One Book Destroyed Western Civilization. No, It's Not The Bible.

So, my friend had this uncle.

He refused to put his scalding hot coffee in the cup holder while driving. Instead, he perched it on the dashboard. He believed it was safer there. His wife didn’t like that. She tried to convince him to use the cup holder.

He didn’t listen.

One day, the coffee spilled all over his wife's lap.

A week later, it happened again.

Every time, he blamed her for it. Apparently, she was causing the coffee to spill by worrying about it. She was doing it with her mind.

My friend's uncle didn't know what he was saying, but he was more or less preaching something someone had read in a book, the idea that you attract misfortune by thinking too much about it. In reality, it's insane to put hot coffee on a car's dashboard and expect it to stay there. Never mind that. A negative attitude trumps physics. Mind over matter. That's the American way.

America has a habit of banning books they don't like, books that dare to talk openly about racism, genocide, disease, poverty, or sexuality. There's one book this country will never ban, even though it deserves to be banned more than any book ever written. Since its publication, this book has sold more than 35 million copies. That's almost as many copies as Harper Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. In fact, the book outsold Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (30 million).

It outsold The Power of Positive Thinking.

It also outsold Orwell’s 1984.

It’s not the Bible.