From the Easy Chair

Punishment

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 118-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161CJ160

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CJ160, Punishment, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 270, July the third, 1992.

This evening Otto Scott, Douglas Murray, Mark Rushdoony and myself will discuss a very controversial subject, punishment.

We live in a time when punishment in any form is regarded as very, very wrong. We have a situation whereby any parent spanking his child let alone a teacher is liable to be arrested for child abuse. That depriving a child of anything as a punishment is also child abuse. And we have the spectacle recently when John Gotti, the criminal syndicate leader was sentenced of a mob outside protesting it and the leader of the mob saying, “John Gotti has a constitutional right to be innocent.”

So punishment is regarded with horror today and, as a result, we have more and more flagrant behavior in every area of life. For example, when I was young tennis was referred to as the sport of kings. It was a gentleman’s game. It was conducted with a courtliness and everything was done to make sure that the proprieties were maintained. Now the players are abusive of the referee. They are foul mouthed. And this is the part of the appeal of the game to many apparently who go to watch these matches. And we are seeing a decline in baseball of referees who are ready to lower the boom on players, because what used to be common place is now regarded as too strict a discipline.

So in one area after another we are seeing the decline of punishment for offenses that should be punished and a feeling that punishment some how represents retrogression to a primitive level and it is un Christian.

Well, with that brief introduction, Otto, would you like to comment on it?

[ Scott ] Well, it is a mixed bag. We are not supposed to punish children and yet the ... and the courts are in a peculiar situation where we see in Texas thousand year sentences and 500 year sentences and in other parts of the country we see similar, not quite as bad, but very savage sentencing. At the same time we see criminal defendants who are convicted not sent to jail at all, but given community service.

Now I don’t know what community service is. Social work, apparently. And the idea that a convicted felon should do social work as punishment is a pretty peculiar one. But that has come into the courts.

I have a book at home which I haven’t read yet written by a professor who took part in a group study which led to certain new federal guidelines and punishments being established. They have taken away, to a very great extent, the ability of federal judges to sentence according to their own whims and put parameters on sentencing for various crimes. And in the course of setting these up, it has now been established, they were established as of last November, they have included in their punishments for corporate executives whose corporations have committed environmental crimes not errors, mind you, but crimes. And they intend to put highly placed senior executives in the penitentiary for these misdemeanors or whatever they are.

So the whole question of punishment has become scrambled. It is very hard to define what constitutes punishment today. We have... for instance, we have illegal punishments which were applied by groups against individuals who may offend a group. So then they become black listed, become persecuted, become ostracized and become ruined. And this is conducted in the private sector without any word from the authorities because the groups are too powerful to interfere with.

So at ... while... while... while the rhetoric is against punishment, the reality is that punishments are actually expanding.

[ Rushdoony ] A very interesting point.

[ Murray ] Well, I think most people’s perceptions now is that punishment is no longer based on the law, because people don’t know what the law is. The are so many laws being passed at the rate of 3000 a year in California and thousands and thousands of laws around the country, nobody really knows any more when they are breaking the law. I mean, virtually anything you do there is a law somewhere that says ... says that you can’t do it. So punishment now is based more on the prevailing government agenda. You know, it is the... it is a prevailing government agenda is a liberal program of ... on the environment, then they forget about the law. It is arbitrarily and capriciously applied in order to force people to accept a particular agenda. It is just like the... you know, Oliver North’s thing trying on the Boland Amendment, you know?

[ Scott ] Which wasn’t a law.

[ Murray ] It wasn’t a law, but because, you know, it was a political hatchet job, but that was the... the prevailing agenda that they wanted to put across. So it doesn’t mean anything, the law doesn’t mean anything except what they say it does and judges, of course, will, you know, candidly say that, you know, the law is what we say it is, not what is written on the books.

[ M Rushdoony ] Who ... who is a congressman? A handsome, fanatical?

