From the Easy Chair

Substitutes for Religion

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 117-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161CJ159

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CJ159, Substitutes for Religion, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 269, July the third, 1992.

This evening Otto Scott, Douglas Murray, Mark Rushdoony and myself will discuss substitutes for religion. We live in a day when all the churches have a high percentage of membership, higher than perhaps any other time in our history. Their influence is really at almost an all time low simply because people find their religion in a variety of substitutes. I learned recently of two areas that have become substitute religions because of the Internal Revenue Service.

It used to be in this country and particular in New York City where the very wealthy lived in earlier years that the wealthy gave generously to establish or maintain charities or to make possible great art collections and establish museums, but something developed after the income tax amendment was passed and the income tax in particular after World War I began to increase. The very wealthy found that with a variety of taxes which have since increased phenomenally, they could no longer have the ambitious and expensive balls that were once common place. The only way they could maintain their old social calendars was now to have balls which were tax deductible, ostensibly promoting a cause. And the two favorite causes became charities and art.

They chose these two because it made possible as much pleasure as they could squeeze into an evening and sometimes until dawn, spend a vast amount of money and gain a tax deduction because it was for a tax deductible cause, art or charity.

It would be interesting to see how much federal legislation has one way or another helped create a substitute for religion.

I think we will start—and there are many subjects we could cite, as I already have, charity and art, psychology and the educational establishment, of course is a substitute for religion and has a plan of salvation and a whole host of things that politics is involved in—but I think we can start with psychology.

When I wrote Freud I think about 25 years or so ago I pointed out that Freud said that it was useless to try to deduce scientific proof of... in order to disillusion people with regard to religion. He said as long as people are troubled by the problem of guilt, they will seek a Savior. Therefore the only way to destroy religion would be to convert guilt from a religious to a scientific problem. And this is what he dedicated himself to doing. As a result, we have seen the rise of psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis and various forms of psychotherapy as means of salvation. And their power is tremendous. The amount of money poured into these disciplines is enormous. And the psychotherapist has replaced the pastor and the priest in the cure of souls, not that he succeeds at it, but he has replaced him and his work in this sphere has been of deadly consequences.

Not only have there been attempts in recent years to prohibit the clergy from doing any counseling, but to require them, if they do, to gain a license from a board of psychologists and psychiatrists. So far these attempts have failed, but the fact that the attempts have been made indicates the direction of things.

Well, with that introduction, Otto, would you like to comment on psychology and psychiatry, psychoanalysis as a substitute for religion?

[ Scott ] Well, I... I do agree with you that the question... the primary question was one of guilt. And the psychiatrist did replace the priest, because psychoanalysis is an obvious steal from the confessional.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...in which the patient is supposed to tell all. And fundamentally this putting aside all of the psychiatric jargon about transference regarding the psychiatrist’s role and so forth, it was the transference of guilt also to the parents. The parents are responsible and I remember asking a fellow once, well, then their parents were responsible for them. And you could carry this all the way back. This sort of slightly ridiculous thing to begin with.

But the main thing here was not only that guilt was relieved, but also there was no sin. In psychiatry there is no such thing as sin. No matter what the individual had done or experienced or had believed it was all acceptable. Homosexuality or lesbianism or whatever was totally acceptable and there was no remorse expected. All that was expected was an explanation of what made them that way and once they knew why they were made that way they wouldn’t have to do it anymore.

Well, that ... that is the part where psychiatry got into trouble, because nobody has been able to prove any difference in the behavior of individuals who have been psychoanalyzed before or after. They come out saying that they feel better and generally they ... it has cost them a lot of money and taken a lot of time. And they have said things that they probably would never have otherwise have said and gotten things off their chest. But you really cannot tell the difference in lifestyle between a person who has been analyzed and a person who has not...

And it has spawned a whole tribe, you might say, of similar efforts with less fearsome vernacular. We have now groups that are applying these principles to each other in common. And they share the idea that there is no such thing as evil. There is only a sickness. And this has permeated our court system. Nobody is evil. Nobody is bad. People are just sick or they are mistaken or they are ignorant. But there is no such thing as evil, excepting, of course, for Hitler. He is the only remaining evil figure in the world.

[ Rushdoony ] Douglas, would you like to say something at this point?

