From the Easy Chair

Health; Mental & Physical

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 80-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BP124

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BP124, Health; Mental & Physical from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 230, November 9, 1990.

Otto Scott and I are now going to discuss health, both mental and physical health, not from a medical point of view, of course, nor from the perspective of psychotherapists, but from the perspective of intelligent laymen who are concerned with the social order, the fact that people today have remarkably intense concern with health which is almost unhealthy. So we feel that it is important to give attention to a subject. People are running around trying to recapture or maintain youth by endless jogging and other things that concern them with a remarkable intensity.

I recall when the jogging craze first came up a doctor telling me he was all for it because it made for a great deal of business for him. Of course, he was being ironic. But he said exercise is very good, but jogging is the worst form of exercise.

Well, with that general statement, Otto, do you want to make comment about the implications of our subject?

[Scott] Well, I agree with you. I think one of the things that impresses me about the joggers is that most of the ones I see jogging don’t seem to need it.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Those... those of us who probably do need it aren’t able to.

[Rushdoony] Well, I know one who gained a drawn and haggard look, all muscle and no mind, just working endlessly to maintain youth.

[Scott] ...which.

[Rushdoony] I have no objection to youth, but I have no objection to age either. I enjoyed every minute of my youth, my middle age and now, well, maybe it is old age, but I don’t think you are really old until you quit working.

[Scott] You are not old until there is nobody left that is older than you are.

[Rushdoony] Well, in our family I guess I am the oldest.

[Scott] The whole business of health, somebody said years ago, that a person in... a man in the middle of the 19th century could enjoy his condition if he was in fair health rather... rather nicely. But, he said, today we look in the mirror and we see the signs of mortality and we know more about health than physicians did 100 years ago. And we know too much for our own good, for our own comfort, because the slightest thing we are... our minds go off into complete speculations, diagnoses and so forth. And then, of course, we have the terrible misfortune of living in a country that wants to lecture us about health around the clock...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...every single day and every hour of the day. I mean, I realize when I was smoking cigarettes for many, many years that it wasn’t the best thing for my health, but I enjoyed it. They were a solace until it became a crime and it was no longer possible to smoke. Now they have taken away the cigarettes and, of course, we know about all the other terrible things that we shouldn’t do. We shouldn’t eat unsaturated fats, whatever they are and red meat, which I love and so forth and so on. I mean, really, the quality of life has been greatly diminished.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...by these incessant lectures, these people who are not only concerned with their own health, but they are concerned with my health.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And there isn’t a thing that hasn’t at one time or other been damned as bad for your health: wheat, milk...

[Scott] Eggs.

[Rushdoony] Eggs, fruits and vegetables, you name it. There is something wrong with everything.

[Scott] And the balanced diet... I have heard about a balanced diet from my mother when I was a boy. Never understood how she was balancing it. The ... the only thing that I share with George Bush is a detestation of broccoli. I don’t know where broccoli came from and why they keep promoting it, but it is everywhere on every restaurant dish. I asked the girls when I ordered what sort of vegetables, broccoli, broccoli. Broccoli and Brussels sprouts, I have never understand why God made either of them.

[Rushdoony] Well, I like broccoli and maybe one of these days given the state of his mind, George Bush might even say, “Read my lips, I want broccoli.”

[Scott] It is possible. I mean, he is the only man I know who would make such a switch. But the...

[Rushdoony] Brussels sprouts, less so. I don't object to them, but I used to live where they were very, very cheap because it was a Brussels sprouts growing area. And in those days the local markets carried what could not be shipped. So they were as cheap as two cents a pound. So naturally there was a lot of Brussels sprouts on the table.

[Scott] I hope your children liked them.

[Rushdoony] Well, they ate them.

[Scott] They ate them. That was ... that was another matter.

[Rushdoony] They were trained to eat what was on the table. But I ate them, too. I didn’t mind them. As time past I felt I had had a lifetime quota of Brussels sprouts.