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] ...who was convicted of crimes that didn’t carry a penalty.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ M Rushdoony ] He was ... he was sentenced and went to jail.

[ Scott ] He was put in prison.

[ M Rushdoony ] For a crime that on the books in the law did not carry a penalty.

[ Scott ] He was put in prison for doing what all the other congressmen did without penalty.

[ M Rushdoony ] Apropos of what you said about how many laws there are not being able to know the law, yet the ... the whole other area of punishment now and one of the most, you know, fearful is the liability and... and law suits. You can be punished whether or not you have done anything, whether or not you have even violated a law. If someone sues you and the sympathies are with the other party, you can be punished because a... a... a jury feels sympathetic to someone else, whether or not you have violated a law.

[ Murray ] Well, a lawsuit is a lottery a ticket. And that is the way people look at it.

[ Scott ] A chance to make some money.

[ Murray ] A chance to make some money. It is pure greed. And the legal profession goes along with it because they get their cut.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, one of the interesting things related to punishment that I have encountered of late was that half sentence in something I read that spoke about the paintings in churches depicting the last judgment and hell. And the writer I passing said that whereas the modern person sees this as a way that the church terrified its parishioners, the parishioners, in actuality usually saw it as a reassuring thing. It meant that there was justice in the universe. And it may have terrified some. I know that King Boris of Bulgaria who was an ungodly man happened to spot such a painting in a church and was filled with terror and he couldn’t wait to hut up a priest and make a confession and become a member. However, most people in a world where injustice surrounded them found those paintings reassuring. It meant that there was an ultimate justice that prevailed.

Well, punishment without justice becomes tyranny, but punishment with justice is one of the most necessary things for man. Everything in our being craves for it. We want justice. This is why the old time western was so popular, because there was a clear cut line between good and evil and the bad guy got punished. And there was something satisfying about that. It made people feel good to go and see one of the old westerners at a movie theater or to see it on television.

Now, of course, everything is done to befuddle the distinction between good and evil.

[ Scott ] Well, they take away the catharsis.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They will have a fellow committing misdeeds all through the film and then at the end he is shot and that is the end of the film. Well, that is not enough. I want to see him go on trial. I want to see him convicted and I want to see him punished.

[ Rushdoony ] Well Dorothy has commented on the collapse of good murder mysteries. I Agatha Christie’s stories the murderer is an evil person. You may not know it at the beginning, but you know it before it is over. And you welcome their uncovering and the judgment upon them.

[ Scott ] Surely.

[ Rushdoony ] Now the murderer is vindicated in too many stories by a lot of psychological clap trap so that the line between good and evil justice and injustice is destroyed.

[ Scott ] Well, there is that and there is also something else. And that is that the difference between the good guys and the bad guys gets to be very minute.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The good guys are as bad as the bad guys. And I think that is an even worse thing.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...because you... before you get through watching the... the show you really don’t care who did it. You want to see them all punished.

[ Murray ] Well, that was the anti hero.

[ Rushdoony ] Especially the... the producer.

[ Murray ] That was the era of the anti hero that came along with Clint Eastwood genre of films.

[ Scott ] Yes, well, of course, the liberals thought that Eastwood was the villain because he was shooting the bad guys and you shouldn’t shoot bad guys. You should find out why they are bad. Find out the cause of their badness.

Incidentally, there was an interesting item on the news tonight that there has been a suggestion that missing fathers who are delinquent in their payments, child support payments should be turned over to the IRS and the IRS should undertake the collections. And one of the individuals interviewed in this particular segment said actually what is going on is a form of civil disobedience. Many of these men feel that they were mistreated in the courts and mistreated by their divorced wives in terms of visitation rights and the rest and that they should just simply go on strike and the idea of being thrown out and told that now you can make payments for so many more years is not going over too well. So that there is a social problem there which has not been properly addressed. And that comes up in the whole question of punishment because, I suppose, punishment talks about the mistreatment and mistreatment of people. What is proper treatment? What is improper treatment?