[ Murray ] Well, I have... used to have... when I was in business I had customers, a few customers who were psychiatrists and I asked them because they seemed to be strange. They were unusual people. And I asked them why they went into that field. And they said that they just sort of fell into it, that they hadn't originally had no intention of going into that field when they started out in school. But in candor they said that they thought that that was a great way to make a living. And when you stop to think about it, people give far less to the Church than they do to their psychiatrist and psychiatrists charge large fees and you pay whether they cure you or not, just like in the case of the doctor. They call it a medical practice and that is... that is the game, because whether they ... whether they cure your problem or not, whether they absolve you of your guilt or transfer the guilt somewhere else so that you don’t feel so bad about it, they ... you still get the big bill. And so you... you start to follow the money and you see a different ... a different reason for that profession. It is very, very lucrative.

So the psychiatrist that I have known... one fellow owed the business a large bill when I took the business over. And I called them and his wife said that I could come out to the house and see him if I wanted to, but that he couldn’t be disturbed at the moment. I went out there to either collect the money or pick up the equipment. And I knew this guy made a lot of money, lived over in Belvedere in a very expensive home. When I arrived there he was sitting inside of a huge hifi speaker, a large bass reflect speaker that... quite large. He was sitting inside of it with a ... a 16 ounce glass of straight scotch, full of scotch and maybe one or two ice cubes and that is how the guy spent his waking hours at home.

And the other one that I knew he had been married six times and was unhappy with his sixth wife and he gave me to understand. And so I haven’t met a well adjusted psychiatrist yet.

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, I think it would be difficult. You know, farmers go in... into agriculture because they love land. They love the productivity of growing something or raising an animal and doctors, to be a good doctor you have to be comfortable with making important decisions. And you go into different fields, depending upon your temperament. It makes you wonder what kid of temperament people have who want to listen to other people’s problems.

[ Murray ] Well, they have no yardstick. I think that is what drives them around the bend is they lose any semblance of where are the limits of human behavior. They have no yardstick. Religious doctrine means nothing to them. So they kind of have to make it up as they go along. They... they have to try to derive from what they see going on in society what the norm is and then try to ... to compare the patient to the norm and tell the patient whether he is normal or not.

[ Scott ] Well, I don’t think they do that. They... there is no... there is no standard of... of normality in psychiatry. Psychiatry takes the view that ... that you are a victim of ... of society. You have a problem and they... they don’t deal with psychotics. That is ... get down to ... in terms of medicine. In terms of medical practice, a psychiatrist doesn’t make as much money as a surgeon. Surgeons make the most.

The psychiatrist takes a neurotic, but he will not take a psychotic. In other words, he will take somebody who can function but is unhappy and the neurotic has been described as somebody who is afflicted with free floating unhappiness. If you straighten out one area they find another area to be unhappy about and this is the way they live. But they always have... they have free floating problems. And they have money. They have to be able to pay for the treatment. So essentially it seems to me that they lift the idea of guilt and they allow now, of course, they have accepted homosexuality as an... as a... a choice and therefore as part of normal behavior. And having gone that far, it would be pretty... pretty difficult to ascribe any standard of normality to contemporary psychiatry.

But I think it is interesting that Freud ever taught his children or told his children anything about sex, that he had a classic Victorian marriage. In fact, he had two marriages, if I remember correctly. There were no...

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] This is Einstein I was thinking of. But he had a classic Victorian marriage and he himself was a classic Victorian. When he visited the United States, which he did not like, he was away from home for a while. He found American women very attractive and he found the whole situation very exasperating. And I think it was Stanley Hall who had him over as a guest and Hall said, “Well, why don’t you get a woman?”

Oh, he was shocked. He was absolutely shocked at that. And so he was not what you would say the average European. He came out of the Viennese Jewish community which was very insular, which talked a lot about acceptance in society, but which itself did not accept others. So he would have been a good subject for psychoanalysis, but he never underwent it.

The only reason he is important, really, and not for his ideas, but for the fact that his ideas affected so many others. It was like Marx. His analysis is what has been accepted that there is nothing wrong with you. It is all the fault of the people who mistreated you as a child. And this whole child centered attitude toward life in the world is now widespread throughout the United States. They have all kinds of groups who pity themselves and pity each other and get together to try to heal themselves of their guilts or their difficulties, their obsessions, their bad habits who all talk as though they are that way because they were mistreated as children and that, I think, is ... is where Freud is still worth mentioning.