[Scott] There is also this question, I remember reading or see a graffiti years ago in a New York subway. It said, “Help stamp out mental health.” And I was in favor of that the minute I read it, because the mental health people had been after us as assiduously as the exercise and food people. And they have ever really defined mental health, what it is. I mean, how do you know and who tells? Who judges?

[Rushdoony] Well, I recall back in the 50s attending a medical meeting. I was taken there by a very fine friend, a Christian doctor and the speaker was from Great Britain, a heart specialist and his talk was very interesting because he said the key to health, mental and physical, is religious.

[Scott] He is probably right.

[Rushdoony] And he said and documented it at great length the kind of thing he had seen as a result of a bad conscience, how it was so destructive to a man’s life.

[Scott] Interesting.

[Rushdoony] ...that it could destroy this or that organ because he would be punishing himself internally.

[Scott] That is very interesting.

[Rushdoony] ...paying for his sin. He also said that the rate of recovery, it was his observation, was greater among strong Christians that unbelievers, that for similar surgery the devout Christian would be on the road to recovery and on his way home before others were anywhere near recovery.

[Scott] Lack of fear.

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes.

[Scott] Lack of fear. Fear...

[Rushdoony] Fear is a major problem.

[Scott] Fear is a big thing. I recall the first time it came to my attention that when I lived in San Francisco many years ago and was a member of the press club there. A local businessman died in the forest during dear hunting season. And they said exposure.

And I said, “What do you mean exposure? How could it be exposure? It has been very mild. You know, deer... you don’t hunt deer in the winter. You hunt deer early fall and it is pretty nice out there.”

Well, he said, “What do you want me to put on the certificate? Terror?”

The man got lost in the woods and he died of fear.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the other occasion, I don’t know if I have told this one before or not, was down in Caracas and they ... they collected all these people who were supposed to be 100 years old. And there was an American physician and the English {?} there who wanted to go over and see them. And I said, “Well, that is really more... more interesting to you than to me. Why don’t you go? And I will be here when you come back.”

Well, he came back. I said, “Did you see them?”

He said, “Yes.”

I said, “Did you find any common denominator?” more or less as a joke.

And he said, “Yes, I did.”

I said, “What?”

Well, he said, “If you lived to be 100, almost everything that you can imagine will happen has happened. You have lost near and dear people and so forth. And you have gone through all kinds of vicissitudes.” And he said, “These were mainly,” he said, “peasants. But,” he said, “there were 100.” And he said, “Every one was the sort that could lie down at night and go to sleep. The wasn’t a worrier in the crowd.”

And I thought he had put his finger on it. Fear and worry has shortened more lives than anything else in the world and, of course, your... your common on religious faith which keeps you from fear and worry... If something really horrible happens to you, you have the knowledge that this is with the permission of God, that it has a purpose and that it is out of your hands.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And you can turn away.

[Rushdoony] Well, when I was a boy I was told once by an older man who was very knowledgeable about animals as we were approaching the house and the dog was snarling, just barking and snarling he said, “Don’t show any fear. Dogs can smell fear and then they will attack. But they are less likely to attack, far less likely if you are not afraid.”

[Scott] Sure.

[Rushdoony] And I have every reason to believe, over the years, from things that I have seen, that that is true. Now I believe that is true on a higher level among human beings. I believe that because the white man has lost his courage, because he has lost his faith and he is fearful about everything, all kinds of minority peoples who are being trained, brought along on the road to civilization, educated and helped by the white man have suddenly smelled fear in him and are becoming outrageous in their behavior, contemptuous and a great deal of our social unrest, I believe is because the white man has lost his guts.

[Scott] Well, our governing class has lost the will to govern.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It would be very simple to restore order in the United States. It could be done in a week. But our governing class lacks the will to do it. I mean, any sensible man would send the army into New York and be done with it or Los Angeles or Detroit or Washington, DC.

This subject came up some years ago when there were riots in Washington and I said the president should be impeached. And my companion said, “Why?”