[ Murray ] Well, I see that the courts now are .... are... men are suing their wives if their wives make big money and they split up, the men are now suing their wives for payments, support payments.

[ Scott ] Well, apparently according to California law whatever is accrued to the marriage is community property so they would split that property upon divorce irrespective of gender. And when we get into the irrespective of gender area, though, we are in something else. It generally seems to mean irrespective of male gender.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, of course, one of the areas where the loss of sound punishment has been tragic has been in public education. When I started school at the beginning of the 20s the principal had a length of rubber hose that was used on the back side of any misbehaving child. And when a child was—I think I mentioned this before—sent to the office, all the teachers were notified. They must have had a buzzer system because they opened the door and you could hear that kid wailing before the first blow. And all up and down the halls it echoed and everybody was in line.

The idea of punishment is the ... a healthy one. It meant that the schools were disciplined and the children learned to respect that discipline. There is nothing like that now.

[ Scott ] As I recall it in my... my experience was more that your family would discipline you. And you were disciplined by the time you got to school. The other thing was that you didn’t pass unless you passed.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So I remember in the sixth grade in the New York City there were fellows there that had mustaches. They had bee held back till they were at the shaving age. And ...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And they had no intention of passing either, by the way. They just sat in the back. But the ... I think the question comes up in capital punishment and they... they... it is the latest execution in California there was a large crowd outside protesting. He had killed, I think, four people. That this a lot of people. And still people thought that he should not be executed. Harris, is that his name?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Robert Dalton Harris.

[ Scott ] They gave him his middle name all the time as though he was a dignitary.

[ Murray ] Right.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, such people may have felt that Harris should not be executed, but I am afraid, Otto, some of them feel that you and I should be and others as well, because there is savagery intolerant to everyone on our side, to everyone who is a Christian. We are regarded as Fascists. We are regarded as evil because we believe in justice in a biblical sense, because we hold to moral standards other that their own.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, it always depends upon whose ox has gored.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] When it comes to capital crimes. I think it was... I think it was one of the greatest ironies of recent history is that the Soviets effectively argued that they had no capital punishment and everybody knows that they were... they had cemeteries all over that country.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But at that time you couldn’t say anything about it in polite society. And it is very interesting to note that nothing is said about it now.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] And that the individuals who protested and were anti Communist some years ago, instead of being honored today, they are treated with the same contempt as before.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Now I... it would ... it would be interesting to go back through the records and find out when capital punishment is used to see if it only happens in an election year over the past 20 years.

You know, the next four executions in California are murderers who are black. And nobody is taking and {?} that there is going to be any more executions between now and the election.

[ Scott ] Well, that is a subject that is interesting, because there has been much said about the fact that there are more blacks convicted of murder than there are whites as though they didn’t commit more murders than whites. And as though the implication is that even if they do, they shouldn’t be executed because they are black.

[ Murray ] Yeah, but the... the statistics are ... is that they are there because they killed blacks. And you would think that the black community would be yelling for justice.

[ Scott ] I would think so.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, they ... when a black is up for trial works to keep other blacks off the jury, because they know the blacks will favor the death penalty.

[ Scott ] Well, they... they suffer the most.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I am surprised that they haven’t organized as a community or as a group to do something about their greater crime. I do see on the films from time to time efforts to clean out a neighborhood and things like that, but they seem to be showing women and just people marching up and down the streets. It doesn’t seem to me to be very well organized or very serious.

[ Rushdoony ] They are in a difficult bind, because they face a very savage hostility. This is why some black churches in inner city areas have high cyclone fences with barbed wire at the top surrounding them. They face all kinds of vandalism for their own people.

[ Scott ] Their leaders have abandoned them.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] This was part of something which nobody wants to say out loud. And that is the myth that it is the duty of the white race to take care of the black race. It is not.

