This stuff is crack for an English major; Ed sends me a reference to this new book, “Ten Books that Screwed Up the Western World“.

My opinion? There are quite a few hits – and a few misses:

Machiavelli’s The Prince was the inspiration for a long list of tyrannies (Stalin had it on his nightstand)

Yabbut, the book is an inspiration for a lot of things, including not a few prescient CEOs as well. There are lessons to learn about every corner of life in The Prince.

Call it 0 for 1 so far.

How Descartes’ Discourse on Method “proved” God’s existence only by making Him a creation of our own ego

How Hobbes’ Leviathan led to the belief that we have a “right” to whatever we want

Of course, without both of them we’d scarcely recognize modern “big-L” Liberalism.

Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, which some have called the worst book ever written, planted the seeds of the French Revolution, the sexual revolution and family dissolution

Never read it. More’s the pity. I’ll have to check it out.

How John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, in making morality only a strictly private and practical thing, led only to a society addicted to ever more intense, barbaric, and self-destructive pleasures

I tried to read it in college – but figured it’d do the greatest good to the most people if I just skimmed.

How Darwin’s The Descent of Man proves he intended “survival of the fittest” to be applied to human society

Another one I got maybe twenty pages into.

How Lenin’s The State and Revolution provided the blueprint for the barbarous communist governments of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and Cambodia

Much of the barbarity came from the fact that Lenin’s writing would embarass a typical blog commenter, as I recall.

How Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was a kind of “spiritualized Darwinism” that accounts for his genocidal anti-Semitism

I read this one in English (as a history minor) and German (as a German minor). Either way, the overriding impression is that this stuff was that, far from “accounting for” his will to genocide, I got the impression it was way too far-out to have convinced people who weren’t already sorta disposed that way.

How the pansexual paradise described in Margaret Mead‘s Coming of Age in Samoa turned out to be a creation of her own sexual confusions and aspirations

Alfred Kinsey‘s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, in which every manner of sexual deviance is made to seem perfectly normal, was simply Kinsey himself writ large

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was 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

Never read any of ’em. Tried to start Feminine Mystique once. Didn’t work.

OK. With that out of the way – I’ve said it before; I may be the only person in the past sixty years to have converted to conservatism at the urging of my college English major advisor. Reading books like Solzhenitzyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Dostoyevskii’s Crime and Punishment, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoii’s War and Peace, Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, and others (including a healthy dose of P.J. O’Rourke) gave me a huge push from the 1980 me (who didn’t much care for Jimmy Carter, but feared Ronald Reagan) to the 1984 me (who voted for Reagan, but didn’t tell anyone, just to be safe).

But there was an equal negative push as well; my sophomore year, I took a class in “Freud, Nietzsche and Marx”, an upper-division philosophy class taught by a guy who left the academy the next year to go work as a liberation theologian with the Sandinistas.

And…yow. The most depressing class of my life. And it focused, among others, on…:

Why Sigmund Freud‘s The Future of an Illusion was itself a “projection” of Freud’s desire to discredit religion by the most salacious conjectures he could come up with.

How Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil issued the call to a world ruled solely by the “Will to Power”

Why Marx and Engels‘ Communist Manifesto is one of the most malicious book ever written

Also Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, Nietsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra and Ecce Homo and Marx/Engels’ Das Kapital.

And as I read all of them, I could feel any lingering fabian liberalism left in my consciousness being pummeled as crowds of rhetorical synapses cheered with joy.

I could do a book by book review – but in fact, the past 24 years of my life are that review.