From the Easy Chair

Envy and Elitism

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 18-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161AH64

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AH64, Envy and Elitism from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 168, April the fifth, 1988.

Otto Scott and I are now going to discuss the subject of envy and elitism. The two are very much related. Envy is very, very powerful in the world today, because our politics, our society as a whole manifests that it is a culture of envy.

Now envy is a product of inferiority, people resenting those that are better than themselves. The sad fact its hat democracy fosters envy, because democracy on the one hand tells everyone that they are equal and the facts of life then deny their equality. Envy then operates using the democratic structure to strike at others. But we have to say that envy is more than equalitarian. Envy always grasps at privilege, because it equates life with privilege. It seeks privilege for itself, but resents privilege in anyone else.

Envy, as a result, is very, very destructive socially. It is death to any society. But envy has been politicized in our day and is at the heart of political life.

Well, with that general statement, Otto, would you like to make some kind of introductory statement?

[Scott] Well, envy, yes, envy is a sin. Catholics call it a mortal sin. It is one of the seven deadly sins in which it leads to all kinds of evils. I think of Shakespeare’s Othello in which the focus of the play is on Iago’s envy of Othello and, of course, the tragedies that then ensue.

The Socialists—and I say that I think it is true that the modern American liberal is a Socialist who won’t admit it—calls himself liberal instead. Socialism, Liberalism is based on envy. You know that the Socialists don’t say, “Follow us. Vote for us and we will make you rich.” They say, “Vote for us and we will see to it that nobody gets rich and we will pull down the rich,” which is an appeal to envy. And it is amazing that anyone would follow such leadership and such a promise.

[Rushdoony] In the Bible we are told by James that he who breaks the law at one point breaks it at all points. This means that when any vice, such as envy is made legitimate, then, in time, all other vices will be made legitimate also.

[Scott] Well, we are certainly seeing that.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Because we have institutionalized envy in this century, in every country in the world, we are seeing all the other vices. We have seen the sexual revolution. We have seen the higher sodomy. We have seen abortion. We are now seeing euthanasia. We are having an aggressive promotion of a campaign to legitimize incest. And so on and on. Every offence...

[Scott] Well...

[Rushdoony] ...that once was unspeakable, is now being promoted.

[Scott] Well, there is also the promotion of not only envy between classes, which operates in Great Britain constantly, they are constantly arguing about class. They are constantly talking about how unfair it is that somebody would be born with a title or land or inherit something from his father and so forth and so on. Here in the United States it is taking a somewhat different form. We have a different society. Recently, for instance, there has been great arguments against the elderly that the elderly have gotten more money than they claim to have.

Now this is actually not true. Most of the elderly is very poor and barely able to get by. There are, of course, rich people that are elderly and middle class people that are elderly, but the majority are not doing well, because the majority come from the working elements or the laboring elements or the lower middle class.

Then we have this argument that is posed on social security payments, that by the time young people get to be over 65 or 65 there won’t be enough money for them to collect and there won’t be enough young people to support them. And this, of course, is nonsense. But it is also true that a nation that has murdered 25 million babies is not going to have as many young people as they should have in proportion to their elderly. Those 25 million, if they had a normal reproduction would produce another 50 million adults who within 30 or 40 years and so forth, those children in turn would be producing more. Our population if... had it been left undisturbed, in other words, would have well taken care of the modest social security programs of the people who manage to live longer than they were anticipated.

But envy comes in here to put the young against the old on the argument that that young are being charged for the luxury and, quote, of the old, that some people shouldn’t be able to have certain property rights to prevent others from walking across their property to go into the ocean and go swimming. So beach front houses have been ruled out of permission. People can no longer build beach front and ocean front homes. If they do, they have to allow access to the general public to get to the ocean across their property. All sorts of impingements upon liberty are being promoted in the name... in the... in the ... through envy, through the manipulation of envy.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the manipulation of the other vices that you mentioned.

