10 Books That Screwed Up the World

And 5 Others That Didn't Help

Benjamin Wiker

10 Books That Screwed Up the World

Ch 1: Machiavelli, The Prince

p 7 Holds up as objects of admiration "rulers who had shed all moral and religious scruples and were therefore daring enough to believe that evil ....is often more effective than good" His name is associated with "calculated ruthlessness and cool brutality."

p8 Machiavelli lived in a time when Italy was made up of warring regions, a "rat's nest of intrigue, corruption and conflict" when there was the "greatest hypocrisy in religion, including cardinals and popes who were nothing more than political wolves in shepherd's clothing."

p10-11 "Tells admiringly of Borgia, who used a henchmen, Orco, to subjugate an unruly district with cruelty and brutality, then had Orco cut in pieces on a public square to placate the wrath of the people."

p12 Promoted the five virtues "appear merciful, faithful, humane, honest and religious"

p13 As an atheist, he did not feel constrained by any morals or values. "The Prince was a favorite book of V. I. Lenin for whom the glorious end of communism justified any brutality of means."

p14 "Machiavelli is the original ends-justify-the-means philosopher."

p15 "necessity, if one is to be a great prince, of being a great pretender ..."

p16 "Machiavelli thereby initiates the great conflict between modern secularism and Christianity that largely defines the next five hundred years of Western history ... shows its mark in all the rest of the books..."

10 Books That Screwed Up the World

Ch 2: Descartes: Discourse on Method

"I think, therefore I am."

p17 "Descartes attacked skepticism, but only by denying reality.."

p18 " fathered every flavor of self-congratulatory solipsism, led us to believe we are no different from robots, and made religion a creation of our own ego. Thanks a lot, Rene."

p18 A good idea to refute skeptics, but "a very bad idea to do it with a cure that's worse than the disease."

p19 "He is known - rightfully and woefully so- as the father of modern philosophy."

p20 "reject as absolutely false everything in which I could imagine the least doubt..."

p20 "if not insanity, then at least narcissism"

p21 throw out the past, likewise intelligence, tradition, senses, reason.

p22 all that is left is "I think, therefore I am"

p23 should say 'I am, therefore I can think."

p24 discusses error of "the things we conceive very clearly ... are all true."

p26 Descartes is the "father of modern dualism" the "ghost in the machine" idea.

p27 Descartes' awful "proof of God" - that God must exist because he can think of a being more perfect than himself.

p28 Creates that modern view that "God is whatever we 'very clearly and very distinctly' imagine Him to be. And that means we fashion God after our own hearts."

p28 Descartes has been a corrupting influence because his reasoning has "led us to reject God on the grounds that our thinking about Him is fuzzy, and to accept the most ridiculous utopian fantasies about humanity because we can imagine them clearly and distinctly. Marxism is only the most obvious instance of the pernicious working out of Descartes' ideas ...."

10 Books That Screwed Up the World

Ch 3: Hobbes: Leviathan

p31 "there is, by nature, no good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust."

p31 Unconstrained and left to ourselves, "we are creatures entirely without conscience, ruled solely by pleasure and pain, ravenous in our desires and ruthless in their pursuit."

p31 "Hobbes added the insidious notion that human rights are simply equivalent to human desires ..." "so that whatever we happen to desire, we have a right to by nature."

p32 "Completely without conscience. No recognition of right and wrong, good or evil, light or dark. The distinctions have ceased to have any meaning - or they have taken on a new meaning. Good simply means getting whatever you want, and evil is anything that might stand in your way of getting it. You are now Hobbe's natural man, man as he truly is by nature."

p33 "Get it? No sin. 'The desires, and other passions of man, are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions, that proceed from these passions.'"

p33 Of course, everyone else is going to have these "rights" as well, so Hobbes recognized that his model of the "natural man" was going to lead to "a war, as is of every man, against every man" and life under these conditions was going to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.".

p34 Hobbes wrote Leviathan just after the Thirty Year's War and during the English civil wars. He apparently concluded that war was natural, and that the parts of men's nature revealed in war were the "natural man".

p35 By taking mankind at its worst as the "natural man", Hobbes works on a foundation t hat is a myth of his own contriving. It is a fiction, because Hobbes had no clue about man's origins and what natural man was like.

p36 In concluding that our natural condition was a state of war, Hobbes concludes "it followeth, that in such a condition, every man has a right to every thing ..."

p37 "Hobbes established these fictional rights ... by bald declaration.." Has list of the logical steps in Hobbe's position. No God, no good or evil, just pleasure and pain, no limits on what you can do, each has a "right" to everything, pursue pleasure, avoid pain by any means = "state of war".

p38 Hobbes' "way out" of this state of war screwed up things even more. Out of the chaos, an agreement to mutually limit each person's liberty. But this gives a picture of society as something alien to our nature, but just a necessary strategy to avoid the "poor, nasty, brutish and short" life.

p39 "an entirely negative view of justice ... not bound by love ...no feelings of natural duty to our family or our neighbor ..no noble affection .. bound by mutual distrust and animosity"

p39 "A negative and ignoble view of justice ... a government drained of all but the lowest motives ..." No real right or wrong, morality as a matter of personal taste. The pernicious idea of rights without responsibilities.

10 Books That Screwed Up the World

Ch 4: Rousseau: Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men

p41 With death of mother soon after birth, with a wandering father, Rousseau grew up without positive family support, drifting from job to job and mistress to mistress. He despised authority and developed a myth of the "natural man" as perfectly free - a noble savage myth. His brilliant writing was very persuasive.

p43 "one finds in him, for good or ill, the seeds of Romanticism and folk-nationalism, the French Revolution and totalitarianism, Marx and Nietzsche, Freud and Darwin, modern anthropology and Margaret Mead, the sexual revolution and this dissolution of the family ... characteristically Rousseau: genius and blunder."

p44 eloquently tried to find the "natural man", to go back to the state of nature, but the "natural state" was entirely one of his imagination. He fashioned a utopia in the distance, and persuasively argued for its pursuit.

p45 "Rousseau's primitive men were suave, peaceful, innocent, carefree, and cheerfully libidinous bonobos." "Rousseau therefore gave us a new Adam, a carefree, make-love-not-war ancestral archtype who became the societal ideal of the 'free love' movements."

Part of this model was the lack of private property, the dissolving of family bonds, total lack of responsibility in sexuality,

p46 "Rousseau's paradise, his new and improved Adam and Eve"

p47 He proceeded from his idea of paradise to the idea that all morality was unnatural, and that society is detrimental. Since society led to mutual dependence of men upon each other, the rules of society must be overthrown.

p47 "We are not far from Marx and Engel's famous cry that closes the Communist Manifesto ..."

p48 While Rousseau would have had us go backward to the purity of nature for his utopia, Marx and Engels saw the utopia in the future and achieved by technology and industrialization.

p49 Rousseau argued against private property and even against the family. These ideas were picked up by Marx and Engels.

p50 Rousseau's idea fueled the French Revolution

p52-53 more about Rousseau's own life, from which his philosophy sprang.