[ Rushdoony ] The Sacramento Union recently had a black columnist speak very bluntly against Jesse Jackson and the result was a flood of mail from black readers supporting him in what he said and saying they were so glad to see someone speak out that way.

[ Murray ] Well, you know, recently we all lost the freedom, which everybody takes for granted, and that is to be tried by a jury of your peers. They just passed a law recently that no one can be excluded from a jury because of race or ethnic background. So what is the definition of your peer?

[ Scott ] Well, there isn’t any. And the American language we don’t have peers. That is from the English. A peer in England is a lord. And a lord can only be tried by other lords. We don’t have any lords.

[ Murray ] Yeah, but a jury of your peers is someone who is of your same social and economic...

[ Scott ] No, no...

[ Murray ] Level.

[ Rushdoony ] That is what it once meant.

[ Scott ] That is what it... that is what it once meant. But since we are... have no peers we are all commoners. So therefore any group of citizens is our peer.

[ Rushdoony ] It was after the 50s that the new meaning of peers came in or the destruction of the meaning of peers. And the lawyer told me it is hard now to have a jury of your peers unless you are a skid row character.

[ Scott ] Well, you have people who have time to be on juries. And Anne was on a jury in San Diego and she said that it was her argument which brought in an innocent verdict. And she was appalled at the level of the discussion. At the beginning of the discussion they automatically were going to find the fellow guilty because he had been arrested on the assumption that if he hadn't done something he wouldn’t have been arrested.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, when you have an absence of a moral education in a culture when the people have no Christian faith, how are they going to be able to discriminate?

[ Scott ] Well, they can’t. In fact, they have been told that they shouldn’t.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Well, strike another blow for the public school system, because they are to taught to think for themselves.

[ Scott ] Well, they are taught to go along with the crowd and they are taught to find out what the crowd thinks. Very... in various ways. And they get to be very shrewd at that, not to stand out and not to be alone. The ... I don’t know what is going on in the military today. I am sure that it is pretty terrible, but because it has been politicized, but I know that at sea we only had 30 men on a... 38 men on a merchant vessel and every man, of course, has got assigned proficient. You have so many ordinaries and so many able seamen. You have one boatswain and three mates and that sort of thing.

Some idiot judge in Chicago gave us two juvenile delinquents on one vessel I was on, but that was a proper thing to do so I was stuck with them. I was acting boatswain. And I remember that there was a this ... there was a barrel with some oil, heavy oil in it. I came upon these two kids and they weren’t doing their work on deck so I took the stopper out of the barrel and let this oil go glug, glug, glug on the clean deck and then I said, “Clean it up.” And they said, “You... you... you are kidding. You are not serious?”

I said, “Well, we can always put you in irons and I will come back in an hour or so and if you are... if you are... if it is not cleaned up I will... I will show you some things.”

So they cleaned it up and I did it to them again. And we went through various episodes of that type. Finally they straightened out and seemed to be fairly decent. At the end of the vessel when we were paid off then, of course, all authority comes to an end and as I got... as I went down the gangway with my suitcase I saw them waiting for me. And didn’t feel good. And they came over and said, “Would you come and have a drink with us, boatswain?”

The greatest relief that I could ever remember. They thought it was wonderful.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They thought it was wonderful. They were proud of themselves. They had made the trip. They were all gung ho to go again.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I can remember as a child in Detroit mother saying that sometimes the only thing to do to a child is to spank him and then he will be quiet and settle down.

[ Scott ] Sure.

[ Murray ] Well, what you did with the oil was the same thing that happens in the army in basic training is being told to dig six by six. You have got somebody that comes in that is undisciplined and after digging a couple of six by six holes in the ground, filling them up and having to dig them over again, why, they get the message very quickly. That is something that has really been lost, you know, when they did away with the draft and universal military training in this country, because a lot of kids who arrived at 18 years of age who got out of high school who had never been punished, had no discipline. They went through that basic training in the military and in a very short time, in eight weeks time it totally changed the, because I have seen it time and time again. The kids that I knew in high school who were just complete unruly, undisciplined individuals and they were totally different people. But after eight weeks of basic training you would meet them, you know, when we got out they were just totally different, very well mannered, courteous, had direction and focus in their lives and just took... completely turned around.