I said, “Because he is sitting on his ass in the White House and they are burning Washington.”

And they were. They were setting fire to the city. This is a very strange period.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But, of course, it doesn’t last. And, of course, this carried... this is a subject of health also, because we are talking about the political health of the culture.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, on the plane back from London I was reading a book which described the vast criminal network of pornography, of child abuse, of drugs, of criminal cartels and much, much more all on on Interlink....

[Scott] Contemporary?

[Rushdoony] Contemporary, today. And how this one federal official worked hard to nail this one man, a European, who was one of the worst in the field of child pornography. He loved to film films of little girls being viciously raped by himself. And the films were almost beyond description they were so bad and he vowed he was going to get that man and worked for years and finally nailed him on a trip to the United States.

The evidence was clear cut, a vast amount of it. In violation of American law the judge gave the man a four month prison sentence.

Now that is the kind of thing we have.

[Scott] Did he give the judge’s name?

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] Isn’t that interesting?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Isn’t that interesting?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We don't know who these people are. You know, the... it is a very strange thing. The American judiciary seems to be operating in the shadows. I looked at the last electoral ballot, the... the election ballot and the judges they only had one name on each one.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And I refuse to vote.

[Scott] There was each... each... each judge was running unopposed.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] There is no explanation, no background, nothing. There is no advertisement. There is no billboards. The lawyers select the judge and he runs unopposed and we are sitting there. We have these idiots on the bench.

[Rushdoony] Yes and the judge who is on the bench and is running will run unopposed except very rarely because any lawyer who dares to run against him is going to lose any case in his court thereafter. So they won’t run. And why should they run when they can make far more, if they are a good lawyer as then a judge does.

[Scott] Well, only the pure in heart assume that judges live on their incomes.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, as one man whom you know, an attorney told me, he said, “Why should I run for judge and get 40,000 a year when I can make 400,000 without working any harder?”

[Scott] You, really... when you have society in the state of corruption, why should people believe the judges are immune? There are enormous issues involved. There are tremendous amounts of money involved.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And whenever you have an enormous amount of money and pressure involved, it is very hard for me to believe in the independence of the judiciary.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Especially a judiciary that is allowed the license that our judges are allowed.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And given the fact that now we no longer have men of dedication running for the office of judge, as was still the case not too many years ago.

[Scott] Well, yes. It was the case, but it has also been the case that dedication sometimes is misplaced. We now know that Justice Brandeis, for instance, used his position on the Supreme Court for political purposes and that so did Justice Frankfurter and so did a number of other of our justices. Now the Supreme Court is supposed to be out of politics. That is the reason it is elected... it is appointed for life. But these men violated the trust of the people gave them. And they died honored and in bed.

[Rushdoony] Amen.

[Scott] Of course, after they are safely dead, well, then, the facts come out. There is nothing you can do about it then. These are sort of unhealthy facts. But there is no way that you could have health unless you know what sickness meant.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now we have... we started on this, I think, on the subject of mental health. How can you tell when a person is mentally healthy or not? This is a subject I have never even seen defined. There is much about psychiatry. There is much about psychology. There is much about various times of ... kinds of therapists and therapy. Now if there is an accident, for instance, the therapists go in to give grief counseling. I don’t know what ever happened to the clergy or the family or friends or parents. We have specialists now to take care of human interactions. And yet most of the therapists and specialists that I have known—and I have known quite a good number on a social level, I might add—have been far from attractive individuals.

[Rushdoony] Well, one of the reasons for the decline of mental as well as physical health is the lack of a disciplined life. When we were younger, perhaps this was carried to foolish extremes. One of the things that marked our younger days was the addiction of many of experts, as well as well as many parents and many school teachers to the benefits of a cold shower.

[Scott] Don’t tell me about it. My father insisted and said it would put a backbone, a spine in me. You know, I looked... you used to look around and wonder whether any people around with no spines. But I had a cold shower every morning until I left home and I haven’t had one since.

