10 Books That Screwed Up The World

[onager]

:rofl:

10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn't Help by "Dr." Benjamin Wiker

In the bookstore recently, I swatted away a few flies swarming around this pile of...books, and eagerly cracked a copy open.

I know you're just dying to know what books made the world the awful mess it is today, so here you go...

Oh, should I mention that "Dr." Wiker works for the Discovery Institute? That will explain a lot:

The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli, 1513) (Reason--destroyed good government, as practiced up until then by all Popes and kings)

Discourse on Method (René Descartes, 1637) (Reason--killed God. And he was French. Descartes, not the late God, that is.)

Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes, 1651) (Reason--envisioned icky society, not enough God.)

Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1755) (Reason--early version of Dr. Benjamin Spock. And French.)

The Manifesto of the Communist Party (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848) (Reason--BOO! Are you kidding? This is the Discovery Institute. They still check under their beds for Commies. And Darwinists.)

Utilitarianism (John Stuart Mill, 1863) (Reason--see Hobbes above)

The Descent of Man (Charles Darwin, 1871) (Reason--see Marx & Engels above)

Beyond Good and Evil (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886) (Reason--re-killed God. Had dubious personal life, which of course invalidates everything he wrote.)

The State and Revolution (Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1917) (Reason--see Marx & Engels above)

The Pivot of Civilization (Margaret Sanger, 1922) (Reason--too much sex, not enough God. Uppity proto-feminist, bad influence on the womenfolk with all her birth control talk.)

And the "5 more that didn't help:"

Mein Kampf (Adolf Hitler, 1925) (Reason--made far-right political ideas unpopular by taking them to their logical conclusions.)

The Future of an Illusion (Sigmund Freud, 1927) (Reason--one of the Unholy Trinity to modern right-wingers, along with Marx and Darwin. Pseudo-intellectuals like the Irving Kristol family of Wingnut Welfare Queens have made a lucrative career out of attacking that trio.)

Coming of Age in Samoa (Margaret Mead, 1928) (Reason--see Margaret Sanger above. Also uncritically reported stuff which later proved untrue. Oh, did I mention that Wiker is published by Regnery, the home of Ann Coulter?)

Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Alfred Kinsey, 1948) (Reason--godless pervert. Interviewed pedophiles, which of course invalidates everything else he did, etc.)

The Feminine Mystique (Betty Friedan, 1963) (Reason--see Margaret Sanger above)

Now if you want to help un-screw the world, Wiker seems to have a solution: ignore all those dangerous books on his list, and read more of...well, I'm sure you can guess. (Hint: talking snake, pregnant virgin, etc.)

http://www.amazon.com/10-Books-That-Screwed-World/dp/1596980559/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

[salvorhardin]

1. Haha, thanks!

I got a blog post out of that. It's always fun to laugh at the intellectually and morally bankrupt.
http://freethoughtfortwayne.org/2009/05/29/open-forum-friday-ten-books-screwed

[onager]

2. And thanks right back!

Good blog. I'll have to start lurking over there.

I shamelessly stole a lot of my snark from an old Ronald Bailey article in Reason magazine. I'm trying to find it on the web. It USED to be there. Dammit.

UPDATE: found it! I only had a few things wrong, like the author's name...ahem...

Origin of the Specious: Why do neoconservatives doubt Darwin?
Ronald Bailey | July 1997 Print Edition, REASON magazine.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/30329.html

Bailey made the point that neo-cons are fixated on discrediting Marx, Freud and Darwin. History took care of Marx (though I guess it's more correct to say it took care of Stalinist Communism). Also Freud, to some extent. So Darwin is the biggest target left.

Bailey also noted that Irving Kristol is most likely an atheist, and I believe Kristol has even admitted that. But he's one of those elitists who think us common folk would run amok without a god sitting on our shoulder:

But something deeper seems to be going on, and the key to it can be found in Bork's assertion in his book that religious "belief is probably essential to a civilized future."