[ Scott ] Well, taking authority away from the teachers was the greatest evil ever inflicted upon the educational system.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I am sure. I am sure. What can you do with a kid?

[ M Rushdoony ] A lot of the instruction in schools, too, you talk to teachers who are teaching at the time is when it took country schools, the one room, two room, three room school houses they had a limited number of students and they combined them into these huge, huge facilities that had 1000, 2000 school because it would be more efficient when they bussed them. Then they put... every school had its own trouble maker, one or two. Now they brought them all together and they ... and instantly they had discipline problems. And as soon as they started combining small schools into larger schools... well, it is inevitable. If you put enough trouble makers together, they are going to dominate the situation.

[ Murray ] Do you know what educators call schools today, by the way? Plants. Like a manufacturing plant. That is the way they see it. You know, you put here one in and you get him out the other.

[ Scott ] Well, it is contagious. I use the word product as a graduate.

[ Rushdoony ] One of the very influential books of some years ago was a book by the psychiatrist Dr. Menninger. I believe the title was The Crime of Punishment. In that book he wrote savagely about the habit of punishing children, of punishing students, the idea of punishment which he described as basically barbaric, a reversion to savagery.

Not too many years ago he wrote another book without any sense of repentance for what he had written and I believe the title was something like, Whatever Happened to Sin?

 

[ Scott ] Exactly. Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Now the arrogance of that man. These two books and the second book without a hint of any humility or any recognition of the religious foundations of the idea of sin. But this is what we face. These people claim to be wisdom incarnate. It was born with them and it will die with them. And they have detected the population from their Christian heritage and are now busily reshaping it into a non theological return to some kind of idea of wrong doing.

[ Scott ] Well they have substituted the word viability and they also use the word accountability, to be accountable, because you put people together in... in groups, let’s say in corporations or for that matter in nations. I mean, Churchill air vice marshal and Dr. Lindeman agreed on Lindeman’s advice that the way to win World War II was to break the will of the German people and they thought that the people who would be the most easily broken would be the working class. So if you bomb the working class sectors of the German cities, destroyed their homes, they wouldn’t be able to work. The whole German war effort would collapse. And they bombed , of course, Dresden and other places where there was no military targets at all, terror bombing, which we later picked up in Iraq and which we did in Iraq.

We told the people here that it was precision bombing, but it wasn’t. It was terror bombing. And it was that our military policy today. And I think we went over this once before that these people were punished for not for anything they had done. These were civilians, civilians didn’t declare war. Civilians didn’t send the air force over London. These were women and children which most men and most periods of history have always felt shouldn’t be involved in this kind of thing.

And there was recently a statute to be put up to air vice marshal Harris, I believe his name is. I have forgotten now. And there was some protest about it. He was the only one, incidentally, that wasn’t made a peer because there was a lot of people in England and elsewhere during World War II who felt that the war had gone off track.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It had ceased to have... it was not a good war. It was a war more horrible than I want to talk about.

[ Rushdoony ] And that is now forgotten , Otto. It is as though it was from start to finish a righteous cause on our part.

[ Scott ] It was a horrible, horrible war, 36 million people lost their lives.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And many more millions injured and all kinds of lives distorted. So all right. There was punishment then without a crime. And it is called war itself a crime. And we are running into this area where Christianity no longer sets bounds for behavior for the whole society. It is whatever seems suitable to the fold. I mean, one fellow said if the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?

[ Rushdoony ] You get The World News Digest, don’t you, Otto?

