From the Easy Chair

Envy

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 47-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161AY93

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AY93, Envy from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 191, April the fourth, 1989.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss a very, very important subject, one that governs the modern world and yet is rarely discussed. The subject is envy. And I am going to ask Otto to introduce the subject this evening.

[Scott] Envy is, as you know, one of the seven deadly sins and I personally didn’t realize how devastating it can be and how dangerous it is and how widespread until Rush lent me a copy of Helmut Schoeck’s work on envy which was originally published some years ago. It has since been republished several times, most recently, I think, by Liberty Press.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...in Indianapolis. In this work Dr. Shoeck examines primitive societies who are held back, one might say, by belief in magic and an acceptance of envy. And in his examination of this, traces what a terrible ... what terrible havoc it can create in a society. Now there are very good reasons to believe that our society has lost sight of the dangers of envy and I think we will explore tonight the various manifestations in which it has appeared in our time.

[Rushdoony] I am glad you mentioned that envy is regarded historically as one of the seven deadly sins, because it has been, I believe, the anti Christian attitude that has allowed very deadly sins like envy to become acceptable. And, as a result, envy is institutionalized today. Most of our legislation is based on envy increasingly. And to be envious is seen as all together righteous if you are able to say you are envious of someone who is superior to you, more successful than you. Then somehow it is evidence that they have wronged you and the rest of society. And I believe that the failure of the church to concentrate on the analysis of sin and what it is has contributed to this. It used to be that the seven deadly sins were well known by Catholics and protestants. Now they know nothing about them.

[Scott] I agree. Shakespeare’s play Othello is based on envy. The central figure in the plan is not Othello, but Iago. Iago is the captain of the guard. Othello was a prince and a general. Iago was jealous, was envious, not jealous, but envious of Othello. And the difference is that if you are jealous of somebody you want what they have, a wife, their possessions, their position, even their talent. But envy cannot be placated and cannot be assuaged. Envy is hatred of the qualities that another person possesses and the envious individual wants to destroy that person and his possessions. He is not to be placated by stealing or anything of that sort. And in the play one of the actors asks Iago, “Why doth thou hate him so?” And he says, “Because the grace of his life makes mine seem ugly to me.”

Now a modern audience, racially educated, watches Othello with... as though it is a black and white play because Othello is black and his wife was white. But in a Christian era when the playwright was Christian and the audience was Christian the color did not matter, because they were all Christians and color does not matter to a true Christian. It was the envy of Iago that was the focus of the play and that the audience watched. And the very fact that Iago’s envy is not even recognized today by a modern audience is an illustration of how far we have drifted from the Christian period.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Over the years I have encountered numerous examples when people have been envious and bitterly so because someone else whom they feel is not as intelligent or not as capable as they are has a better job, a better income, a better wife, better children, you name it. Somehow that is wrong. They have no right to excel. They have no right to be better than anyone else. And this kind of hostility has thoroughly warped our society. And, as a result, we have many, many groups who feel that they are justified in being envied. I believe it is a very, very important part of racial conflict.

[Scott] Well, it is an entirely different societal attitude. It is really a retrogression to the primitive. The old idea, let’s say the pre-revolutionary idea of society was of inequality under both the king and God. It was understood that people were unequal, that their situations were unequal, that their responsibilities were unequal, that their authority was unequal and that their talents were unequal.

Now to some extent we could simply soften that by saying different. People are differently equipped. Some are advanced in certain areas and deficient in others and so on. So there is an uneven profile, you might say, which affects all humanity.

But never before, never before the French Revolution have men risen up to lead the masses on the argument not that they will make men rich, but that they will stop others from becoming rich. From the French Revolution until today envy has been the disabled appeal, the single dominant approach of all revolutionary. Socialism is based on envy.

[Rushdoony] I recall years and years ago reading an account of conversations in the late 20s in the Soviet Union by someone, a westerner talking with the people, very ordinary people about what had happened. And there was no question that these people were suffering and they said, “We deserve what we are getting, because when the Bolsheviks told us that the nobles and the Capitalists had no right to their wealth and their good houses and encouraged us to break into their houses to kill and to loot, we were ready to do so. And we are now paying for our sins.”

