Vitaly's books
Vitaly Malkin has an acute awareness of the importance of enjoying our lives without setting ourselves any limits. In his witty and sharp essays, this freethinker wants to deliver us from conformism and moral burdens, as well as from any kinds of ideologies and dogmas. He invites us to turn away from puritan practices in all their various forms.
In Dangerous Illusions, his well-known essay on the role of religions, he shows how exactly they deprive us of happiness. Omnipresent in our minds and in our societies, they pursue their moral crusade unnoticed. And we, presumably liberated from monotheisms, are in fact without defence when facing them.
Vitaly Malkin's pamphlets envisage great challenges that emancipation process must face. Secularism? It is still precious but its power has weakened. Morality? It has been largely borrowed from religious values. Freedom of expression? It is paying the price set by the "neo-puritans". Monotheistic religions? They reflect subjugation of multiple beliefs that could be so useful to man.
A great reader of Spinoza and Nietzsche, Vitaly Malkin responds with force and vigour, while always offering positive perspectives and outlining the morality of life and risk. This is a kind of morality that respects our desires. Malkin reminds us again and again that it is of utmost importance to be free in the modern world.
One against everybody
For centuries, the egoist has been mocked, condemned and ridiculed. This vision is the opposite of Vitaly Malkin's, who is convinced that egoism should be defended as a natural, positive value, as the best way to lead one's own life and to respect that of others.
Equality: a dangerous fantasy
Equality seems self-evident. The idea that all human are born free and equal is one of the pillars of our public life.
Sex is God's Greatest Enemy
Vitaly Malkin conducted research on the history of religions through a sexuality lens. He points out the hypocrisy of monotheistic faiths and their dangers to the most precious human freedom: self-pleasure.
The Ruse of the One God
What are the strategies put in place by the monotheisms to control us? What are the methods they use to impose their moral norms which have as sole objective to reinforce their hold on our societies? What other ways can be found to satisfy the deeply human need to believe?
Fatal Identities
Central to the identity wars tearing contemporary societies apart is affirmative action.
The Twilight of Freedom of Speech
Free speech can never be taken for definitively granted. There is no instance in human history of an unconditional and universal form of freedom of speech.
The Mandate of Heaven
Against the disturbing background of Islamic terrorism, this comprehensive review of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (the three monotheistic religions) investigate their troubling similarities: an exclusive sense of self-justification, a presumption of monopoly on the truth, a lust for political domination, and an obsession for extreme religious violence.
A thousand ways to believe
In his second pamphlet, Vitaly Malkin investigates our need to believe and the way monotheisms have diverted people from their terrestrial life, from their desires, and from the ancient beliefs which used to enchant the world and operated on a human scale.
The Spectre of Morality
“God is dead” but oppressive morality is everywhere, lurking behind the watchwords of neo-puritanism and progressivism. Malevolent, often unrealistic, always vain, it is the dregs of the depths of time. Vitaly Malkin puts forward the case for another morality, one which draws on the complexity of the world and our desires instead of relentlessly oppressing them.
Dangerous Illusions
Vitaly Malkin shares a decade of research on the evolution of religion in his meticulous and impassioned Dangerous Illusions, arguing that religion’s long-standing clash with reason has lead to violence, masochism, oppression, and misery.