[ Scott ] Not any more. I don't think I do.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh. Well, in the recent issue the ... it was a very interesting account and I had seen a note about it elsewhere. Dr. James Billingsly, a historian, now the librarian of the Library of Congress found that so many of the men working there, especially the PhDs were stealing rare books on a wholesale basis. He barred them from the stacks.

[ Scott ] Sure.

[ Rushdoony ] And the union now is working to have him ousted.

[ Scott ] I am sure.

[ Rushdoony ] Because their thesis is they have a right to those books.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] Not only have we abandoned the idea of punishment, but we are abandoning the idea that there can be a crime, that there is guilt.

[ Scott ] Well, libraries, first of all, the politicians are not funding them. The libraries in the United States in the first place were created by people like Carnegie and J. P. Morgan and others. They were the ones who put up the money for these... and libraries all across the country. So the people could educate themselves.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I am product of the public libraries in very large measure. I have spent years of my life in them. But libraries today, they go to the library today to find the answer to quiz shows, to... to ... to... to write a school paper, not for the library themselves as a place to explore. The San Diego... the college at San Diego, California college in San Diego still had open stacks and I was amazed because I used to go out of there with suitcases and, you know, have them on long term assignments, some marvelous... but most of the libraries today do not have open stacks. They have closed stacks. And I understand in the Harvard library, one of the best in the country, they have turnstiles. And they have cameras because of the pilferage.

[off mic voice]

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So where... why ... on what term do we punish today? What is the point? The real crimes in my opinion seem to be new crimes, defamation of a group.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Which has now expanded to the point where any criticism whatever is considered defamatory. We have no sacred groups. And, of course, we have the obscene groups like the white middle class males, you know?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But these are crimes which are punished.

[ Murray ] Well, when you go down the list the ... the church has been undermined. Discipline in the schools has been undermined. We no longer have compulsory military service. So is it any wonder that kids don’t grow up until they are 30 years old? They don't get married until they are 30. They can’t accept any responsibility that marriage entails until they are 30. You know, we have got... we have got a whole generation here of potential adolescents.

[ Scott ] Well, the profile of maturity seems to be vanished. I don’t know when it vanished. But have you ever seen any... any commentary on what is a mature person? The word now means old.

[ Rushdoony ] After World War II we had very quickly the development of a youth culture. There were a number of things that contributed to it. First, those who married during the war years or immediately thereafter remembered the Depression and they did not want their children to go through what they did. So they indulged him... them. They did not discipline them. And by the end of the 50s the image of what was desirable had so shifted that Kennedy with his youthful image, carefully cultivated by the media, appealed to the voters. And the shift was from Eisenhower as the father figure, to Kennedy as the perpetual youth. And as a result of that, the old standards of discipline, years of maturing, of hard work as a necessary part of discipline all went by the board.

[ Murray ] Well, Oswald really missed the mark. If he had shot Kennedy’s barber instead of Kennedy we wouldn’t have the two or three more generations of Kennedy clones that are in the Congress now. All of those same barbers, the same haircut, the same image, the same style. They got to the same tailor.

[ Scott ] Well, it is an odd thing, because Nixon and Kennedy were about the same age. And Kennedy got in by zero... 0.1 or something like that, 120,000 votes out of all of those millions and most of those stolen in Texas.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...and Chicago. And then suddenly he had a mandate. When ... when Reagan had 49 states out of 50 they said he hadn't got a mandate.

[ Murray ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So this propaganda and propaganda has become another punitive instrument. It can reward and it can punish.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] A bad press will ruin you. And so we have what I keep coming back to, extra legal punishments in our society for ... for crimes that are not are on the books.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And the crimes that aren’t on the books are ...’

[ Scott ] Very{?}

[ Rushdoony ] ... are increasingly going by the boards.

[ Scott ] Very erratic.

[ M Rushdoony ] I heard county planning departments recently took an aerial tour of the county. One of them made a comment that he would like to have more cluster development. That means they will have a street or a homes in a subdivision. And not allow any more of these 20 or 40 acre parcels. Our reasoning was we have got too many 20 and 40 acre parcels that have become junked up. So their answer was... their answer was let’s not allow any more development where people are allowed to own large parcels.

