If the pen is mightier than the sword, it’s certainly just as dangerous. So argues BenjaminWiker in his book Ten Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn’t Help.

Wiker takes on Machiavelli, Marx, Nietzsche, Darwin, and others ? explaining how their ideas ended up hurting mankind.

The desire that something be true, rather than the desire for truth itself, may well be the root of all evil. It is certainly the origin of all ideology, and ideology was the source of much of the evil in the past century. ?

Because [ideology] has no compunction about refashioning truth to fit our desires, it has no hesitation ? in refashioning reality according to our cravings. Pseudo-science is thus the handmaid to ideology. Politics is its hammer.

Speaking of pseudo-science, you’ll have a chance tomorrow to hear a speech against the use of pseudo-science to prop up the arguments in favor of catastrophic global warming. Roy Spencer speaks at a noon Headliner luncheon in Raleigh.