Now that type of exploitation of the sin in people is very common. It becomes especially difficult, I think, in our day because there are so many people who, because of the modern ideology, have been brought up to think that there is something wrong with being successful.

[Scott] Well, I wrote a column about that which was rejected, by the way. It was a pilot column. There was an effort made to syndicate and it was rejected. And the... the name of the... the title of the column was, “The Sorry Smell of Success.” And I was struck by, at that point, by the number of individuals that I knew and also that I read in articles and so forth of very successful people who have an awful lot of complaints about this country and this society, the sorry smell of success. And many of these individuals were people who had worked their way up from very humble beginnings and one would have imagined that they would have a lot of decent pride and happiness in having finally broken clear and having all the things that they wanted. But instead they compete almost at demonstrations, deploring one aspect or another of the society in which they prosper.

And I think the first time that this occurred to me was at a party many years ago. It was a party held by a group of radicals, most of whom I knew, at which Paul Robeson attended. And it was before his decline. He was still giving concerts. And, as you know, he was very impressive, a very big, broad shouldered man, deep baritone voice. And he was holding forth about the terrible condition of his race.

And I said, “Well, what is your problem? You had everything. Rhodes Scholar, college, a letter.” He was an all American football player. He was a star on stage and screen. “What is your argument?”

Well, he said, “Every... people around me are shocked.” And he said, “Well,” he said, “I have a brother in prison.”

I said, “What for?”

He said, “For killing a white man.”

And I said, “Should he have gotten a medal?”

And somebody shut me up. But Robeson continued to talk. And he never did answer the question. He had every honor it is possible for a man to receive, irrespective of race or color. And yet he hated the United States. And there is a sort of a vicariousness here where people are encouraged not to think of where they are, but where some presumed poor person is or where some other race is.

Now there is a sort of lunacy involved in this, because we really should judge the world from where we stand and by our own experience and not by what we hear about somebody else.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, you did put your finger on a problem. There are so many successful people who feel guilty because they are successful and they not only permit, but often encourage in various ways the unsuccessful or minority groups to complain about how they are treated, as though it is the fault of others that they are in a low estate.

A friend of mine who is black is one of two people of his generation that came out of a black ghetto. The others were not interested. He and his friend are now both outstanding in American life. They are friends. Their classmates are all in the ghetto, involved in all the evils of the life there. And full of complaints.

[Scott] Well, we find this again and again. People who.... Al Smith grew up in a small cheap neighborhood. Margaret Thatcher didn’t come from the top, from the purple. I have a friend in San Francisco years ago who was black who was an assistant D. A. He was the only back assistant D. A. as a matter of fact in the D. A.’s office at that time. And I went in to an all night restaurant late at night and ran into him and he was depressed. And we sat and had some coffee and chatted. And he said, “If you were in my position what would you do?” He was complaining about the United States.

I said, “If I were in your position, I would go to Brazil.”

And he took umbrage and he said, “Well, I am an American.”

I said, “Well, you are not being serious. You don’t... you are offended.”

He said, “You are telling me that I don’t belong.”

I said, “I am not saying that at all.” I said, “I looked at you and I see a sharp lawyer, well dressed, well educated, well equipped. In Brazil where there is virtually no color line, you would do very well.” But I said, “My forbearers had sense enough when they weren’t doing well where they were to get up and come here. You haven’t got sense enough to get up and go anywhere. You think it is an insult to even think about it.”

He said, “Well I didn’t look at it that way.”

I said, “No, you don’t.”

But there is nothing that holds anybody here.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is exactly it. When people turn envy into a virtue they cease to be responsible. Instead of doing something to correct their condition, they say somebody else is responsible of their condition and, as a result, they begin to hate and they turn their hate into social action, legislation. And today we have, in both parties, a strong vein of envy legislated.

[Scott] Well, that is very true. There is a show... Oh, I also... the whole question of magic, but let’s... let’s get through envy first.

