The Ten Books That Screwed Up The World (And 5 That Didn’t Help)
Have you ever wondered how the unthinkable—-legal abortions days before birth, “educated”professionals insisting that there are dozens of genders and prosecutors saying thieves shouldn’t be punished—-became reality? Well, all you need to do is read The Ten Books That Screwed Up The World (And 5 That Didn’t Help). Author Benjamin Wiker briskly outlines the books that for the last five centuries helped the progressive nonsense seep into our culture like an invisible, toxic tonic.
Yes it’s 17 years old, but I think the book is more valuable now: The philosophies outlined throughout these 15 books burst from the obscurity of university classrooms into the mainstream via the Black Lives Matter movement and the outing of woke education indoctrination when Covid restrictions brought public school classroom “teaching” into the home via Zoom.
A common theme: atheistic human hubris that inevitably leads to horror.
Wiker starts with The Prince, Machiavelli’s 1513 instruction manual for effective leadership through “calculated ruthlessness and cool brutality…meant for rulers who had shed all moral and religious scruples.” A related approach is from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan where his focus, like Machiavelli’s, is on me: Good is getting what you want Evil is anything standing in your way of getting it. With no God, and no morality, man is created to seek the most pleasure and avoid the most pain.
Jean Jacques Rousseau is the book’s poster child, with Wiker noting, “Rousseau has done so much damage in so many books that it is hard to single out one element, let along one book, for censure.” He chose Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, which set the stage for the “free love” movement two centuries later. Sex as a “purely animal act….blind inclination, devoid of any sentiment of the heart” No strings! This is not a surprise, because he believed all morality was unnatural. How did this play out in Rousseau’s life? He left all five of his children to die in a Paris orphanage.
The better known books are from the 19th and 20th century, and in many cases, are attacking critical issues facing the increasingly industrialized west. There were many victims of the massive cultural changes. The problem is the proposed solutions.
“Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims.”
100-million is the body count in the 20th century when ideas from The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) by Marx and Engels bore their fruit. As Wiker writes, “Never have so few pages done so much damage.” Once the body count was complete, “even tenured Marxists are a bit squeamish about tooting the Manifesto as a horn of plenty.”
Ardent atheists, they believed humans are only material beings defined by material needs and desires Once the ideas outlined in the Manifesto became reality in 1917, it was Lenin who put the ideas from his The State and Revolution into practice. “For Marx, and hence for Lenin, history is a relentless, driving conflict of classes that ends with a final revolution ushering in a community utopia.”
It’s fair to ask why these ideas are still alive NOW? New York City will soon elect a mayor whose platform shares many of the views highlighted in these discredited books. It is the heart of the Critical Theory movement that fueled the Black Lives Matter protests: We are forever in two boxes, oppressed or oppressor, with one-sided sin and no repentance.
“God is Dead” is one of the most well known, and least understood, philosophical sayings of the last 200 years. Uttered by Friedrich Nietzsche, as Wiker writes while outlining the 1886 book Beyond Good and Evil, it was a cry of despair not of triumph. Nietzsche believed there was no God, no good and evil—-but without God, society is “just sheer human will swimming in an indifferent, if not hostile, cosmos.” How do you balance the two? You don’t. Nietzsche went mad.
No book on the most destructive writing is complete without Charles Darwin, in this case The Descent of Man. Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” led directly to the eugenics movement, led by Margaret Sanger. In her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization she writes that “the greatest present menace to…civilization” is the “lack of balance between the birth-rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit’.” Simply put, she was fighting the “menace of the moron.” This is why the industrial sized abortion factory Planned Parenthood took Sanger’s name off its building in New York City (where by the way, more black babies are aborted than born each year!)
Can you see these philosophical lines crawling through the centuries? Hitler’s Mein Kampf is included and Witker calls the worldview of racial superiority “a union of Darwin and Nietzsche…a worship of the Germanic race as the only one capable of eliminating the weak and bring the ubermensch (“superman”) into existence in accordance with the cruelties of Nature.”
Has much changed? Witker says, “While we shun racial extermination of unfit children and adults in gas chambers, we have very little anxiety about eliminating the very same kind of less-than-perfect human beings in abortion clinics.” Or through genetic testing in the push for the perfect IVF child!
This very accessible book, which includes six more entries in Wilk’s library of shame (from Freud, Descartes, Mill, Mead, Kinsey and Friedan), is a must read for those who want to better understand this cultural moment. It proves Colson Center president John Stonestreet’s point: “Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims.” Those who follow these destructive ideas by pretending there is no God, and that morality doesn’t exist or matter, could use a little humility and a lot of honest history.“If you really want to test whether there is an original and indelible fault that warps the human soul and is impossible to erase without divine intervention,” Wicker writes, “then put power into the hands of those who, rejecting the existence of God as well as sin, wish to bring heaven to earth.”
Stuart Kellogg