Now one of the great lures of the caesar was the sexual freedoms that were allowed in Rome. When morality ceased to be legal, when sin was no longer illegal, when morality disappears it is replaced by regulation. And then regulation, of course, without morality means it doesn’t mean that a sex... a live sex show cannot show on Time’s Square in New York, but it means that the fire exits should be provided.

[Rushdoony] Every time you have had the rise of Totalitarianism or dictatorships historically you have had a loosening of morality. People are given the illusion of greater freedom while they are losing their freedom. They are given license while their freedom is taken from them.

[Scott] Well, there is a very clever, an interesting factor involved. And that is if morality is no longer to be obeyed by the people it need no longer be obeyed by their rulers. And then the rulers can do anything, anything.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...because there is no moral barrier.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now in the Soviet has gone all the way to murder, torture and slavery.

[Rushdoony] Well, it was not long after World War II that someone commented that the city with the least morality in the United States was Washington, DC and that it would set the temper for the country. It has certainly done so, because it has in one way or another worked to destroy the faith and character of the American people and to bribe them into becoming parasites.

I recall a... oh, in the mid 60s, I believe, perhaps mid to late 60s at the latest, chatting with a man in Mississippi, an old pastor, long retired, but still active as a pulpit supply. He came from the hill country and he had come down to Mississippi for this conference and we spent a great deal of time chatting together. And he said, “You know, the people who are called hillbillies used to be a very strong, self reliant people.” And he said, They would work a few months of a year harvesting certain types of hard wood which would provide them with a... an income that satisfied them for the rest of the year. And during the rest of the year they would be whittling and making thing things that are called hand crafts which would also be sold. But along came Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” he said, “and these people were told that they would qualify for welfare because they were not employed during half the year. And they thought that it was pretty smart of them that they were putting one over on the federals and revenuers by applying. But then they were encouraged,” he said, “to stay on the year round.” And he said, “The result has been the destruction of the people I once loved.” And he said that the character of those people is gone. They are a totally different people from their fathers.

Now this was a man of over 90 who was, by the way, very upset. And he said hearing me was the first good moments since his birthday, because his wife and children had grounded him and said he could no more saddle up and take off on his horse for his morning canter.

[Scott] Well, that is too bad. I think at the age of 90 he should have been allowed to do anything he wanted. But the ... the envy and jealousy... now I think they are often confused. Jealousy, which is not a very ennobling position, either, is when you are jealous of somebody because you want what they have. You want their possessions or you want their ability. You want their wife or something of that sort. Envy is worse, because envy cannot be placated by getting your possessions. Envy wants to destroy you and you possessions for having had the ability to get those possessions. That is why it is Socialism. That is the appeal of Socialism. That says, “We will tear down and take away and destroy and we will take that big home away from those people and turn it into a worker’s hotel.”

[Rushdoony] Yes. I think your definition of envy is right. Envy is insatiable.

[Scott] Yes. There is no way to satisfy it.

[Rushdoony] However, I would speak in defense of jealousy. First of all, jealousy very commonly means feeling indignant at the violation of your privileges and your place.

Years ago I heard a pastor speak—who was a very brilliant man—on jealousy and its importance in human life. He said, “Supposing a woman was at the breakfast table drinking coffee, very upset. She had been up all night because her husband had not shown up, had not come home from work and she had been unable by phone calls to trace him. And he walks in and tosses his hat over on the counter and says, ‘I am sorry to be late, dear, but I spent the night sleeping with Mrs. Jones.’” Now the old man said, “If she had said, ‘That is all right, dear. Sit down. Your coffee is getting cold,’ there would be something very sick there, very wrong.”

[Scott] That is true.

[Rushdoony] But if she were jealous it would indicate love, love that had been violated.

[Scott] Well, indignation.

[Rushdoony] Love whose rights had been transgressed, so jealousy can be a good thing and God says, “My name is jealous” as well as declaring himself to be love, a consuming fire, judgment, mercy and more.