He said that one of the reasons why the black tribes of Africa had not advanced was that in order to advance you have to... one person has to do something better than other people. And when the other people see that it works, they begin to imitate it. But the envious will not accept that. They feel that, for instance, one farmer would feel that if one farmer got a bigger harvest then all the rest the others would say, “He put a curse on us to keep our crops below his.”

So therefore any effort to get ahead of the other fellow is an insult. You are trying to put him down in this classic phrase that is being used today. You are trying to get ahead of him. So nobody gets ahead and when nobody gets ahead there is no progress. And the primitive tribes, therefore, froze everything that they did at a certain level and that stayed that way from time immemorial.

Now what is happening to us? Innovation is declining in the United States, innovation in thought, innovation in expression, innovation even in the areas where it is supposedly encouraged in scientific effort, because there is a subliminal ... a subliminal acceptance of the idea of magic that you don’t have to do anything to improve. If everything around you falls, you will some how be bettered, but yet you don’t grow in stature, because the other fellow is taller and you don’t like it. you can cut him off at the knees and you are still not going to increase your stature.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Two great books have been written in our time on envy, Helmut Schoeck’s Envy, S C H O E C K, Schoeck and Gonzalez Fernandez Delamora, Egalitarian Envy, another excellent work. And Delamora in his book says, and I quote, “Envy is no more than the anxiety and impatience of a man who sees and acknowledges himself inferior to another.” And he says, “This insight was that of {?}. Ahead of Nietzsche he discovered in this inferiority feeling an important connotation, the affliction of impotence. Hence, the envious is always a coward.”

[Scott] Well, that is interesting. I ... I don’t know whether I would accept that because I have seen every sort of vice included in some very rough characters. And perhaps... I don’t know really whether I would go along with that. But I would say this, that envy is probably one of the most dangerous of elements, because the envious feels entitled to do anything injurious to you that comes into their mind.

[Rushdoony] Yes. He also says that, “There is no other sin that shares more in evil than envy, because envy is the contrary of the most radical and supreme Christian virtue, charity or love in Christ. Envy is antisocial and anti solidarity. It breaks the union. It distances from those who are most happy.”

[Scott] Well, let’s look at it. I know... I read very often writers that are better than I am. Their grasp of technique sometimes strikes me as almost magical. And I am delighted when I read somebody who is that well equipped because there is such a pleasure in reading good writing. It never occurs to me to feel otherwise.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And I know that this is true of musicians, good musicians. When they hear another fellow play better than they have ever heard an instrument played before. They are delighted. They crowd around him. They call him master, maestro.

[Rushdoony] I have an amusing story to tell on that. It goes back to the 30s. A very prominent violinist of the day was vacationing in San Francisco when another very prominent violinist from Europe was giving a concert there and he and a friend who was also a musician in the San Francisco symphony, but not a violinist were seated together. And this prominent violinist listening to this man who was superlative in his playing became a little uncomfortable with the excellence of the concert violinist. And he fidgeted a bit and mopped his brow and told his companion, “It is very hot in here, isn’t it?”

And the man looked at him and said, “For violinists, it is.”

[Scott] Well, I love... I knew some jazz musicians years ago and their attitude was of great pleasure. I think ... I think the fine arts, the fine musicians and the concert groups that we know are much more catty, much cattier. Almost like the professors.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Academia is not famous for being broad minded or admiring in any way of first rate talent.

[Rushdoony] Well, to go back to Delamora. He makes another point that I think is marvelous. He says that the opposite of envy is the communion of the saints, a fellowship in terms of a common faith, a common life. And he said envy isolates people. And instead of the communion of the saints, instead of community of any sort, you have an anti community impetus. You have a hostility directed to everyone from a position of isolation because the envious man is not content to be at peace with anyone.

[Scott] Well, of course, he cannot ever be, because it is always something to be envious of. If you are basically an envious person you must envy the man who can dive off a high board. You must envy a good dancer. You must envy almost every ability that you see that you don’t possess.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, we live in a world in which no one preaches against envy, neither in the church or out of the church. It is regarded as altogether natural to be envious.

