Dangerous Books

Very interesting list. I'm sure the poster had to do a lot of thinking!

I think in some cases, however, they were a little simplistic. The Communist Manifesto isn't a malicious book. That's just silly. Marx (whether or not you believe he was way off base or not) truly believed in advancing the "common man" as the saying goes.

Terrible, terrible things were done with it. Perhaps it could be "The book with the most malicious readership of all times.

The most horrible thing about the Communist Manifesto is that there are still people who do not think it was a malicious book. After all, Hitler's Mein Kampf only led to the slaughter of 60 million people (battles plus holocaust). The Communist Manifesto, however well-intentioned it was (and one of the most horrifying things about the book is that I believe both it and Mein Kampf could very well have been well-intentioned) killed 100 million, and that's not even counting deaths due to war.

Read the Communist Manifesto, and you'll see that the problem with Communism isn't that it was done wrong, the problem is that it was done RIGHT. Can anyone honestly say that the big Communist regimes of the 20th century did not faithfully carry out the ten points of the manifesto and the principles of collectivization, the idea that the individual is subordinate to society and must live for it? Could you imagine a life where your life is not yours by right, but belongs to the State in the name of the common good? Care to live in that society? I don't. Gimme the Land of the Free any day of the week over a land where my wealth is confiscated in the name of making me wealthy and I am enslaved to society in the name of making me free.

If there's one thing Marx proved with that damned book, it's that the road to hell (not to mention famine, misery and slaughter) is truly paved with good intentions. I was shocked (in a good way) to find a list of this kind including it at all, let alone at no. 2, but I would have actually had it at no. 1.

A state in which one's life is not one's own by right but belongs to others is, in fact, the usual human condition. Those of us who are not currently subjecte3d to this are vastly privileged.

Serfs. Peasants. Employees. Slaves. Housewives. Children.

Functional cultures require that their members subsume their personal ambitions to the common good. Cultures that are not doing that are, for instance, Somalia.

A GOOD society combines one's obligations to the society with rewards for doing that, and with the ability to ALSO pursue one's own interests. A society that allows only selfishness, or one that allows only self-sacrifice, are equally doomed.

In fun random facts bouncing off your comments about books, you know that Machiavelli also wrote a book titled THE ART OF WAR, right?

Far less generally useful than Sun Tzu's -- Machiavelli's is really specifically designed for how to wage war against city-states in Tuscany.

Interesting list. Can't say I disagree with any of them.

The junior high school I went to was named after Margaret Mead. So at age 14 or so I went and looked her up. Surprise does not cover my reaction. Gotta wonder what the school district was thinking.

I think Moliere must have read The Prince--when we saw Tartuffe in 1996, it might have just been written the week before, given the uncanny similarity to the political situation of the time, esp. with certain ReligiousWrong people in the news at the time. Paul Whitworth played Tartuffe as if he'd taken Macchiavelli to heart--very slimy character.

I think we need to consider the difference between a book that screws up the world and a book that explains how the world is screwed up. In my crackpot opinion, Machiavelli didn't create the behavior in The Prince, he merely faced and recorded the behavior that already existed, and had existed since Mugg and Uggg whapped each other over the heads to see who would be King of the Mighty Lice and Mud Clan.

There's always somebody who wants to kill the messenger. Who thinks the problem would go away, or at least be more controllable, if we didn't know what it was. Perhaps they're right. Perhaps we would have had fewer Machiavellian politicians without Machiavelli's book. But I'm one of the people who thinks it's better to know the truth, however unpleasant it may be.

You could argue that we'd have more Machiavellian politicians without Machiavelli's book to warn us about their methods. We'd have to come up with another name for such people, though. No problem, anybody who's dealt with them has many pet names for them.

By the way, I have my doubts about Ten Books that Screwed Up the World that doesn't include the Bible, the Koran, and perhaps one or two other unholy books.