[ Rushdoony ] I want to go back to something you said earlier which is central to the modern counseling movement, confession. I was at a conference 50 years ago. It could be a little longer than that. And this professor at a seminary of pastoral counseling gave a lecture. He also was a counselor at a church and had an office on the church premises. And he was very, very censorious of the traditional method of the cure of souls by pastors and priests. It had to be made into a scientific discipline. And he passed out sample cards that he had devised so that everything could be jotted down that that person confessed so that you sat there with a writing board, a pad and a pen.

[ Scott ] Sure, like in class.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And you took down everything that he said and you put it in his file. I was very upset and I was one of the first to raise a question and I said, “Isn’t this dangerous? After all, anyone can walk into that church office when you are not there and look up the records of Mr. and Mrs. So and so.” He was very indignant, in fact.

I made the point that traditional priestly and pastoral work in the cure of souls was entirely off the record, nothing written.

Well, every now and then you read about a doctor’s or a psychiatrist’s office being broken into and the statement is made that they were looking for drugs. But I have often wondered. Is this not a means of getting information to blackmail? Because it is all there, easily available. And I think if the story could be told or anyone could get at the data, they would find that a great deal of damage has been done to the lives of these peoples by these counselors, psychiatrists, pastors who are a part of this heresy and are keeping voluminous records.

[ M Rushdoony ] Something that Otto said that made me think of something I had never thought of before. Since your parents are to blame for everything according to psychiatry because they shape your ... your self image, et cetera and they give you your hang-ups, that is probably why zero population growth and not having children or having very small families or waiting later in life to have children one of the reasons it was very acceptable when just the economic, but if my parents gave me my problems, then if I have children, I am going to pass on problems to them. So people more and more are waiting later I life, waiting until they are affluent and they can afford to spoil the child.

During the 60s it was very common for these hippies who disowned their parents to be subsidized and get monthly checks from their parents. Perhaps part of it was that their parents were afraid they were going to somehow damage them by disciplining them. And one of the arguments for abortion is also, well, think of how many poor children you would be bringing into the world, children growing up into a life of poverty. People are afraid to ... to create any difficult situation that might in any way hinder their... their children.

[ Murray ] Remember the Dr. Spock child rearing manual that was popular in the 60s.

[ Scott ] Well, he had children on a ... a demand schedule. The generation before him had them on the clock. At a certain hour of the clock you fed the kids and you didn’t pick it up and fool around the kid in between times and so forth. And it as very, very mechanical. Well, products, of course, felt that that the... that the psychiatric explanation that their parents had been too rigid of this or that. Spock just said you should go in for demand feeding the kid, because when it is hungry so you feed it when it... when it asks. And something like a cat, I think.

But psychiatry is ... is... and... and I have... it is a heresy. It is an anti religion. But it is a... it has established itself as the establishment religion. It is taken very seriously in the courts and it is taken very seriously at... on the highest levels. The psychiatrist is called in in criminal cases and often in civil cases also as an... and, of course, they give conflicting opinions. But they are a part of the establishment and to say that you do not accept their fundamental arguments today is to brand yourself as a redneck or somebody who doesn’t know any better. When they discover that you might no better and are still opposed to it, well, then there is no possibility of further conversation.

So we are really talking about an established religion when we talk about psychiatry.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Dr. Martin and Deidre Bobgan wrote a very telling book Twelve Steps to Destruction: Codependency Recovery Heresies. And it is a devastating critique of the whole codependency idea. What it amounts to I think I can sum up with a little illustration.

At a church which professed to be thoroughly orthodox, they had two psychologists that dealt with all the couples or youth or anyone who came, old and young. And their whole premise was the codependency hypothesis. And this young couple were put through it. Now there was on question that the young man was a scoundrel, a rat, bad as you can get. And he took to this codependency idea with delight. And he told his wife joyfully, “Don’t you see? We are not at fault. Our parents did this to us.” Now that, I feel, is compounding sin.

Well, if we have no more to say on—and there is a lot that can be said on psychology and these psychiatric heresies—perhaps we can go on to education.

[ Scott ] Well, I would like to continue with the codependency.

[ Rushdoony ] All right.

[ Scott ] It is an article in the latest Examiner in Sunday, last Sunday. He is quoting here, the article writer is quoting somebody who wrote a book, apparently, called Codependency No More. Guilt, he said, “makes everything harder. We need to forgive ourselves,” end quote. And then the writer goes on to say, “Someone should remind me that there is a name for people who lack guilt and shame, sociopaths.” We ought to be grateful if guilt makes things like murder and moral corruption harder.