[Scott] Well, it is promoted. It is encouraged, but it is true that you don’t hear sermons about. I don’t really know what the church today sermonizes against. Once we... when we really come to it, all sins seem to have shriveled down to racism.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Beyond that there is no sin.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is very good. That is about the only sin that is left. And that is an odd thing to choose as a sin, because one of the characteristics of people all over the world has been a preference for their own. People prefer their own families. They prefer their own nationality or their own race, which is entirely legitimate as long as they don’t abuse and mistreat others. I believe that the world has seen more racism in this century than ever before precisely because we are trying to equalize everything and we are trying to obscure the differences and say they don’t exist. And when you do that, you are going to create a situation where there will be a bootlegged and resentful recognition of differences.

[Scott] Well, you drive underground what doesn’t belong underground. The business of justice, the business of treating people fairly, the business of equality before law and meritocracy, so to speak, of making opportunities open to all, the whole idea of a civilized society is based on the idea of mutual respect. But respected is one thing. A denial of reality is something else. If in order to get along or to placate we have to pretend that everyone has the same intellect and intelligence, the same ability then we have downgraded all intelligence and all ability.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is usually a question of let’s you and he be equal. Not you and I.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, by obscuring the fact of differences, what we have done is to create a climate in which any awareness of reality is gone.

[Scott] Well, it is dishonest.

[Rushdoony] Yes. You are not living in a real world if you don’t recognize differences and say he is better than I am. He is of another color. And he or she is not as good as I am in this particular field where I am good.

[Scott] Well, I had that conversation with a sales manager at a magazine I was with. He said, “I was raised to believe that I was as good as anybody, weren’t you?”

I said, “No. I wasn’t.”

And he said he was surprised. And he said, “Well, how were you raised?”

I said, “I was raised to think that we were better than some and not as good as others.”

And I still think that is true.

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes. That was very much a part of our training in our generation.

[Scott] Well, now, of course, it is forbidden to say that you are better than anybody else. That is an evil thought in the popular jargon. And yet how could you possibly avoid having it?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, as I said, when you will not allow reality to govern your thinking you are going to live in a world of hypocrisy and that hypocrisy will increase year by year and more and more warp society. And I believe that the envious character of our society, its anti racialism, its hypocrisy in one sphere after another, is leading to more and more dislocations, because reality is not allowed to impinge upon our world.

Well, as we continue discussing envy, I think it is well to recognize that Communism is institutionalized envy. And so we have a sizeable portion of the world today dedicated to institutionalizing envy.

[Scott] Well, their idea was or their argument, their argument was that they would, in effect, eliminate envy, eliminate sin by eliminating the inequality of possessions. If everyone had the same thing then there would be nothing to be jealous of, which isn’t true, because some would still be envious of the beautiful or the athletic or those who had a pleasant voice or whatever. Envy covers everything.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] There is no way that you can change the environment so that envy doesn’t exist.

[Rushdoony] No. People will be envious of almost anything, a full head of hair, of example, if you are bald.

[Scott] Well, naturally curly hair, that little girl in Snoopy.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, Delamora said that Egalitarianism is the opiate of the envious. He also made a very telling point in some detail that the idea of a class struggle is an invention by the Marxists. It did not exist. And it has been devolved into a fact of sociology, as it were. It has become... become a thing that people believe and operate in terms of.

[Scott] Well, they do in this sense that they don't look at you as an individual. They look at you as a representative of a class.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I am a white, middle class male instead of myself.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And there is also the whole ... I...I always thought that {?} pretty well shot down the class struggle thing when he pointed out that in the antique societies before Greece there was no class. There was simply the despot and the {?}.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The merchants, everyone except the noble was on one level and the nobility, for that matter, could be thrown out any time like somebody from the politburo today.

[Rushdoony] There was no nobility in antiquity.

[Scott] Not in the sense of the hereditary peers of...

[Rushdoony] Yes. No hereditary peers.

[Scott] No. No. There wasn’t.

[Rushdoony] The only ones who had a title were those who were the friends and servants of the king.

[Scott] And that is a temporary thing.