[Scott] Oh, well, you have brought in heavy guns now. I will have to back up.

[Rushdoony] But I think what you said about envy is right. It is precisely because it is insatiable. It doesn’t stop at anything. And as you have written about the French Revolution, it wasn’t enough to take away the titles from the nobles. It wasn’t enough to take away their lands. It wasn’t enough to take away their lives. They had to be defamed. They had to be spat upon. They had to be, in one way or another, continually a target of abuse.

[Scott] That is true. And you know that when the Royalists came back to England after the death of Cromwell they dug up his body and burned his skeleton.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now that was vengeance. That is just ridiculous.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So I see this in black Africa today regarding South Africa. The blacks in South Africa are more prosperous than the blacks in any other part of black Africa. And South Africa is the most advanced country in all of black Africa. Why? And black Africa... South Africa supports its neighbors with food and medicine and supplies and facilities. Why then do the leaders of those black countries get up and denounce South Africa? Because they are envious.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And they do not intend, if the day ever comes when South Africa is turned over to black tribes, they will not attempt to maintain that level. They will destroy it because their envy cannot be appeased.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes.

[Scott] There is no way that you can get away with it. We get echoes of that here. We get arguments against competitive examinations on the theory that the scores that come out are disparate, unequal. Groups don’t get the same number of successful graduates.

Well, of course, Thomas Sowell pointed out that there is more than one factor involved in even the cultural in pointing out the income, for instance, of certain minority groups in the United States, the Jewish people for instance, in comparing them with the Hispanics. The average age of the Jewish community is 45 and the average age of the Hispanic is 19. Well, 45 year olds have more money than 19 year olds. So there are a number of different factors involved...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...and not a difference of intelligence, because I truly believe that all races have the same intelligence potential.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] However, we run into the argument that the competitive examination is unjust because the scores are unequal and the fundamental argument is if I am as good as you are, why don’t I have what you have got? Why don’t I get the same score?

Now, of course, this doesn’t make sense. It is like saying that I should be able to be a heavy weight boxer or a jockey...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Or anything else that somebody else is.

[Rushdoony] There was a very interesting thing in the papers a few days ago, startling, but wonderful. And I hope it catches on. A black fireman was going to be promoted, because in a competitive examination although he placed very high, the fact of his color gave him some extra points and put him ahead of the others and he refused it.

[Scott] I remember reading that and I admire him for it.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] In other words, he said it was not an honest promotion and he didn’t want it.

[Scott] It was unjust.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, what happens when you do that sort of thing to a people and many will accept it. They will feel that because they belong to this or that minority group...

[Scott] Destination.

[Rushdoony] ... they are entitled to preferment. It means that they then begin to be less competitive, less ready to exert themselves, because they have an advantage over others and they are going to coast on that advantage.

[Scott] Well it is a privilege.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] You recall that anecdote that I got from The Spectator of London, the old, 128 year old magazine which I still read. It is a very good magazine for me. And every issue it has something that came from 100 years ago. And this was about the wealthy woman who had set aside an island property as a deer park. And there were some poor villagers who lived near by who were unemployed and they invaded the deer park and killed a deer, because, they said, they needed the food. And they were arrested at her insistence and taken to court and fined. And the editors in 1887 said, “Although we sympathize with the unemployed and we are sure that they needed the food, we must agree that they should have been arrested and they should have been fined, because they cannot translate their need into rights. The right of the property owner should not give way to their need.”

And I thought how far we have moved in 100 years, because envy comes forward and says, “I need it and therefore I have a right to take it.”

[Rushdoony] Yes. And what we do then is in the name of human need we set aside a moral premise. And the consequences are far greater in the impact on society, because it destroys everything for all.

[Scott] Well, look at New York City. The subways are in advanced decay. They were created, by the way, 100 years ago. And 70 years ago, 88 years ago, I think the most recent subway, well, the most recent was done in the 30s, the Eighth Avenue subway. The piers and the wharves and the docks are rotting. The city, the streets are filled with potholes. The whole physical establishment of that great metropolis is decaying, because...