Now getting rid of guilt is not really our problem.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] Our problem is to face up to what made us feel guilty and what we may, in fact, be guilty of.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And to admit it. And the codependency like ... which is a step child to psychiatry, is the idea that you are having a neurotic problem in tandem with somebody else, husband, the wife of an alcoholic or the husband of a slut, whatever. And that group forgiveness, confession, group confession, group forgiveness can take care of this codependency.

Now if you strip the codependent argument all the way down, you practically would be back to... you have no dependence. You are not dependent upon anybody which is impossible. We... we are part of society. There is no way we can disentangle without going insane. And one wonders, really, what has set so many people into these paths. We have all these social problems that are social misbehavior problems and so much unhappiness at a time when we have more of the goods of the world than our ancestors every dreamed of having. It sounds very much to me as though the leaders of religion, let me say, the clerisy, the clerics, have failed to maintain their own knowledge of the faith in order to transmit it to people. And I remember you and I, Rush, read a book on the ... I have forgotten the exact title, The Collapse of Religion in the 19th Century by an Englishman in which he talked about the fact that the working class began to feel un... unwelcome in the churches, because the churches got so moralistic and so Victorian good that an average working man didn’t feel that he belonged in the church. He didn’t stop going. And science and government began to argue that superstition is something to beware of and so on.

The clergy doesn’t seem to have been up to its predecessors in terms of defending the faith against new and essentially pagan ideas.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. There is a very great failure on that area. Historically it is known as apologetics which unfortunately has in English the idea of an apology. In reality apologetics is the defense of the faith in an aggressive way to set forth its implication for every sphere.

At this point...

...apologetics is the defense of the faith in an aggressive way to set forth its implication for every sphere.

At this point let’s go on now to another substitute for religion, education.

One of the books I wrote in the late 50s, early 60s was The Messianic Character of American Education. What I found in the course of the research I did on that was that the men who were the shapers of public education in this country saw it as the real religion, the means of saving society. Horace Mann was vehement on that.

It is interesting that all the early ones, with one exception, were Unitarians. They did not see religion as the salvation of man. The state was man’s Savior and it would be active in the saving of society where children were concerned through the state schools.

That faith has never waned. It has been promoted very aggressively by the philosophers of education. And they do believe that the salvation of man and society depends on the public school and its programs.

[ Scott ] Well, I think most Americans regard all problems as being able to be resolved by better education and more education. I got a résumé in the mail today from some poor fellow who put on his card, “Help!” with an exclamation mark after it. And he had ... I counted four degrees. Each time he... he got a job and apparently there was something wrong with his problems on the job because all the jobs he... he listed were of fairly short duration. And each one was ended by his going back to college to learn something else. So he is involved in that search.

Education has replaced status. There is a belief that if you go to school long enough, you deserve a certain level.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And if you don’t get that level the world is not treating you properly. It is not recognizing your hard work and your accomplishments and schooling.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I recall back in the 50s this elderly woman whose son and daughter-in-law themselves 50 ish descended on her and stayed with her. The last I knew they were still with her because he had lost his job with a corporation. He was—and in those days this was a lot of money—a 100,000 dollar man. And he would not accept the position for less, because with his educational background plus his Harvard, I believe, business administration degree, nothing less would suit him. And he turned down one thing after another to the exasperation of his mother who found it increasingly a burden to have to put up with him in the house.

And this feeling that if you have so much education you are entitled to a status is very prevalent. In fact, in Asiatic and African countries it is regarded as one of the curses that there are so many people who have gone abroad and gotten an education and come back a worthless because they feel that unless they gain a certain position that they are not rewarded according to their merit.

[ Murray ] Well, there is a great hypocrisy, the liberal education establishment accuses religion of indoctrinating children through Christian schools and yet in the public school system they are indoctrinated in everything else except the things that they need to get through life. They are indoctrinated in sex. They are indoctrinated in political attitude. They are indoctrinated in virtually everything that they want the kids to know and yet they always drill this epithet that religious organizations have indoctrinating their own people. And they are not the... the public school system is not indoctrinating I don’t know what the word means.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] And they see their future as always getting it, going to college, getting an education. It never works. They make laws against children working. And some students even with colleges today some students which are not specially {?} type of schools are producing, some students just can’t make it into college.