[Rushdoony] Nor have I. I attended one school where the hot water was turned off when you wanted to ... when you took your shower after the gym class, because that was good for you.

[Scott] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] I am sure he turned it on when ... before he showered to go home.

[Scott] It is an old American thing. Anne’s grandmother used to take a cold bath, a cold bath. And that was customary in her generation.

[Rushdoony] Well, let’s skip the cold showers. I felt that was masochism, not discipline, and get back to the disciplined life. The thing hat makes life easier is habit, doing things automatically. We dress each morning, putting on certain things first. And a particular shoe goes on before the other shoe. We do this all automatically.

[Scott] It speeds the process.

[Rushdoony] It speeds the process. Life functions with habits. But we have despised habits since World War II. Children are not brought up with the disciplined life with the habit pattern established. And I think that is very bad for the mental and the physical health of the individual. One of the consequences is the hit and miss attitude towards exercise. And now you do it and then now you don’t. It is an act of will, not a routine. And wherever we lose that discipline we suffer, I believe. And we need that discipline mentally as well as physically.

[Scott] Well, mentally yes. And it comes in fairly early. To learn that you can discipline your thoughts there are certain avenues which one cannot allow himself to enter mentally.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The moment they appear you turn them off and ...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... and you think in other directions. Otherwise, you will be at the mercy of your own mind.

[Rushdoony] And that is, I think, a critical problem today. I believe you have cited something that is definitely lacking today. People have trouble controlling themselves, their own mind. Their mind wanders. Whether it is in a classroom or whether they are adults and I was once told that in... this was in an aerospace plant that the average was about one engineer in 10 who was functioning properly.

[Scott] You mean concentrating?

[Rushdoony] Concentrating. The other nine, their minds drifted here and there. They were wandering around. Their work was minimal because there was no discipline in their lives.

[Scott] That is interesting. Well, journalism is a pretty good means of discipline. I started out in a city room that was noisy with people running back and forth, the telephone ringing and a deadline and a clock standing up there. And you had to forget all this and concentrate on what you were writing in order to meet your deadline.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And it was a very good... very good training.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I used to work with the children playing around me and had no problem, but that sort of thing people cannot do now. It is impossible for them. They are not trained to it. They can’t go into a situation of any noise. They have to have, perhaps, the TV going full blast. They have all kinds of crutches and they fell they can’t work apart from them, but actually they are not functioning in any of the situations.

[Scott] Anne tell... told me that the children today are much more difficult to teach dancing than they were. They cannot concentrate. They hate to be told what to do.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They are insolent and their parents cannot be reached or talked to about it.

[Rushdoony] Well, that is true across the boards. And the result is that we have an undisciplined generation. I think the sad fact is that we have more intelligence among the young than in our day. There are a great many things that predispose the young towards intelligence. Our culture no longer is geared to manual labor, but to skilled labor. But precisely when we have had this shift we have had a loss of discipline in the training of they young.

[Scott] Interesting.

[Rushdoony] One of the things that has marked our lifetime is the disappearance of a great deal of unskilled labor. Remember when we were young, any kind of work in the city you had a large number of ditch diggers. They were hired in great numbers. The was a constant demand for them. But machinery has come in and replaced them.

[Scott] That is true.

[Rushdoony] And the number of jobs today for unskilled workers is very limited. And yet at the same time we are producing more unskilled labor than every before in history so that industry has to train these people they hire. The army has to teach them how to read so they don’t destroy equipment and so on. And to be incapable of meeting one’s responsibilities is destructive. There can be, I think, no harder think to face than to be confronted with a job and you don’t know the first thing about how to do it.

[Scott] Well, that is true. Of course, the men who are running the machines are the same sort of men who used to be digging the ditches. We have a much higher level of skill in construction than we used to have and in industry generally. But not too long ago I saw an examination for a high school diploma printed up in 1917. And I want to tell you that no post graduate scholar that I know could pass it. There has been a marked decline...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...in the intellectual level of our educated class. There has been a great increase, on the other hand, in the theater of education, the theatrics, you might say. We hear an awful lot more... our young people are terribly articulate, but totally unlearned. They don’t know history. They don’t know foreign languages. They don’t know foreign cultures. They don’t know the world. And yet they have all the hubris of the greatly educated individual.