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Scott ] That is our...

[ Rushdoony ] Mark...

[ Scott ] That is our ruling class.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] And that is our... that is our planning department in the county.

[ Rushdoony ] About 25 years or so ago my cousin, a farmer who was on a state commission and a planning director came and talked to them and the goal openly stated was to abolish farm dwellings, that the farmer was to live in town and go out to the farm each day to work.

[ Scott ] That is a medieval pattern.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And their objection to it, the farmer’s objection was the idea is ridiculous. For one thing how are we going to get tractors and other heavy equipment out every day to the farm if you want a clean development in the country? But these people have no realization of anything except their plans. And they were going to punish the farmers by saying that the farming areas are messy. Therefore they have to be phased out as far as the family farm is concerned and live in towns.

[ Murray ] That is what Ceausescu tried in Romania and went out and pulled down all the farm houses and got all the farmers to live in... in block houses and then they couldn’t feed themselves.

[ Scott ] Well, it is a very good point, because what they are doing is that we are continuing the planned economy motive with government as God that sent the whole Soviet area, the whole Soviet empire over the cliff. We are continuing with it. We haven’t altered any of it. Since the downfall of the ... or the dissolution or apparent dissolution of the Soviet Empire we haven’t rolled back any of these regulations and we haven’t stopped any of these trends.

[ Murray ] The arrogance of science.

[ Scott ] It is as though it never happened.

[ Murray ] They figure that we can do it because we have got science and we have got technology and they were just backward over there.

[ M Rushdoony ] But these people grow up with the social studies. They grow up learning about some tribe somewhere who does something somewhere. They figure if it works in a tribe somewhere in some other continent somewhere, isn’t that why we study social science, social studies, rather? It should be the pattern here. And they don’t think of themselves as Socialists and as Marxists.

[ Scott ] Oh, no.

[ M Rushdoony ] ...pattern, but they have been grown... grown up studying social science ad how you control society and how you... you study society for the purpose of controlling attitudes. Ands these people when they get on planning commissions and such they come up with these ideas and they don’t think twice about them. Somebody I know once told somebody on the county planning department, “Don’t you understand how much power you have that you make people rich and you make people poor by what your decisions are and what they can do with their property?”

And they looked at him as though, you know, what are you talking about? This is our job to make these decisions. That simple decision of how ... whether you can put a gas station on this corner or whether you can have a business zoning or commercial zoning can make the difference between a parcel being valuable or whether you can’t even build on it.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, in areas like the East, let’s say New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, older communities you might say than California there is money at stake. The exchange of money is involved. You have corruption that goes all the way down to the smallest clerk. And these decisions are ... are wagered on who gets what. And sometimes who is who, what race, what group and so forth, because groups accumulate political power, political position and they use it. These are ... these are some of the American realities which are never written or discussed, but which every professional politician knows

[ Rushdoony ] One of the interesting things, I think, about the whole subject of punishment is that Karl Marx very early wrote that putting it in my terms, the idea of hell is an inescapable one. The people need to know that there is a judgment. And he said, “Of course, we don’t believe in the old biblical idea of heaven and hell. We are going to create heaven on earth and we need to create a hell on earth for those who will not bow down to our wills, to our plans.”

So the... the whole idea of slave labor camps, concentration camps was not something that came about under Stalin. Marx called for it. He felt there had to be a hell, a Marxist hell so that people would know that there is a punishment for divergence from the requirements.

[ Scott ] Well, it is very interesting, because you ... you are bringing up, really, the divergence from Christianity into a Marxist heresy.

