hypnotized by “content.” He trains you to look at the environment a medium creates, and at the kind of person it rewards

4. The Phenomenon of Man – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Teilhard was a priest and scientist seeking to integrate evolution, consciousness, and spiritual development into a single view. He treats human history as a process that is moving toward greater complexity and awareness, and he introduces the idea of the “noosphere,” a sphere of mind that grows as human beings link and reflect together

You read Teilhard to stretch your sense of time and scale. You do not have to agree with his theology or his conclusions to feel the effect. He invites you to see our current information storm as one phase in a much larger story of how human consciousness develops.

5. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics – Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises starts from a single point and refuses to let it go: human beings act on purpose

It is a deep study of choice under uncertainty and of how people try to cooperate when each person only sees a small piece of the picture.

You read Mises to understand how systems of human action hold together or fall apart. He explains how prices, profits, and losses convey information in complex settings and what happens when those signals are distorted or silenced. (systemantics)

For The Whirl, this is the piece that connects individual Orientation to large-scale behavior. Boyd helps you see how people adapt in conflict. McLuhan enables you to see how media environments shape perception. Mises helps you see how incentives and information flows shape what organizations and societies actually do.

This is not a “top five” list for the sake of it. It is a suggested foundation.

You cannot understand modern conflict, culture, or politics if you treat platforms as neutral systems