[Rushdoony] And the water mains also are decaying.

[Scott] ... the water mains, the sewers, the plumbing, everything. And what happened to all that money? Well, it was distributed in welfare. It was distributed in pensions that are keyed to escalate... to escalate with inflation. They spent the money in pottage, so to speak, at the expense of the future.

[Rushdoony] When we were in London, you remember, there was a subway disaster and we were told that despite the clean appearance, the subways were in an advanced state of decay.

[Scott] The welfare state. The bill of the welfare state is beginning to come due.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the welfare state is based on an appeal to envy.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] There is ... that is why the ruinous taxation... now if everyone had to pay the same percentage of tax, that would be equality before law. But an unequal percentage is inequality.

[Rushdoony] This is why the Bible stresses the fact of equal taxation, the same for all and say that charity is a responsibility of all people.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Charity begins at home.

[Scott] Absolutely.

[Rushdoony] Because it does not permit a power state.

[Scott] Well, I remember reading a Talmudic story to the effect that a very eminent rabbi was visited with a discomforting disability. Nothing serious, but something that was annoying and niggling, so to speak and seemed to be ineradicable and its nature I don’t quite recall. And his associates sat down and tried to figure out what was in his life was going wrong, what was he doing that demanded this particular kind of persistent, but annoying retribution. And one of them finally said it doesn’t allow the reapers. And he changed, because it is a responsibility to personally...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...help somebody.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, our society is in a crisis, because envy has been made legitimate. And the target of envy is now the sinner in the eyes of the media, as though by being successful you are somehow to blame. You have robbed other people.

[Scott] It depends. If you are a baseball player or a movie star or a rock band that is all right.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...because you are... have made you money in a way that the people approve. But if you are the head of a corporation, a steel company or an oil company, no oil company executive gets the kind of money that Barbara Streisand gets or Barbara Wawa gets or Dan Rather. There isn’t any corporate executive that I know that makes three million dollars a year from the corporation, but Dan Rather does.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So you notice that the target, the direction, the pointing finger, the... the... I always think of Phil Donohue. He gets somebody up on a platform and he asks him a couple of soft questions and then he takes the microphone and he retreats into the middle of the audience and then he points his finger at them and fires questions at them from the middle of the audience and it says, in effect, let’s go lynch him.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] No this... people who use, manipulate envy point out, like Phil Donohue, the man on the platform and say, “Let’s pull him down.”

[Rushdoony] Well, 13 years ago when I sold our house in southern California and moved up here, the person who purchased my house was a black basketball player who was a substitute with the Lakers, apparently never made the grade. But he was with them for about three years and his first year he started off with a salary of, as I recall it, 105,000 dollars. I know it was in excess of 100,000. Well, it was interesting, because I ... in discussions with college students brought up the matter of their hostility to farmers. They were seeing farmers as exploiters. And I said, “I come from a farming community and right now those farmers are doing well to make 20 to 35,000 a year. And it is a better successful farmers are doing it. Farm prices are not good and farmers are more and more taxed.” And I said, “On top of that, periodically they lose their crops so they have no income.”

That didn’t bother them in the slightest, but when I brought up the matter of a black basketball player getting 105,000 a year and he was the low man on the totem pole there, they didn't’ see anything wrong with that.

[Scott] Only the farmer?

[Rushdoony] Only the farmer and, of course, the businessman.

[Scott] And the worker.

[Rushdoony] Yes. So we do have a very false morality, the morality of envy. It envies those who belong to the Puritan work ethic.