The... the thing about Christian faith, I believe, that has been pretty much lost to sight is that according to the Christian faith we are all going to live forever. And this is just the first station. Now if you are going to live forever, you have... you should have a different view of what is important and what is not important on this earth. And we are talking here as though... or let’s say our society is now talking about punishment. First of all it is talking dishonestly. It is not admitting the punishments that are actually applied.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] That actual sanctions that are actually applied to people. The whole nation is being punished by its government, in my opinion, because we are slow in understanding that it is our duty to obey orders.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And like Marx, Washington is busily creating its own version of hell for those who will not fall into line.

[ Scott ] Well, in another couple of years at the most, when the effects of the Clean Air Act really take hold, there is going to be an awful lot of people who will realize what a noose that we have put around our own throats in the name of a nice environment. All kinds of little businesses are going to fold up. And people are going to go to prison.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Just like the wetlands put some people in prison.

[ Rushdoony ] Already a number. I... and in the most preposterous kind of context, for example, the man who cleaned up what had been a junkyard area on his property was accused of tampering with a wetland and sent to prison.

[ Scott ] That is right. And although there are a lot of articles written about it, I notice that he wasn’t released.

[ Rushdoony ] No, no.

[ Scott ] And I noticed that the people who made the decision to prosecute him have never been named.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] And the judge who applied the law was never named. We have got what amounts to practically an anonymous government. The press never gives us the names of the people who do this.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, when the state is infallible, as it is increasingly in terms of Hegelian theory and must be, you are not going to affix blame by saying, “Here is an individual who did it.” The state did it. And the state is God walking on earth.

[ Scott ] Well, it is very interesting, because God’s rules are... are a marvel, of course, The punishment is always immediate. If you made a mistake, if you don’t breathe for five minutes you are dead. And if you open your mouth at the bottom of the ... of the swimming pool that is the end. I mean, these are inexorable laws and the punishment is immediate and that is it. And if you punish ... if you commit what amounts to intellectual crimes in a social sense you ... your society kills itself.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And it is immediate. It isn’t protracted. It isn’t long range. We are ... Mr. Bush, I understand is surprised to discover that it looks like another recession is coming our way. I am surprised that he is surprised.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, if you do not believe in God you will not believe that there is a fixity in the moral order, that the wages of sin are always death. One of the thing that I encountered in doing then work that went into The Messianic Character of American Education was that we were more radical than the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union believed in a planned society. In other words, they believed that their plan was good and it had to be imposed willy nilly. But our thinkers, our planners did not believe in an overall plan that was always good. They affirmed, instead, a belief in a planning society, ad hoc thinking always because there is no absolute good and evil, no right and wrong and, therefore, in each situation you devised an ad hoc solution. Well, that is why Washington, DC right now is distressed that another recession seems to be well on its way and the interest rates for new housing have come down again, but people are not planning to buy because it appears that a growing number of Americans are afraid that after the election in November they may well be out of a job.

[ Murray ] Well, with a bunch of banks that are slated to... to go under and they are just keeping them going at their... they are... they are losing I forget how many millions a day, still on banks that are insolvent and they are just keeping that quiet until after the election. I mean what is that going to do consumer confidence when these banks go under?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Right after the election.

[ Scott ] Well, that brings up the real truth about punishment and that is that this behavior brings inevitable punishment. There isn’t any way you can escape and what we are witnessing in our entertainment and... and literature world and so forth, our fantasy world, you might say, created by our artists of various sorts, is that it has departed from reality and it has convinced a great many people that their behavior has nothing to do with their consequences.

[ Murray ] Well, the political sphere in this country has become like that. They have exempted themselves from the laws and they live in their own fantasy worlds.

[ Scott ] That is true and therefore the government is in a fantasy which believes that it can survive no matter what it does and you know that this a fantasy.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our time is virtually up. Is there a last statement or two that any of you would like to make on this subject?

[ Murray ] Yes. I think we should have some bumper stickers printed up that say, “Christianity is good for your mental health.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] That is a good one.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I like that.

[ Rushdoony ] If I try that...

[ Scott ] You may get a few rocks.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our time is nearly over. 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.