[ Murray ] Well, our form of business’ biggest problems is just getting new hires just to show up every day. The attitude of kids today is that they work when they want to. It is almost a Neapolitan attitude. They work long enough to get their food for the day and they will stop. If it is two o'clock and they have enough for the day, then that is as far as the are going to work that particular day and that is the way young people in their late teens, early 20s today. That is their attitude.

[ Scott ] Well, I have had a {?} childhood, retarded childhood, an extended childhood you might say. The ... I recall having a fellow once saw I put an assignment, I told him to go ask several men in a particular industry where they were on certain levels and he spent the whole day. He was gone all day. He came back late in the afternoon and I said, “Where the hell have you been?”

He said, “Well, I was in the library.”

And I said, “What were you doing in the library? I sent you out to check on the business situation.”

He said, “Well, I was looking it up.”

But I said, “The library is a graveyard of dead information. What I want is what is happening today in business.”

And he was astonished. His eyes widened. He said, “I have never been bawled out for going to the library before.” He really felt abused.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, in the latter part of the 60s I had a conversation with an elderly professor who was the editor of a... a scientific journal. I am pausing because I said elderly and I suddenly realized he was younger than I am now.

[ Scott ] Well, everybody is, so go on.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, he was appalled at what was happening. He said, “I get articles for this scientific periodical that I cannot understand. They are written by full time professors at universities and they cannot write English.” So he said, “It is a major problem for me. Even those that seem to be worthy to render them fit for publication with a lot of correspondence back and forth.” But he said, “If you try to tell these people that they are semi illiterate they are angry.”’

[ Scott ] Of course.

[ Rushdoony ] Because they have some degrees and that ostensibly has saved them from such a ... a term.

[ Scott ] Well, there is an argument that underlies all this and that is that we are all born with the same potential. And that all we have to have is a education and everybody will be equal. They cannot confront the fact that a good part of the human race is ienducable at least in scholarly terms. That doesn’t mean that they are unintelligent. They maybe very good mechanics. They may be this or they may be that, musicians or whatever. Talent comes in a variety of forms and education unfortunately is cast only in a few. And it leaves an awful lot of people out of that particular {?}. And the idea that an education makes a better person has got to be conceived by blind men, because the fact is it has nothing to do with your morals.

I think it was Mc Cauley who said our... our... most of our geniuses have been great criminals and it ... it is true. They take advantage of others. And there is an confusion in the country as to what education is supposed to do. It is really only a method of enabling you to make your way in the world and to contribute or participate and to give something to the world.

[ Rushdoony ] There is another aspect. Education, essentially, is what you said. It gives you the basics so that you can make your way in the world. And it transmits the heritage of the past to you as one of the young who represents the future of the culture.

[ Scott ] That is true.

[ Rushdoony ] And at that point modern education is at war totally with the past. It wants to destroy the past in order to create new future.

[ Scott ] It has no idea the size of that task once you destroy...

[ Rushdoony ] Exactly.

[ Scott ] ...what people have already learned.

[ Rushdoony ] And they have rejected the wisdom of the past insofar as the transmission of reading, writing and arithmetic are concerned. So thy are failing there also. So in the two key tasks of education they are failures.

Mark, you could probably tell us how difficult it is to have a transfer to our school of a child who is beyond the elementary grades because of the bad schooling he has.

[ M Rushdoony ] There... well, there are two key aspects. One is the academics and the other is the work habits. Of the work habits are often just not there. I have had very intelligent students, but they have never had to work and they refuse to do anything that requires effort. As far as the academics, of the students I have had transfer to my class in seventh and eighth grade probably one in four will do well.

[ Scott ] That means that three out of four will not.

[ M Rushdoony ] Three out of four will... will get very poor grades and because in two years I can’t do it. If I can get him in sixth grade, I can usually ... if I can have them a year before it gets more difficult in seventh and eighth grades and then I can ... they will often do all right. But students who have come in at the seventh or eighth grade level are... it is very difficult whether to catch up. By the time they figure out how behind they are and if they are going to decide to do anything about it, they are... they are very...

[ Scott ] The previous schools didn’t make them work at all.

[ M Rushdoony ] Very often no. I have had students come to me who said, “Well, my teacher just graded us on what we turned in.” Or I had another student this past year say... I asked in a math... regarding type of a math problem he says, “You have had... have you had this before?” And he said, “Well, sort of.” And then the other student who had the same teacher said, “Oh, Mrs. So and so just says, you know, her favorite line is, ‘We will... we will go over this again,’ and then she never gets to it.”