[Scott] Well, of course, there is envy of ability. Somebody... I don’t know who it was that made this terrible movie about Mozart in which they distorted and misrepresented all the elements of Mozart’s life. Anyone who has any knowledge at all of Mozart would have walked out on that movie. Only an ignorant country would allow such a movie to be exhibited. And the focus there was the envy of the Italian composer for Mozart’s genius when he is presumably didn’t deserve it, because in ever other respect he was an idiot savant. And that Italian composer in real life, in historically speaking there is a statue of him in his home town. He was very successful. The movie was based on a poisonous play written by a poisonous man many, many years ago. And only an envious society would have produced and distributed such an exhibition.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I do believe people go searching for things in history that they can warp and twist to vindicate the world and life outlook of the envious man.

At the beginning I made the point that envy grasps at privilege, because it equates life with it. And while it resents privilege in other people, it seeks to gain privilege for itself. In the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution some of the people who broke with it and escaped wrote some very, very telling accounts of the horrors that were perpetrated out of envy, out of hostility to those who were privileged and how they tried to get ahead by trampling on the bodies for those who were over them. And any excuse was found to say that somebody’s grandmother had been of the aristocracy and therefore they should be eliminated or their mother perhaps had certain relatives that were well connected.

Every excuse to destroy the people who were envied while at the same time seeking to take over their possessions, to gain their privileges. And that certainly is very, very much with us today. I think we need to see also that very often some of the people who head up this kind of envy among the people are themselves privileged people who are resentful.

[Scott] Well, that is a very strange, but very real paradox. In the Hungarian Revolution in 1919 which was one of the most awful and bloody ...

[Rushdoony] Bela Kun...

[Scott] A terrible, terrible series of... of murders and tortures. It was really ushered in by a count who was the wealthiest man in Hungary. And then we have the spectacle of Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts.

[Rushdoony] I was going to comment on the father, Joseph Kennedy and John F., because they often spoke about doing in people who thought they were better than they were.

[Scott] And who were better than they.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And that was the... that was the core of their envy, because envy can spot superiority. It is envious of superiority and of natural superiority, what Jefferson called natural aristocracy.

They want to destroy talent that exceeds their own. And ... but what you said about the wake of the Soviet Revolution was played out again in France.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] With the collapse of the Nazis. The French underground suddenly swelled by many thousands of people who joined at the last minute and who then proceeded to murder their neighbors and seize and steal their goods under the guise that they had been pro Nazi or collaborators or what not. And that was a nightmare period in which men got away with this.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And women who were resented were accused of sleeping with German officers.

[Scott] Their heads were shaved.

[Rushdoony] Their heads were shaved and they were driven naked through the center of the town.

[Scott] Yes. Now, of course, the French are notoriously envious. It happens to be a national characteristic that more than one observer has commented upon.

[Rushdoony] The French Revolution...

[Scott] ...brought it out.

[Rushdoony] ... helped create that.

[Scott] And... and it perpetuated it.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because now you have two groups in France, both of whom can claim the ancestors of the other group with various crimes.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And envy, of course, is being stirred in Britain all the time. All the time. I mean, they have stopped hereditary peers, you know, there is no more of that. They are life peers today. And the idea was that it is not just for people to inherit a peerage because of the noble deeds of their ancestors. Well, I... I can’t think of a better reason, frankly.

A nation does owe a family something that contributes in a very large way.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And we ... we have no system of national honors. And every time we have tried to create one, it has been quickly debased by frivolous appointments.

[Rushdoony] I have, a couple of times, spoken on a movement in the fifth century which is, perhaps the most radical communistic revolution in all of history. It happened in Persia. We don’t have any good books on Persia, because Persia was once the outpost and center of western civilization. And it had a remarkable culture. The Greeks have been glorified because the Greeks under their philosophers became Atheistic. And that made them a great culture when they didn’t really compare with the Persian culture.

[Scott] Well, in the... may I interrupt?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The latest issue of Insight magazine has an article about a new historian slash archaeologist who argues that the Greeks were not the way they have been written up, that 19th century historians distorted the Greek heritage in order to suit their ethnic pride and they claimed the Greeks as Aryans and ignored the contributions of the Egyptians and other people in that area, because they didn’t consider them Aryan. And that it was the whole distortion of Greek history was part of the egocentric outlook of western Europeans, which more or less goes parallel with what you are just saying.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I thought you would be interested to know that.