[Rushdoony] Well, about 10 or 12 years ago I was talking with someone who had heavy equipment and did backhoe work, bulldozing, that sort of thing.

[Scott] The mechanical engineers they call them.

[Rushdoony] Oh. Well, he was an operator of this equipment. And he was commenting on the fact that he had more work than he could handle. He as getting older and there were very few people around to take his place, because, he said, first of all, I had to work hard before I could go into this business. The equipment cost me...

[Scott] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] ...fifty thousand, 100,000. So I had to accumulate something to make the down payment. I had to work hard then to make the payments. And the insurance costs. I forget what he said, it was in the thousands.

Well, the problem was that there were young men who were ready to go to work for him. He would have to teach them. They had the aptitude. But none of them had the self discipline to work, to save and accumulate in order to be operators on their own in due time.

And that is the area where we have failed. And I believe that the inability to take care of yourself in such a field, to remain always working for someone, incapable of saving enough to buy equipment is mentally and physically bad for a man.

[Rushdoony] No question. Operating engineers, by the way, is what they call them.

[Rushdoony] Operating engineers.

[Scott] Operating engineers.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, it is true that the great effort in previous generations was to have a business of your own or to be at least self supporting or to have a skill which would enable you to be self supporting. Business schools today teach you how to get along with the boss. They teach you everything about business excepting how to raise the money.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And therefore they are mainly turning out business courtiers, butter up specialists.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And this is unhealthy. We are talking now about mental health.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the whole question, well, for instance, the phrase will power has gone out of existence. You remember and I do, too...

[Rushdoony] Oh, my, yes. Books and books on the subject when we were boys.

[Scott] That they really emphasized will power.

[Rushdoony] And the teachers did, too.

[Scott] You have to have will power. You have to be able to... they have a much fancier way of putting it today. They talk about that future oriented and the present oriented. And they have built a very elaborate thing about the simple matter of will power where you have to go without in order to attain a stated goal.

Riceman went into this.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] In his inner directed and outer directed individual.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And, of course, I will never forgive him for creating the acronym WASP, which is a deliberately denigrative term.

[Rushdoony] Well, we have a major mental health industry today...

[Scott] ...which is creating sickness.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And encouraging people to feel that their problems are mental health problems when they are essentially moral failures.

[Scott] Well, they are... I think you put your finger on something when you said the lack of ability to support one’s self. That was the observation that William Bolitho made when he wrote Murder for Profit. In those days—and he wrote that in 1927 or 28, I think—serial murderers were so rare that he had to go back to {?} and the butcher of Hamburg and {?} and some earlier specimens. Today, of course, serial murderers are common.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But the instances that the used, which, incidentally was also, was plagiarized, in a way, by Charlie Chaplin in his film Monsieur Verdoux, was that each one of these individuals was intelligent enough to live on a fairly high level, but had no skill. And therefore turned to crime and in the course of the crime committed a murder and made money from the murder and then began to murder as a means of livelihood. So he became a professional murderer. We have now different kinds. We have the mafia murderers. We have all kinds of assassins in the modern world. Some of these revolutionary groups and political groups have psychopaths who...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...attach themselves to a cause as a rationale. And we have a culture which increasingly accepts murder.

You mentioned the comment of the judge from The Victim’s Song, that book in which the judge in this particular case in New York, I think it was, grew impatient with a long winded attorney and said, “Oh, come on. This is just an ordinary murder.”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now that is a very unhealthy society.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And... and we could go into the moral ... the moral end of this at great length as evidences of poor mental health, the rise of... the rise of perverts. They have always existed, but any society that tolerates them or accepts them is, according to the historians, a very sick society.

So sickness here, it is impossible to separate the moral, the intellectual and the physical.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They are all bound together.