So their academics are... are often sorely lacking. And I only see them up to the junior high level. It would be very, very difficult to have a high school and Christian high schools have this problem. What do you do with the student who has come through your Christian school into the high school and now somewhere in the junior high age is often when the parents will say, “Oh, they are in junior high, I don’t want them in this... you know, they are getting into drugs and socializing and so forth. Let’s put them in the Christian school.”

Others than... they might get it through the Christian school. They are well adjusted. They can handle the public school. They need to socialize and make {?}.

So very often there is a shift at about the seventh, eighth grade or ninth grade level to the high school. And you have a... quite a mixture that amounts to, well, quite a bit academically. And I have heard of schools that have very, very serious problems.

A teacher I had in high school ... now after I had left they had gone to... this was a Christian school. She called it bussing. But they were bringing lower income students in who did not have any, you know, Christian schooling in their background. They did not have basic academics. Teaching them all ... from the text and giving them the text they would all... she would have 80 percent of the class failing. She said it was... it was very scary how ... how low academically.

[ Murray ] What do they think that the Christian school is like an aspirin tablet that they can give to kids and all of the sudden he is going to be all right?

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, essentially, yeah, they... they... they... they think... for some reason they often don’t get scared to say they need something {?}. It is quite late, quite late.

[ Murray ] This... this social adjustment thing that the public school system puts out is very destructive. It is almost as if our government wants young people to function only on a social level and to be under the complete control of the government intellectually and let the government make all the hard decisions and just get the kids just enough information to get through the day.

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, they have an entire course in it. It is called social studies.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ M Rushdoony ] Social studies is to teach about society and how you should view society and it is... it is to ... it is to program a child for how they... what their attitudes about others should be.

[ Murray ] Well, the public school today is made up of how to drive a car, how to have sex, how to play sports and that consumes about 90 percent of the day.

[ Scott ] Well, this running into something very unusual, very interesting to me. Business applies a certain amount of discipline and even today when it is difficult to dismiss anybody without all kinds of tribunals and so forth, nevertheless, the fact remains that a job is not secure and promotions are difficult and there is a lot of competing for promotions and so forth. So for many of these products from our schools encounter their first true discipline in the world of business. Now that has what you just said about schooling teaching education, teaching sports and things like that. You come out of that. I am seeing now some younger men, some products of that sort of education the MBAs from Harvard and so forth in which everything is taught on the case study method. And everything is a team. But the team is like a basketball team. It is put together in order to win a game or a goal. And what you can contribute toward winning that goal is enough to keep you on the team, but if you do not keep up with the team, you get out. And there is no fooling around about it. You are in a management position. You are fired between eight and nine o'clock in the morning and that is it. They clean your desk out and give you your stuff to carry out in your hands. They don’t even want you back in the office and there is somebody else put on the team.

Now that is different than if you {?}. We used to... I had protégés and I myself was a protégé at one time when I was young enough. Some of the older me saw some promise in what I was doing. They would give me tips. They would take time to tell me things and so forth. And I would do the same in my turn. They don’t have protégés. They have teams. There is no loyalty down. There is no loyalty {?}. There is only the game.

Now this is the end result of what turns out to become technically well trained barbarians, harder and tougher than any of the generations we have had before. These they... they are not.... they don’t consider themselves tough. They don’t come on tough. They are Joe and Harry and ... and... and Bob and so forth and their manners are easy and casual. It is always first names and so forth. But if you don’t keep up with the team, you are dead.

[ Murray ] Well, if the people in this country ever figure out that they are really paying for education twice. They are paying an enormous price to educate their kids in the schools and the kids come out uneducated and they go to get a job and then the company that they get the job with has to retrain them and reeducate them in the basics and that has to get paid for and it is in the price of the product that the company makes.

[ Scott ] Well, MBA at Harvard costs about 25,000 a year. That is ... and... and there is lots of extras. So you have to ... you have to come from a fairly wealthy family to get this... Now they may shove some others through and give them a diploma. That... that is going on, but that doesn’t mean anything, because once they get in the job they have a very short life if they can’t keep up.

Now this means a life without religious values.

[ Rushdoony ] About 110 years ago Hodge, the Princeton theologian wrote in one of his books that the future of public education was very bleak, because, already, eve though there was Bible in all the public schools, he could see what was happening. Because there were people who were Unitarian or who were Arminian Methodists and all in the schools, he said, doctrine is gone. And he said, “What we are beginning to see is this. He who believes the most must give way to him who believes the least.” And he said, “In due time he who believes the least will have to give way to those who believe nothing at all.” And there will be a progressive downward integration in education so that both religion and equality will progressively have to suit those at the bottom so that what he was describing was what Van Til later called integration downward into the void.