[Rushdoony] If you will give me the title of that book, I would appreciate it.

Well, envy began to raise its head in Persia. And in the mid 400s the Marxists, you might say, or the Communists of Persia took over, the Masdekites. They called for the total communization of all property, of all money and other forms of wealth and of all women. And for a generation or two, a couple of generations approximately, they controlled Persia. At the end of that time there were very few people who knew who their father was. The destruction was incredible. They had brought a great culture, a great power to its knees.

It was then that a young prince of the royal family who had been in hiding was able to get enough men together who were still disciplined men and recapture the throne. That was {?} the second. But the damage had been done so that within a century, approximately, the Turks moving westward were able to overthrow Persia and the Arabs as well, both moving from different directions.

That was the end of a great culture and it was envy that made it possible for the Masdekites to succeed.

In the long run, they all suffered, because when you give that much envy full sway, as the Masdekites did, you create total anarchy, a culture that was crawling on its knees, as it were.

[Scott] Well, of course. Deadly, deadly means deadly. It means that it brings death. And sin is not simply a violation of morality. It is much more serious. It is much more serious. What is happening here among us is the destruction of a great nation. The whole idea of an American has... is being shredded. I heard a debate the other day on whether or not the United States should be an English speaking nation by law, whether we should have an official language.

Well, most countries do have an official language. You cannot become a Mexican citizen if you cannot speak Spanish. And yet we have Mexican immigrants who want Spanish to be a bilingual language which means that we will be like Quebec or like Belgium or like any other bilingual country, because then you have set up a series of disputes between one language and the other.

There is a Spanish proverb that says, “Two languages, two men.” And I have seldom met polyglots. I think Doug Kelly is one of the few that I have met who was master of many language who didn’t have an accent in all of them.

[Rushdoony] Well, he had an accent in English.

[Scott] He had a southern accent. Well, where he comes from that wasn’t an accent. We have an accent there.

But the whole question was argued by a representative, an American of Mexican or... ancestry, who was arguing that the ... to use English would be discriminatory against Hispanics. And one of the others said, “Well, why not Chinese?” And what about the Vietnamese language? And what about the Russians? We have got many hundreds of thousands of Russians now. And what about all the other languages? Why is only Spanish...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...to be singled out in this fashion? And his answer was rather feeble, but, of course, you know, his purpose is ... his purpose is to divide the United States...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And some day to return to Mexican control the area that Mexico lost in the War of 1848.

[Rushdoony] Except that it was never under Mexico. It was under Spain.

[Scott] That its rue.

[Rushdoony] And when the empire fell apart, Spain tried to take over all those departments and it was able to take over some, but not Texas.

[Scott] Well, in any event, this was the argument. And this...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] This is something that our grandchildren will contend with.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well...

[Scott] Why... why would... why would anyone in his right mind want to take all of this populace and prosperous area, the sun belt, western sun belt and return it to the control of a government that has succeeded in destroying more opportunities than you can name, that is sitting upon a very wealthy area, a very large area in abysmal property, riddled with envy...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...of the United States.

[Rushdoony] What you have is a number of Hispanic agitators and American liberals who are speaking this way. A vast number of Hispanics are eager to be Americanized. This is why they came here. They prefer it.

[Scott] Of course. Of course.

[Rushdoony] But they are being bullied into feeling that somehow they are traitors to their past.

[Scott] Well...

[Rushdoony] If they don’t play along with these shoddy self appointed leaders.

[Scott] Well, the propaganda machine has gone to work on behalf of the agitators.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We don’t hear from the majority of the... nobody takes a poll... Nobody even goes into the Hispanic community. They are more his... almost as many Hispanics as there are blacks. And yet no... they... they are not in every television ad. There is no great political movement. So far they are leading their own lives and they are not particularly interested in politics as a mass, as a group, because it doesn’t fit their culture.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] In time, of course, they will be politicized. The effort that is underway is to politicize them and they are... Envy is being used as the weapon. Envy of the Anglo as he is called. And the Anglo includes very strange people.

