Ten Books That Screwed Up the World (and Five Others That Didn’t Help) by Professor Benjamin Wiker

If ideas have consequences, then it follows that bad ideas have bad consequences. And if bad ideas are written down in books, they are far more durable, infecting generation after generation and increasing the world’s wretchedness.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince — the owner’s manual to a long list of tyrannies (Stalin had it on his nightstand), whose blasphemous approach to Christianity has also made it the engine on the long train of modern atheism

Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method — which “proved” God’s existence for the feeble of faith only by making it depend on our thinking Him into existence, thus making religion a creation of our own ego

Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan — according to which there is no good and evil, only pleasure and pain, leading to the belief that we have a right to whatever we want, and it is the government’s job to protect such rights

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men — a hymn to the “natural man” containing the seeds of the French Revolution and totalitarianism, Marx and Nietzsche, Freud and Darwin, modern anthropology and Margaret Mead, the sexual revolution and the dissolution of the family

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto — which, on body count alone, could win the award for the most malicious book ever written, such that even the tenured Marxists are a bit squeamish about touting it as the road-map to Heaven on Earth

John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism — which held that morality is merely a matter of calculating the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number, leading only to a society addicted to ever more intense, barbaric, and self-destructive pleasures

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man — proof positive that Darwin intended his theory of evolution through “survival of the fittest” to be applied to human society, so that that “unfit” people(s) would be weeded out

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil — which completed the modern rejection of God that began with Machiavelli, and issued the call to a world ruled only by the “will to power” that Hitler answered

Lenin, The State and Revolution — the blueprint for the murderously oppressive Soviet-style government which became the pattern for, and patron of, the other equally barbarous communist governments of Eastern Europe, North Korea, Vietnam, China, Cambodia, and Cuba

Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization — a kind of “Eugenicist Manifesto” by the foundress of Planned Parenthood, who believed that too many “misfits” were breeding, hence the “need” for birth control

Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf — a practical culmination of modern atheism invested with quasi-religious fervor, an expression of “spiritualized Darwinism” identifying Jews as the greatest problem facing genetic progress — proving that Hitler’s genocidal anti-Semitism was a malevolent effect of the unholy spirit of the age

Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion — a fundamental attack on religion, dismissing it as mere wish-fulfillment by infantile minds; yet itself a “projection” of Freud’s desire to discredit religion by the most salacious conjectures he could conjure

Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa — a little book that contained a big lie that all too many wanted to hear — that women could have fun too in Rousseau’s pansexual paradise (which turned out to be a creation of Mead’s own sexual confusions and aspirations)

Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male — in which every manner of sexual deviance is decked out charts-and-graphs style to seem perfectly normal, but was simply Kinsey himself writ large

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique — once again, autobiography masquerading as science, in which Friedan’s attacks on the roles of “wife” and “mother” were defined by her own personality and personal conflicts

“No free government now exists in the world,

unless where Christianity is acknowledged,

and is the religion of the country.”

Pennsylvania Supreme Court, 1824