[Rushdoony] Well, nowadays the child very early is excused in his moral failures. He is vindicated in his laziness and he is overindulged with a net result that lacking maturity he never has real mental health and maturity is basic to mental health. You have to grow up, in other words, to be mentally healthy. And instead of trying to grow up, our culture has people who are trying to stay perpetually young or on a perpetual state of childhood and I think it is a form of insanity.

[Scott] Well, it is. Definitely. You cannot stop the clock. And who wants to remain a child anyway?

[Rushdoony] Well...

[Scott] Childhood, you know, you are small. You have no authority. Everybody can tell you what to do. You have no money. You are a prisoner. I ... I never look at childhood as... as a happy time. And a great... my great desire when I was a child was to grow up and have a life where people didn't tell me what to do every other minute.

[Rushdoony] Well, we do have an increase in longevity in our time and some are under the opinion that it is... and the illusion that it is due to a great many things and medical advance, better personal care and so on. But in reality it is the elimination of the childhood diseases that has increased he number of those living.

[Scott] And the adult diseases.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Pneumonia used to take people away automatically.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It doesn't do it anymore.

[Rushdoony] That is right.

[Scott] Diphtheria and so forth.

[Rushdoony] So we haven’t really had a fair test of how healthy our generation today is.

[Scott] Well, we are younger for our ages than our parents were. My father in his 60s seemed much older to me than men in their 60s appear now. The ... but there are new diseases, as Durant said, new diseases from the cures of the old. Viruses, filterable viruses, which can only be detected by their effects and cannot be actually seen even by the most powerful microscopes.

So ... and they mutate, I understand at such a rapid rate that by the time one is identified it is already produced mutates, mutants that have not yet been indentified. There is a whole area of medicine opening up which apparently is going to bring to a close this brief period of relative medical command. The bacteriological theory which seemed to work well enough to get rid of pneumonia and diphtheria and measles and various and sundry other things is coming to a close. We now have a variety of influenza and lowered immunity illnesses which the doctors really have no cures for. They can’t even diagnose.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, AIDS, of course...

[Scott] ...is the most spectacular.

[Rushdoony] The most spectacular. It has to do with the destruction of the immunity system of the body.

[Scott] Right.

[Rushdoony] And lack of faith and fearfulness are very destructive of the immunity system. So I think one of the major steps towards a return to mental health not only personally and in the family, but in the culture is a return to the faith. Then a man can stand I a situation because what counts is his faith, his courage to stand up, not his ability to run.

[Scott] Well, much more should be written and spoken in that area. The clergy has not really brought these matters to the attention of the congregations, as far as I know. I was browsing recently... I lost, you know, a recent... the library thefts that I endured a number of books were taken from my library recently. But I got another copy, a soft copy of a book called Pagans and Christians. And I was looking at it briefly today. And the sexual area, the area of sexual behavior there was in the second century AD an enormous variety, probably... most unprecedented variety of sexual experimentation in the pagan world ever known before or since. Almost everything became allowed: incest, all kinds of things.

And against this the Christians had one standard of conduct, one only. Certain things were permitted. Certain things were not permitted. So look at the difference between a Pagan and a Christian. The Pagan had this totally limitless landscape to choose from and the Christian had only one.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, it is a lot easier to live with only one. And the Christian today is in a similar position.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] He is surrounded by a pagan culture.

[Rushdoony] A doctor, a professor in a medical school in Spain wrote some years ago that contrary to the usual picture medicine was really saved by the coming of Christianity and had a tremendous renaissance. The reason was that Pagan medicine was mechanistic. And, as a result, it could not cope with the real problems of the human body because it had no awareness of the psychological and religious dimensions of illness. And Christianity by bringing in that aspect really created a major revival and a consider development in medical practice which is normally ignored by historians. It bought about this perspective because looking at mental health it recognized the primacy of religion. And with that in mind, it was able to rethink the whole of the medical field, discard the mechanistic model of Greco Roman medicine and regard man as a creature made by God whose mental and physical health first of all, had a religious dimension.