[Rushdoony] Yes, it does.

Well, the richness of the English Language is unrivaled by any other language in the world. It has such a complexity of an inheritance that it has a vocabulary that is greater than that of other languages and, therefore, an ability to be precise and to orchestrate one’s language, to orchestrate one’s book, one’s writing.

[Scott] It is also a language which is remarkably flexible in terms of deception. Many things can be presented in English that are totally absurd and made to sound fairly plausible.

[Rushdoony] Well, that is because of its...

[Scott] It is...

[Rushdoony] ...its tremendous scope.

[Scott] It is an accordion language.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And I think a great deal of the richness of English comes from the contributions of so many immigrant peoples who have each contributed words to the English language and often contributed delightful accents. I enjoyed your story about the Irish priest and his Latin as well as his English. That is a classic.

[Scott] Oh, he spoke... he spoke Latin with a brogue.

[Rushdoony] Why don’t you...

[Scott] “Corpus domini nostri mundi,” he would say. You could almost hear the harp in the background.

[Rushdoony] Well, I think we need to enjoy this complexity, but we have people busily trying to set one against the other as though they are being deprived because we are not recognizing Spanish as an official language or, of course, we have recognized in some states black English, whatever that is, in the schools and made it legitimate.

[Scott] Street language. Street language.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Not... not good language.

[Rushdoony] That shows no respect for the blacks. It is saying you are inferior and you are never capable of meeting the common standard.

[Scott] But... and it is a total lie, because the English schools in the Caribbean taught the black children as well as the others to speak impeccable English. There is absolutely no difference in the potential of the races.

[Rushdoony] That is a very important point , Otto, because we have had in the East a number of ... a sizable number of Jamaican immigrants who were brought up in the old English schooling, before as recently they turned totally relativistic. And what has developed in the East is that the Jamaicans get ahead in a dramatic way so that an American black and a Jamaican black are in two different leagues.

[Scott] Well, they come here better educated.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And they come here equipped with skills and equipped with dignity and equipped with self respect. And I count those factors as equal.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... in the advantage. Now I have talked, of course, to black people in Venezuela who... they don’t know they are black. There is absolutely no difference than talking to a blonde or a brunette. But there is a difference in the United States which has been inculcated by liberals and by radical blacks. W. E. B. Dubois who is now held aloft as one of their great figures was an absolute disgrace. He wound up worshipping the dictator of Ghana.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And his writing is not scholarly.

[Rushdoony] And he was an elitist to the core.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] An elitist. And this is the thing that envy always creates, an elite group. Whenever you have had a revolution or a movement created by envy it strikes at the natural aristocracy, at hierarchy.

[Scott] Yes. It sets up an artificial group.

[Rushdoony] Yes, an artificial, self appointed group who have gained power through coercion over others so that Elitism and envy are very closely tied together.

[Scott] Well, then, we will take the example, for instance, of Stalin and Lenin. Now Stalin is an interesting case. He never forgave any man who ever contradicted him, ever. And he never forgave his superior for being superior. He had them all killed.

[Rushdoony] Or anyone who had been better than he before he took power.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] They all had to go.

[Scott] Yes. It was remarkable. And one of the... one of the results of that sort of a regime was that the worst thrives, the worst thrives.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The most evil...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The most envious, the most unscrupulous. The number of Iagos...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... appear. And that is why I look at Gorbachev who was known in the university as the eye of the police and who turned in his fellow students. He turned one in because the boy’s parents had run a foul of the authorities. And now here he is, greeted as tough he is what? Some sort of a gentleman.

[Rushdoony] Well, look what our growing envy culture in the United States is producing in the way of leadership in Washington. It gets worse every year.