I don’t think we have seen the bottom yet in public education.

[ Scott ] No, obviously not. There is a great free for all going on no in the state of California as to whether or not the educational bill will cost will be reduced. And I heard an ad in the... some woman was saying that... the terrible thing that the governor wants to reduce education and millions of young children will no longer be able to go to kindergarten.

Well, no kindergarten is not an education, at least I never thought it was. I thought it was just a place to park the kids to create boon, no doubt, the working parents, but I didn’t go to kindergarten and I am glad I didn’t.

[ Murray ] {?} It is important to the educational establishment because they want the indoctrination to start as early as possible. Kids today in public school kindergarten are getting environmental indoctrination in all their work materials.

[ Scott ] Well, then this...

[ Murray ] And...

[ Scott ] Pardon me.

[ M Rushdoony ] Our... our students always ... there are some sections on the... on the tests we give all of our students tests each year and we can see where they fare. One area in which we are always low in the... well, one section on the test that kindergarteners take is the environment, because they spent a lot of time on their environment, their surroundings and they talk about Mr. lizard and what Mr. lizard does and other... other kindergartners will know more about the animals, you know, and how they live and where they live and some animals and our students don’t know that much, but they can read by the time they are out of kindergarten.

So that gives you some indication of what goes on in the public school kindergarten.

[ Rushdoony ] You don’t know Mr. lizard, huh?

[off mic voice]

[ Scott ] Well, there is... there is an epic that is being distorted and going back to the common education. There is much talk about equality and sensitivity in various forms, but I don’t see signs of that ethic emerging in the product, in the... in the... in the people themselves. They.... they don’t cue up. They push. They jump lines. They will cut in front of you in the car. They... they will gall you with foul language at the slightest provocation or none at all, men and women alike. They steal. They lie. Nothing is safe. Everything has to be locked up. You can’t believe any answers. Don’t ask any questions, because you get a bad answer.

[ M Rushdoony ] You are wrong here, Otto.

[ Scott ] I am...

[ M Rushdoony ] You are describing a public school.

[ Scott ] Yes. That is what I meant to say.

[ M Rushdoony ] That... that... they... they are producing.

[ Scott ] This is what they are producing.

[ M Rushdoony ] This is what they are producing.

[ Scott ] This is what the school is teaching.

[ Rushdoony ] I ran across something a while back I should have saved, but it was so ridiculous I just passed it over, the definition of freedom by a university student. Freedom is the right to heckle.

[ Murray ] A legion of hecklers.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Of course that is a right which only the left can exercise.

[ Murray ] In that sense it is true. The next step to that is... is nagging and that is what we have with all of the regulatory agencies in our government. All of these kids who went to college in the 60s and 70s now have jobs in the regulatory agencies. So they have stepped from heckling to nagging.

[ Scott ] Well, I have heard on the radio that, you know, every... every news broadcast, even if it is only three minutes has to contain some new warning about some regular habit. And the latest one was that hair dye may bring cancer. And Rush Limbaugh, from what I heard said Reagan’s longevity disproves that theory.

[ Murray ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I like what Tom {?} had to say about the breast implants. He said everything has a risk so that if breast implants are completely save, then they are they are the only safe thing in the world.

[ Scott ] That is true.

Well, I remember Buchanan’s description of a classroom in the University of Paris in the 16th century where he taught and he said at any given moment so many, such a percentage of the class would be in tears and others would be being undergoing beatings.

[ Rushdoony ] Universities.

[ Scott ] And others... yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And ... and others would be doing something else. They sent them to the university when they were 11 and 12. They got out when they were 15 and 16. Finished.

[ Rushdoony ] That is not where Buchanan taught, but it was common everywhere.

[ Scott ] Paris. He taught in Paris.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes. That is right.

[ Scott ] He taught in the University of Paris.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And they came out speaking Greek and Latin as well as their native language. And it obviously learning is a difficult thing and this is where, I think, traditional religion teaches that life is not a bowl of cherries. You know, man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards. And looking to a veil of tears in so many different ways the Christian religion has said life is hard and the school says it is not hard. It is not supposed to be hard. Somebody is abusing you if you are having trouble.

[ Rushdoony ] Right. 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.