[Rushdoony] It was not hereditary. Hereditary nobility is a fairly modern thing. People forget that William the Conqueror, had he lived 200 years later could never have become King of Normandy and then of Britain, because first he was not legitimate and if he had been, which is barely possible, his mother was not of royal blood. She was a barmaid. But it was no problem at that time, because it was not a hereditary principle. It was in terms of ability.

[Scott] Yes. Well, the class struggle thing is ... has absolutely destroyed university thinking. Practically all our higher educational levels have accepted class struggle as a fact of life in history and very few of them go back into history to see what classes existed when and where and so on.

[Rushdoony] Well, that is very true, because I had a student call me today and he said that his professor of philosophy ruled out of court any idea or consideration that was Christian, because that was, by definition, irrational and, therefore, could not be considered.

Well, similarly class struggle and envy have been institutionalized place in sociology so that sociology begins with these things and treats them as reality and refuses to consider, for example, that the communion of the saints has been an alternative in history that has worked and envy does not work.

[Scott] Well, of course, you could say that not just of saints, but of sinners, too, of ordinary people. And as long as you had a good working relationship with your fellow craftsman, for instance, work is a pleasure. It only becomes onerous when envy begins to make its mark and when somebody is held back deliberately.

One of the drawbacks of the union movement was that it stopped the employer from rewarding merit. Every man was limited to the same pay of the same work and the man who did better work than the next fellow still got the same pay. So there was something inherently unjust about the idea of standard pay for a standard job. If some people did better at the job than others, they should have gotten more than others.

So you find that the union movement played upon the idea of inequality in order to set up what amounted to an artificial brotherhood and it was a brotherhood which then became pointed against the employer, against the Capitalist. So you had jealousy and envy put to work in the market place which distorted the whole relationship between the employer and the employee, the workman and his foreman and so forth.

[Rushdoony] You mentioned earlier how envy depersonalizes, stratifies a society, reduces people to classes. We can both of us recall when the term minorities was not used.

[Scott] No. I is a new term.

[Rushdoony] Yes. You saw people in terms of individuals. They were good workers or they were not.

[Scott] That is right.

[Rushdoony] You didn’t type them as a class.

[Scott] No. No that wasn’t the point. You... there were ethnic identifications, but they were identifications and they were not invidious. Although the language today is held of language that was used in the 20s and 30s is held to be insulting and evidence of a great ethnic hostility, it was not true. The language was used affectionately. Many of these nicknames were considered harmless. They were used by the people themselves. I recall in my mother’s family. It was working class Irish when all the Irish in the New York area called themselves donkeys and were so known. And didn’t think anything of it.

The whole idea of the affection that existed between black and white in the United States a generation or more ago is now denied as ever having existed. But it did exist. And there was a lot of affection.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, our society is being divided by envy and envy continues to divide a society progressively until it destroys it. And today envy is institutionalized in every country in the world. There isn’t a one that today in some form or another has not passed legislation that makes envy somehow legitimate in one sphere or another.

Now I believe that this whole direction cannot be reversed unless we begin to make Christianity again relevant and vital, until we again confront all of sins for what they are, analyze them, discuss them and indict people for them.

[Scott] Well, I don’t know how the indictment would come about, but certainly they ought to be discussed. And I have no... I think we all have that somehow the most successful movements in the United States that have picked up and have improved individuals and areas where the clergy has failed has been in Alcoholics Anonymous and its offshoots. And I notice with great interest that one of the things that made AA successful was that it began with confession. It began with the admission that they were alcoholics and then having admitted that they were alcoholics they began to make an effort to do something about controlling their drinking or stopping it or whatever.

Now they have had Fatties Anonymous and Gamblers Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous and I don’t know when. But here the principle at work is that a group of people have sat down and been honest with one another about sharing a particular sin, because alcoholism, of course, is a gluttony. And Gambling Anonymous, I suppose, you could call greed. I am not sure. Why else would one gamble? And so forth. So this was an effort at... at self help thing without the clergy, without the doctors, without the psychiatrists, without the very professionals whom this civilization has entrusted to that particular sector to.