[Scott] Well, Washington is the graveyard of reputations. No man leaves Washington without knives in his back and his reputation in shreds. Every one of our recent presidents has left under a reign of defamation. Nobody leaves any large position in Washington with any reputation at all. And you can... Here in... in the mountains of California where things are fairly civilized it is difficult to bear in mind what you see on the posters that are printed and distributed in places like New York. Filth.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] If the leaders of any nation were subjected to one tenth of this vilification there would be outcries to the moon from our liberals about our chauvinism.

[Rushdoony] In the prophet Isaiah we read that when a nation begins to decline it finally reaches the point where the wise men will refuse to hold office and then women and children at the same time begin to rule over everyone.

[Scott] Isn’t that interesting?

[Rushdoony] And now we have had a child centered culture for some time. We have had Feminism. And we are turning away from some of the best possible candidates from president... for president to choose inferior men.

[Scott] It is very interesting, because I talked to the Republican Women’s club and state convention in... just outside of LA and these are conservatives women, definitely not like the Feminist stereotype at all. And yet influential and active in politics and estimable, I would say, in ever sense. Very feminine. I didn’t see any slacks, all dresses. And talked to them later and they said not so many young women anymore were... the... in the Republican Women’s clubs, because the young women don’t have the time to engage in politics. They are out working. So there has been a shift in the demographics here.

Now the whole shift which is taking place, though, I think is closer to the Renaissance. Eventually the corruption of the Ancion regime in the Renaissance in France under the Victorians, under the Edwardians led to a total collapse of the ruling group and a change in attitudes among the people. I think, really, we are on the eve of that kind of change.

I think that everyone who listens to this particular dialog will think of how much disgust is growing with the present trend. I mean, we are so sick of racial and ethnic representations when we are supposed to be a nation in which we are all together.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I had a letter that came today with a gift for Chalcedon from a missionary and it was brief, but a very moving letter describing the tremendous sense of culture shock in coming back to America and finding it so very much decayed and degenerate. And then the distress in finding that most churches were not interested in the problem, but were holed up in their inner life and their church affairs about any sense of responsibility for the culture round about them.

Now, what I wrote to this person was what you say is very true. But what is developing is that many people are taking Christian Reconstruction seriously, that we have a growing element in the population that is going to apply the faith in every sphere of life and thought.

And another letter in the same mail came from a young man who is producing an insert for church bulletins. And he says it is to teach them how to read the papers.

[Scott] Oh, that is very helpful.

[Rushdoony] Yes. What he does is to pick out certain articles that deal with the critical moral issues, the intrusion of the state into the life of the church or the life of the family, highlight them, put a heading or two above them. And then put them in a four or six page flyer folded to be inserted in the bulletins. Doing a remarkable job.

Now this is the kind of thing that is happening all over the country and every day we get word. In fact, I would say one of our problems is a very, very remarkable problem, a good one. Because so many people who start reading us and supporting us then get involved in creating Christian schools or creating something like this young man with inserts.

[Scott] Right.

[Rushdoony] Or creating some kind of charitable organization and so on and on. And then they pour their effort and funding into that.

[Scott] Sure.

[Rushdoony] So we have to find new people to train.

Now this is marvelous even though...

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] ...needs are continually hoping that we will get some more recruits who will help us with our finances. But something is happening in the country and I think it is wonderful.

[Scott] That is great.

[Rushdoony] Any last comments, Otto, before we conclude?

[Scott] Well, I think that all these critical comments should not be taken as signs of inevitable collapse, ruin and so forth and so on. Nothing in history was ever inevitable. Every event could have had a different outcome if people had behaved in a different way. And in many cases did have a different outcome. The revolution was stopped in Spain. It was stopped in Chile. There was a reformation which changed the whole face of the entire globe and yet it only lasted through a couple of generations. And with as many people as there are here, as many Christians, as much knowledge, as much education, as much information, as much wealth, it seems to me that our situation is a lot better than it was 10 years ago.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I believe we are on the winning side.

Well, our time is up. Thank you all for listening and God bless you.

[Voice] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.