These otherwise largely secular intellectuals may well have turned on Darwin because they have concluded that his theory of evolution undermines religious faith in society at large. Of course, this is not a novel thought. Many others have arrived at the same conclusion.

Conservative activist Beverly LaHaye, a biblical literalist who is president of Concerned Women for America, puts the matter directly: "If the biblical account of creation in Genesis isn't true, how can we trust the rest of the Bible?"

[mr blur]

3. He missed out the Bible.

Just saying..

[Orrex]

4. My first thought, as well

I was wondering which ten books thereof he'd pick. Deuteronomy and Leviticus should certainly should certainly be near the top of the list, with Genesis not far behind...

[uriel1972]

5. The Prince?

destroyed good government. :rofl: The Popes and Kings of the time were good government????? Ahahahahahahahaha. Machievelli took his lessons from the Popes and Kings. You can't say these things with a straight face.

[bluescribbler]

6. How many

Epistles did Paul write?

[onager]

7. My partial list, what would yours be?

I'm not sure I can come up with 10 off the top of my Alleged Head. But as a quick drive-by:

Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion - that fucking thing is STILL causing trouble, more than a century after it was concocted by the Czar's secret police as a handy excuse for Russian pogroms. When Henry Ford bought his own newspaper in the 1920s, the Dearborn Independent, he serialized the whole book. Thanks, asshole. Just what the world needed. (Ford closed the paper after his anti-Semitic rantings earned him a libel suit.)

Malleus Malleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) - a hateful anti-female screed written in 1486 by Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, a pair of monks. Became a handbook for Inquisition: WCI (WitchCraft Investigation). Probably bedside reading for "Dr." James Dobson et. al.

Foundations of the Nineteenth Century by Houston Stewart Chamberlain - published in 1899, its crackpot theories about "Aryan civilization" had a huge influence on Hitler and his gang.

Hmm. I could almost pad it out to 10 with The Holy Bible, Atlas Shrugged, The Book of Mormon and Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health...

[salvorhardin]

8. I've been thinking about this a lot

When I posted this on the FFW blog I asked readers to come up with their own list. Since then I've been thinking about this a lot and your list matches mine item for item.

I think I'd add Abbé Augustin Barruel's 1797 book Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire du Jacobinisme (Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism. Memoirs has, as far as I know, the distinction of being the first right wing conspiracy theory and is the great-great-grand daddy of all the Illuminati/NWO conspiracy theories. It basically argues that Voltaire, Freemasons, and the Illuminati engineered the French Revolution.

Oh, and (dis)honorable mention would have to go to Henry Ford's 1920s series of booklets The International Jew: The World's Problem which were later collected in book form, sold very well all over the world and in 1938 earned Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle.

[moggie]

9. Don't forget Martin Luther

On the Jews and their Lies and his other writing on Jews was very influential at the time, and even into the twentieth century and you-know-who's political movement.

[salvorhardin]

10. Good call!

How could I forget about Martin Luther!?

[charlie]

11. A lesser one

Milton Friedman's Free to Choose. That and his PBS series with same name helped convince the American public that deranged pinhead Reagan was a credible presidential candidate, unleashing the monetarism, privatization, deregulation, and hostility to government that's killing us today. And his wreckage wasn't confined to the US, Iceland is just the latest bunch to have their shit totally fucked up by devotion to the Chicago School.

[salvorhardin]

12. Excellent choice

I'm not sure if that should go in our also-ran category or in the actual Top 10. Chicago School economics really is a special sort of woo - the expectation that everyone behaves in perfectly rational ways; irrational belief in rationality. About the only thing nuttier is Austrian School economics.

[charlie]

13. I wasn't sure

But it's early yet. With the fragile state of the world, everybody waiting for the other shoe to drop, his scribblings may yet leap to the head of the pack. I hope not.

He admitted shortly before his death that monetarism doesn't work. Well, actually he allowed that, "the use of quantity of money as a target has not been a success. I'm not sure I would as of today push it as hard as I once did."

Thanks Milt, you fargin' icehole.