[Scott] Well, that is interesting, because our reliance today is on chemistry and surgery.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And these are totally physical. There is talk about psychiatry and psychology, but actually very little application in any sense of the way.

I fail to see... I do not know of a single proof that psychiatry has ever cured any illness.

[Rushdoony] Well, a Dutch psychiatrist did an exhaustive study on that some years ago and came to that conclusion that as compared with a non medical intervention case of mental illness, the recovery rate for those who never went to a psychiatrist was more rapid than those that went to a psychiatrist.

[Scott] Well, I should think that would follow, because psychiatry dredges up all sorts of incidents of a personal nature involving your family.

[Rushdoony] And also it makes money by extended analysis.

[Scott] Well, the first question a psychiatrist asks is: How much money do you have? But, of course, that is... that is... that is another... another subject.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That is true when you go to a hospital also.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, mental and physical health today, I think, is in crisis. We have had a number of years where everybody was involved with trying to build up their health with all kinds of mechanical devices, with jogging and a good many other things. And it is wearing a bit thin.

[Scott] Well, most of the young people, a great many of the young people go to the gym, both men and women. And they have all this heavy equipment. And it is interesting for me, because they...we have men with bulging muscles, much more than I have ever seen before.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I mean, these burly hairdressers, clerks and what not. But in most of the situations of life I fail to see any outstanding examples of courage.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, we routinely have today in society at large physical and mental outbursts of a very unhealthy sort that did not exist. For example, in Europe the insanity manifested at soccer games or football games as they call it, people going berserk and destroying things. And the kind of reaction that rock musicians get in Europe and here. It is mentally sick.

[Scott] Well...

[Rushdoony] It is spiritually sick.

[Scott] It reminds me of Byzantium. In Byzantium they had actual wars over the reds and the greens.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] In the chariot races.

[Rushdoony] Well, today we have a major battle because I... I believe that psychotherapy has become an evasion from the fact of sin. People will not face up to the fact I have done this because I am stinker. I am sinner. Not it is something of a mental problem. Therefore, we have got to go to a psychotherapist. We have got to undergo therapy or else we cannot solve this problem.

[Scott] Well, actually they are more apt to put it in the category of a... a disease.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Alcoholism is called a disease. Well, of course, it is not a disease. It is misbehavior and it is certainly not a medical disease, although the AMA officially said that it is, because it then enabled the AMA to treat alcoholics and to collect insurance.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But a priest wrote a book on the subject in which he said the alcoholics real problem was that he was engaged in an argument with God in which he refused to accept limits and insisted on living a lifestyle that made no sense simply because he wanted to. And that once it was born in upon the alcoholic that he was not in control of his own destiny and could not be, then he was ready for reformation which, of course, was a... essentially a conversion. And the same thing was said by Dr. Jung, the psychologist in Switzerland. He said at the end of his career every patient he had came to him because he was in trouble with God.

[Rushdoony] Well, in the past few weeks, well, maybe a couple of months, I have encountered a number of cases of real depravity and I mean depravity. And the solution, whether it has been on the part of doctors or ministers is psychiatric or psychological counseling.

So sin is set aside in favor of a mental sickness. And the result is that instead of solving problems, I believe we are aggravating them.

[Scott] Well, yes, if we take that approach.

[Rushdoony] And it is the approach that the churches are now taking.

[Scott] Well, the churches are then taking the approach of their enemies.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because the whole subject was launched by Freud openly and deliberately...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] As an anti religious instrument.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] He said so.

[Rushdoony] Yes, he did.

Well our time is about up. Is there a last sentence or two you would like to get in, Otto?

[Scott] Well, I do—despite what I said—believe in normal exercise and in eating properly and doing all the sensible things, but I do think that to use this as ... to use these measures as a means to escape death is not only foolish, but a little bit pathetic.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And do you still believe in stamping out mental health?

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Well, 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.