What is the most wrongthink book you've ever read?

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Democracy: The God The Failed - Hans-Hermann Hoppe

The first book I read that conclusively proved democracy is the problem and that the system is unfixable by definition (see the concept of time preference). I always half-assed understood that just based on general observations, but this book throroughly and systematically proves it.

By the end you are forced to either accept that democracy and freedom are incompatible and that our system can only degenerate more as time goes on, or you ignore axiomatic truths because the alternative scares you. It's a foundational book in that everything else you read should be viewed through that lens for clarity.

I've read edgier "wrongthink" books, but that one is probably one of the more legitmately dangerous books because it proves the system is unfixable and once enough people realize that, the facade has to come down.

I read it, agreed with it, and then later went back on my view. I'd have to refresh myself on it to know if this criticism is really fair (and it's been long enough to be worth doing), but as I recall he faltered a bit in:

1) Comparing Enlightened despots to modern states and especially to modern totalitarian states. Hoppe takes a position, as I remember, that if an ideology calls itself something, it makes it that thing, but I think there is still a very obvious qualitative difference between something like the Soviet Union and something like the USA. With the despots, I don't remember him addressing how the more representative governments (like Britain, the Swiss, the Dutch, Italian republics, Holy Roman free cities...) were generally a LOT more prosperous materially and culturally. He never really considers that technology and even that era's tendency towards state-building might have been what made the state get out of hand...

2) Common for economists, naivety. Rationality is a good sketch of how people behave on average in their own individual little lives. But there are people out there that are fucking dumbasses. It's like what people say about slaveowners taking care of slaves. There are women out there that will destroy a car by never adding engine oil. There are monarchs that will rape their country.

3) Thinking like just because it's the despot's property, that means everything in the state will go the way the despot wants. Not recognizing that force (I'm Heinleinian here) is the ultimate basis for everything. The enlightened despot is going to have to play ball with his core supporters, who play ball with their core supporters. Rent-seeking is baked into every social system.

4) Thinking mercenary armies (this may be the worst one) will actually work against the force of a state geared up for total war, or even a determined army of nobility and militias that are willing to fight to the death for something other than gold. Thinking you can provide a public good in an anarchist society. (We did have stateless society in recorded history. American Indians. They lost as much because of the shitshow that was their organization as because of being outnumbered - they were doomed, but the actual forces used to suppress them didn't have to be that big - and definitely not because of technology.)

5) Assuming that cultivating the state like a little garden is always going to pay off for him better than looting the place and leaving. The only places I know of that were genuinely run as Moldbuggian "neocameralist" corporate states - Appalachian company towns and the British East India Company - were horrorshows. Corporate raiding is a valid strategy to build wealth.

I think the mainstream is much more realistic. Acemoglu (Why Nations Fail), Bueno de Mesquita (The Dictator's Handbook). I like Hoppe mostly as a Devil's Advocate to stop the democracy circlejerk. Democracy isn't about crowds being smart, it's about people being evil selfish bastards so you have to split power up in such a way that some don't just have their way with the others.