10 Books that Screwed Up the World

This discusses the origins of the failed philosophies that influenced the far left.

This discusses the origins of the failed philosophies that influenced the far left. Most of the left aren't deep thinkers on history/philosophy, but they did get exposed to false belief systems. These are some of the false beliefs of the intellectual left that lead to the cascading failures of their ideology on the follower left.

ℹ️ Info

~ Aristotle Sabouni
Created: 2022-08-08

10 Books That Screwed Up the World (And 5 Others That Didn't Help) (By Benjamin_Wiker) is a brilliant book that details many false Gods (beliefs) that the far left holds, or what influenced those beliefs.

I had understood the failures of the belief systems and why they were wrong... but other than Marx, and a few others, not always where those ideas had come from. This explains the seeds that sprouted as the modern left's belief system.

Don't get me wrong, Wiker is biased, Christian, and he sees the flaws in many of the books as teaching amorality/immorality, aka atheistic / not-Christian views/values. But whether you're Christian or not, you should be able to agree on some of the points he makes, even if you don't like his justifications for why. Those that can't, can be ignored -- the reviews were filled with emotional rants against his theism, or proclaiming the virtues of atheism -- while failing to get the points, or address the actual points made (like why/how hedonism as the foundation for a belief system is cynical and wrong). Which means their points are meaningless. Yes, they don't like the author or his religion.

💭 Exerpt
Common sense and a little logic tell us that if ideas have consequences, then it follows that bad ideas have bad consequences. And even more obvious, if bad ideas are written down in books, they are far more durable, infecting generation after generation and increasing the world’s wretchedness. I submit, then, that the world would be a demonstrably better place today if the books we’re about to discuss had never been written. It was possible half a century ago (and even 25 years ago, among the academic elite) to maintain that Marxism was a positive force in history. But since the protective cover has blown off the Soviet Union—and China’s has at least been torn—no one can look at the tens of millions killed and conclude anything other than this: if The Communist Manifesto had never been written, a great deal of misery would have been avoided. The same is true of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the other books on the list, even when the carnage is sometimes of a more subtle and different sort. What then? Shall we have a book burning? Indeed not! As I learned long ago, the best cure—the only cure, once the really harmful books have multiplied like viruses through endless editions—is to read them. Know them forward and backward. Seize each one by its malignant heart and expose it to the light of day. That is just what I propose to do in the following pages.