Now nothing could be a greater illustration of the failure of a group than the fact that citizens have come to... the people have come together on their own to help themselves, to help one another solve these problems. And I think envy very well could get into it. Fatties. I have actually... I saw a very fat woman a few years ago on television parading against a beauty pageant because she said it was unfair. I could see why she felt that way, but why she didn’t go on a diet, I don’t know. But, you know, the ... the {?} there...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...is that a beauty contest is somehow or another denigrative to women. Well, I always thought it was putting them up pretty high, but I guess I don’t see things properly.

[Rushdoony] And some years ago when I first encountered a situation in a church and since then have encountered it more than once where a struggling young congregation invited someone to be their pastor and they said very frankly, “We don’t have much to pay you with.” It has been as little as 50 dollars in one case and 75 in another and so on. Insufficient for a family. And the man has gone there and taken a job, worked hard to build up the church and in at least two cases being a skilled person in construction and having contractor’s licenses took charge of a building project, put up a good structure and then with large membership said, “All right. I have worked sacrificially for several years now. Now I want so much for pay.” And they encounter resistance. And in a couple of instances after arguing by the hour one of the trustees or elders or deacons as the case may have been has said, “Well, if we paid a pastor that much he will be making more than I do.”

Envy.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And that kind of thing is very prevalent. It is also directed against classes. For example, I have encountered, over and over again as I spoke to university students over the years hostility towards farmers. Farmers were getting rich. They were making so much money, not as much as has been said in the last decade because so many farmers have been losing their farms. But there was a hostility against the farmer for making some money. And the farmers, by and large, the average farmer was making 25, 30, 40,000 and some less. And that was too much, they said, for a farmer to make.

And I said, “What about the years when the frost takes his crop?”

Well, that doesn't matter. Then later in conversations during the discussion I would mention a basketball player I knew, a rookie, black, whose starting pay was 110,000 dollars. They saw nothing wrong with that, because in the world of entertainment and athletics everything is acceptable, but the farmer represents a conservative working element in the population and he is resented.

[Scott] Well, not just he farmer.

[Rushdoony] Of course not.

[Scott] The oil industry, the oil industry...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... was invented in the United States, was pioneered by Colonel Drake and put together by John D. Rockefeller, the original. Mr. Rockefeller was an industrial and commercial genius. He invented the tanker, the tank car, many other matters. And he put together a whole series of small oil companies. He didn’t put anyone out of work. He didn't bankrupt anybody. He paid for every company that he acquired and he paid more than they would have gotten from anybody else. He created the whole industry and out of that industry, out of the use of certain type of oil, for instance, it became possible to create these great dynamos. You couldn’t have very large pieces of equipment without a certain type of oil which keeps the metal from working against fretting, against the sides and so forth. Everything we have—the automobile, the airplane, the submarine, the battleship and so forth and so on—a product of the oil industry. And the oil industry brought oil to the United States cheaper than any other country in the world was able to have it. And in the process, of course, the were many men who became wealthy. And the hatred and the envy of the men who became wealthy in the oil industry is still with us.

There are individuals who get apoplectic about he oil companies making money. What would they have preferred? An industry where nobody got rich, of course. I mean, time an d again we keep moving as a country closer and closer to the idea that people shouldn’t get rich unless they please the crowd, unless, of course, they are entertainers or unless Dan Rather gets three million dollars a year. Is anybody picketing for that? Are there any sermons about making too much money off of the sweat of the poor? And the oil industry is a working industry.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] All these companies, all these activities are workers. Your farmer that you are talking about is somebody that works, that produces something, not just makes noises in the air or puts a ball through a basket up against the wall. Some of those {?} are higher than the basket.

[Rushdoony] In the early 70s I twice had reports from people on our mailing list about pastors who in the course of a sermon had insisted it was immoral for any many to make more than so much...

[Scott] More than they.

[Rushdoony] That is exactly what came out of the second. The first was ... had set 30,000 as a moral limit. The second, 45. And the... it was asked by someone who was not a member, but who was visiting why 45? And he said, “Well, I make that.”

[Scott] So that was a moral wage.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is envy. Let no one be better than myself.

[Scott] It is easy for you, they say as though it is.

