10 Books That Screwed Up the World

And 5 Others That Didn't Help

Benjamin Wiker

10 Books That Screwed Up the World

Ch 5: Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto

p57 "On body count alone, The Communist Manifesto could win the award for the most malicious book ever written. Now that we have more accurate calculation of corpses - perhaps upwards of 100,000,000 - even the tenured Marxists are a bit squeamish about tooting the Manifesto as a horn of plenty."

"But as it has obviously failed so miserably, we must ask why it succeeded so magnificently. What is it about Marx's grand vision that inspired his disciples to clamber up the pile of corpses to have a better look?"

p59 Marx was just shy of 30 years old when the Manifesto was presented. He was a totally dominant personality who gave no consideration of anyone who differed with him. He evisioned a classless utopia.

p61 The most famous statement in the Manifesto is "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle."

p62 "we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

p66 "Marx happened to live at a time when the brutalities of industrial capitalism were painfully evident."

p67 Saw all history as the story of class conflict. Advocated the dissolution of property, and the dissolution of the family.

p69 "Marx merely turned Rousseau on his head. Rousseau put an entirely fictional state of nature at the beginning of human history ... Marx puts his entirely fictional state of frictionless bliss at the end, just beyond the great revolutionary conflagration."

p70 "According to Marx, the fulfillment of the communist dream requires the disappearance of an entirely corrupt class. There is no moral blame attached to the revolutionaries who exterminate this class, and there is certainly no God to keep accounts. So it's no surprise that communism advanced by epic brutality. Such is the danger of a bad idea."

p70 "The actual experience of Communist countries like China and the former Soviet Union demonstrates that once the proletariat and intellectuals get in charge, they turn out to be much more savage than the capitalists they displaced, snatching up every privilege within reach, enslaving a great part of the population for the "good of the revolution", and elimininating thousands or millions of those whose anti-revolutionary tendencies are deemed incurable."

10 Books That Screwed Up the World

Ch 6: Mill, Utilitarianism

p73 "The ultimate end .. is an existence exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments."

74 Mill's father, and atheist and social reformer, kept John Stuart Mill out of contact with any other children and forced into a rigid educational program. His own autobiography speaks of a lack of love in his family and childhood.

p75 Utilitarianism invented by Jeremy Bentham, a friend of John Stuart Mill's father.

p 77 All involved were atheists - philosophy a revival of that of Epicurus,saw all world's ills as caused by religion, fashioned their own system of morality, like Hobbes, in terms of just pleasure and pain.

p79 Mill ..exactly what Epicurus said: morality's foundation is not God but pleasure and pain. But adds a test of quality, and he is one of the testers.

p80 "Since there is no creator God and hence absolutely no moral commands written into nature, there are no intrinsically wrong actions." So Mill is in a dilemma of having to admit that you have to try everything to be the judge.

p82 Even after his judgment of quality, extends his utility principle to all living things.

p83 Gets to an incredible optimism about perfectability of human society, and that the prosperous would help, and not hinder - and that all suffering could be alleviated.

p84 Failed to see how deep evil runs in the human heart.

10 Books That Screwed Up the World

Ch 7: Darwin, The Descent of Man

p85 "if everything he said in his more famous Origin of Species is true, then it quite logically follows that human beings ought to ensure that the fit breed with abandon and that the unfit are weeded out. Attempts to disengage Darwin from the eugenics movement date from a bit after World War II, when Hitler gave a bad name to survival of the fittest as applied to human beings. But it is impossible to distance Darwin from eugenics: it's a straight logical shot from his evolutionary arguments."

p88 "The deep-down nastiness of the Descent is eugenic: the idea that the "survival of the fittest" should be applied to human beings."

p89 Darwin explicitly decried protecting and caring for the unfit, used the phrase "care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."

p89 Open discussions and defenses of eugenics were in standard biology texts in the first decades of the 20th century.

p96 Darwin did, reluctlantly, endorse sympathy in human beings and draw back from the elimination of the unfit. But he did presume that there would be some elimination and competition among races, and made some rankings of races.

10 Books That Screwed Up the World

Ch 8: Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

p99 "Christianity has been the most calamitous kind of arrogance yet ..."

p100 Discussion of the context of "God is dead" as a cry of despair about a failure of the development of greatness in humanity, and it comes from the mouth of a madman.

p100 "And Nietzsche is that madman. And indeed, he died a madman, having grasped and then been torn apart by the terrible implications of his own words. Unlike most other atheists, Nietzsche was brutally honest about what atheism really meant, and that honesty ultimately cost him his sanity. No up nor down; no good nor evil; just sheer human will swimming in an indifferent, if not hostile, cosmos."