It is a... a great way to ignore ability. I remember.... I remember when I was a boy we were swimming in the Hudson River, a filthy river. We weren’t supposed to swim in it. Every one of us were under orders not to go near the water and we always did. And there was a pile driver that tied up at this little pier and somebody got up and climbed halfway up and dove off half way up and great... oh, boy, was that a wonderful thing. So I climbed to the top and I dove off. And it scared me, too, and I got a headache when I landed that lasted about three days. And when I resurfaced and looked at the crowd they all had their back to me. Every one had turned away. I had never forgot it and I was never stupid enough to make a high dive again.

[Rushdoony] And that is envy. Well, we do need, as I said earlier, an emphasis on the seven deadly sins, on envy, on these things that are tearing our society apart.

[Scott] Well...

[Rushdoony] And no one is even recognizing them for the evil that they are.

[Scott] Well, we could go down the line. Pride...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... for instance, we should discuss one of these days. The... the pride that impels individuals to do the work of God.

[Rushdoony] And lust which today has respectability and if you speak against it, you are a Puritan, you are a kill joy, you are any number of things. I read quite a diatribe recently against those who treat lust as though it were bad.

[Scott] Oh, really? Well, have they seen some of the derivations?

[Rushdoony] Well, of course, everything goes for these people.

[Scott] Greed. Do you wonder what impels somebody like Ivan Boesky? How much money is enough money? Now if he had put together, if he had put together some of those corporations to be productive, I would have said, well, well have here the makings of another Carnegie. But to simply swap stocks is something else. Well, envy.

I really consider it lucky, fortunate—a better word—fortunate, maybe a blessing, that I have not been cursed with that particular sweetness. I am more apt to admire superior ability when I see it. And because the world needs it. I would hate to see mankind limited to my measure. I would have no hope if I weren’t able to run into smarter people.

[Rushdoony] One of the things that Delamora says about the envious man is that he says he is like the toad who spits poison from his hole and he says the envious man will endlessly praise insignificant and mediocre men.

[Scott] No interest.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Maybe that is what is going on with the editors of People magazine.

[Rushdoony] Well, the New York Times book review and other periodicals you read some of these periodicals and the book is supposed to be such a great one and if you get fooled into buying it about three times at out four you will find that it isn't worth much.

[Scott] It is unbelievable. The New York Times book review is one of the masochistic exercises that I go through weekly. And it constantly reviews the trashiest and most obscure, crazy, stupid novels. Now novels today comprise only 10 percent of the books, but they are 90 percent of the books the New York Times book review reviews.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, Delamora says they must tear down those who are superior and exalt the inferior. Somehow that is their virtue. They are proving that they are fair minded and appreciative.

[Scott] It is a very deadly business.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because I have actually run into individuals who have made up lies about others.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Of whom they were envious. And there is no defense against that.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] It cannot be anticipated.

[Rushdoony] Well, the envious are inferior. And instead of trying to excel they are going to tear everyone down to their level.

[Scott] Well, let’s go back to Iago, a very interesting portrayal, because he was the captain of the guard and he managed to fool Othello all the way up to the end and yet he didn’t come on as subservient. He was one of these bluff man to man types whose courtier like qualities were disguised in a bluff manner so that Othello trusted him and believed him. He thought he didn’t quite approach being a peer, but very close so that he gave the idea of blunt honesty. I hate to tell you this, but your wife might be unfaithful. As a friend, I want to bring this news to you. That sort of thing.

And there is a ... a writer M. Scott Teck. Did you look at any of his books?

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] He... he wrote a book on evil, I think it was. Half the book was very good because it came very close to what you are ... we are talking about tonight, about the activities of sin in every day life, unrecognized, unrecognized sins, unacknowledged. I mean public drunkenness. Yes. We can see that. That is... that is no good. Obscenities. That we can see. Racism, that we can see. We can frown up it, smoking in public or whatever. But ... but envy is acceptable.

[Rushdoony] Yes and Solomon says, “Who can stand before envy?”

Well, our time is up now. Thank you all for listening and remember that as a Christian people we are to eschew envy. The community of saints is to be our standard. Thank you for listening.

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