Nietzsche was hostile both to religion and to the kind of atheism of Mill who both advocated a nice humanitarianism. He cries out for greatness, sharing the atheism of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Mill, and influenced by Darwin's fear that we might slip backward by evolution, he raged for the development of the superman. He felt that greatness would come through great suffering and struggle, and by going beyond good and evil - that is by not accepting any limits of morality.

Nietzsche built on Darwin, but went beyond in his will-to-power, his striving toward the superman, his development of master and slave morality. His disdain for Christianity was based on his judgement that the aspects of Christian morality were "slave morality".

p112 He railed against Christianity, argued for the development of a new caste or aristocracy of greatness in Europe against the Russian threat, a fight for the "domination of the earth - the compulsion to large-scale politics."

p112 Wiker's response is "One cannot but hear the marching boots of the Third Reich".

10 Books That Screwed Up the World

Ch 9: Lenin, The State and Revolution

p115 Lenin was a privileged aristocrat who received the very best of educations and never had to earn a living. "Like Marx, he was far more interested in abstract theory than flesh-and-blood individuals, and so had very little contact with the working masses he was allegedly carrying to the communist promised land. That, perhaps, is why he had so little difficulty having them shot by the thousands when they balked at boarding the revolutionary express (or merely turned up late for work.)"

p116 "For Marx, and hence for Lenin, history is a relentless, driving conflict of classes that ends with a final revolution ushering in a communist utopia.

p117 this "meant to Lenin the vehement rejection of any political compromise. What stood in the way had to be ruthlessly and completely destroyed, both in speech and deed: "

p117 "the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible, not only without violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power."

p118 Lenin approved the words of Engels "The proletariat seizes the state power and transforms the means of production ... into state property." then supposedly it puts an end to the state ... it withers away. But that certainly is not what happened.

p118 Lenin established a dictatorship and killed between 6 and 8 million people. Stalin inherited the machinery and killed 20 to 25 million people. Besides dictatorial power, it was characterized by "abolishing any qualms of conscience about using any means to achieve a merely political goal, a very Machiavellian idea indeed. (Lenin was a great admirer of Machiavelli.)"

p119 Lenin's three tools were atheism, the second the insistence on the utopia to come, and the third the loosing of any guilt about using whatever means necessary to reach the utopia.

10 Books That Screwed Up the World

Ch 10: Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization

p127 "Each feeble-minded person is a potential source of endless progeny of defect; we prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, [so] that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded .."

p127 Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood, but you can't get her book from them. Wiker calls this "soft censorship".

p129 Sanger wrote a lot about the "feeble-minded" and suggested that it was spreading like an insidious plague, justifying the eugenics that she was championing.

p133 She wrote about a decade before the Nazi extermination program began.

p137 Wiker suggests that she ought to be in the Pseudo-Science Hall of Fame for her writing about mystic energies from sexuality, and her advocacy of birth control partly for the society to be able to be energized more fully from that energy.

p142 Wiker expresses concerns that euthanasia is just another face of eugenics, and that harvesting of fetuses for other purposes. He also invokes Hobbsian ideas that when such things are deemed possible, people will consider them to be their "rights" in the Hobbsian sense.

10 Books That Screwed Up the World

Ch 11: Hitler, Mein Kampf

p 145 "On this planet of ours human culture and civilization are indissolubly bound up with the presence of the Aryan. If he should be exterminated or subjugated, then the dark shroud of a new barbarian era would enfold the earth."

p146 Straight out of Niethzsche , the words of Himmler "I expect you to do superhuman acts of inhumanity."

p146 "The Nazi regime murdered no only six million Jews but millions of other "undesirables": enemies of the Reich, from Slavs, Gypsies, and prisoners of war, to the handicapped, retarded and even mildly "unfit". The Aktion T4 program, the Nazi eugenic plan-in-action, resulted in the state-ordered execution of around 200,000 people who where disabled, retarded, juvenile delinquents, mixed-race children, or even plagued with significant adolescent acne."

p147 following Darwin's Descent of Man "National Socialism is nothing but applied biology" said the deputy Party leader of the Nazis, Rudolf Hess.

10 Books That Screwed Up the World

Ch 12: Freud, The Future of an Illusion

p 165 "It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence ...a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be ..."

p165 Self-described as a "godless Jew", Freud launched this attack at religion as an illusion. Following Machiavelli and Nietzsche, he presumed atheism. He also presumed a Hobbes-type nature of man, with a bit of Rousseau's myth of pre-social man. But contrived a bizarre picture of the origin of religion. He pictures it as having its origin in man's urge toward incest, murder and cannibalism. Wiker characterizes it [p172] as "impure fantasy, a bizarre projection of Freud's fundamental wish that religion be discredited by the most salacious conjectures he could conjure."

10 Books That Screwed Up the World

Ch 13: Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa

p177 "The child of the future must have an open mind. The home must cease to plead an ethical cause or a religious belief with smiles or frowns, caresses or threats. The children must be taught how to think, not what to think ..."

p179 Wiker's assessment is that Mead as a young graduate student in anthropology foisted on the poor Polynesian Samoans her own vision of a happy sexual paradise. "The fallacy of thinking the primitive is superior because it is allegedly more natural is especially pernicious when it is used as it was by Mead: as a means to smuggle in a sophisticated and highly questionable theory about human nature."

p178 Hobbes, Rousseau and Freud made arguments based on the the natural or primitive man, but their pictures of man's pre-civilized state were merely suppositions. Mead's picture at least shows her trying to find a living example, but Wiker sees "her famous portrait of the carefree, libidinous Samoans was in fact just one more modern fiction".

p180 "Mead wrote it like a romance novel so that her hidden agenda would have the maximum popular impact (which it did). Her real goal was to convince the West that the rigors of Christian sexual morality were unnatural, and that its anxiety-producing inhibitions are something we'd all be happier without."

"In other words, Mead was using the Samoans to push her own sexual schema, but that was not all she was pushing. As she makes clear in her finale, she was peddling an entirely new approach to education, "Education for Choice,", one whose entire emphasis was to avoid any emphasis, and whose core belief was that there was no core belief."

p189 Wiker suggests that Mead used her science for propaganda, to sell philosophies like "we shall have realise the high point of individual choice and universal toleration which a hetrogeneous culture and a hetrogeneous culture alone can achieve." But her "science" has certainly been called into question. Derek Freeman charges that she entirely misrepresented the Samoans.

p190 Mead's own lifestyle strengthens the supposition that she imposed her own ideas on the Samoans. "ditched her first husband for a man she met on the journey back home. The second was soon traded for a third, and finally her third marriage was casually cast aside. The whole time she was carrying on with her lesbian lover" She stated "rigid heterosexuality is a perversion of nature."

p190 another anthropologist, Martin Orans has strongly criticized the science of Mead's work. Wiker's comments "Mead provides a classic example of the power of ideology in creating and perpetrating pseudo-science. ...Bad books screw up the world only if they are consumed eagerly by those who are hungry to hear their messages ...that easy sex, easy divorce, easy parents, easy standards, and easy religion will cure all that ails us." It appears that this was more characteristic of Mead than of the Samoans.

10 Books That Screwed Up the World

Ch 14: Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male

p196 Kinsey's book "Released in 1948, it washed away every moral boundary of sexuality with a torrent of charts, graphs, and technical lingo. Kinsey's careful posturing in lab coats, his dour glare as he churned out data to naysayers, his aura of disinterested objectivity - all were calculated to one effect: to ram through the sexual revolution as just another aspect of the scientific revolution."

It was almost fifty years later that James Jones "Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life" was published. "the lab coat and scientific screen were ripped away to reveal the seething fleshpots of Kinsey's private life. ... book would have been revealed as what it really was: a thickly disguised attempt to force the world to accept his own unnatural sexuality as natural." But by the time this revelation came "the revolution was over, and Kinsey had won."

Kinsey's approach was to argue that he was merely reporting how men acted, not how they shoulld act. But, being a far from objective reporting of the evidence, it had the affect of sanctioning almost any kind of sexual behavior. Whatever happens, it must be natural. Wiker criticizes the "rotten roots" of Kinsey's work - first the rotten root of a Darwinian confusion of animals with human beings, then a Machiavellian assertion that the world ought to be defined by what people actually do rather than some notion of what they should do, a Descarts separation of the spirit and the machine, and Rousseau's pre-moral paradise.

p204 Wiker makes the point that Kinsey's arguments for "anything goes" sexually because animals do it, everybody is doing it, etc. could be equally applied to justify murder, incest, rape, pedophilia, etc. Why did Kinsey apply the argument only to sex? Wiker replies "Why? Because Kinsey's own sexual perversities were so astounding that the only way to escape the unnaturalness of his activities was to declare them to be natural, and to say there was no sexual good or evil."

Wiker gives some details of Kinsey's personal sadomasochism and homosexuality, and more details are available in Jones' book. Also shocking was the data presented on sex with children and even infants, in situations where even as an observer Kinsey would likely have been subject to prosecution.