From the Easy Chair

Victimhood

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 137-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161CU179

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CU179, Victimhood, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 289, May the third, 1993.

This evening Douglas Murray, Otto Scott, Mark Rushdoony and I will discuss the subject of victimhood.

And exceptionally fine book has been writtenon the subject by Charles J. Sykes, S Y K E S, A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character. And the point made is that we have a people now determined to be victims no matter what.

Dr. and Mrs. Martin {?} in Santa Barbara have been sponsors of a book which points out that in the churches today biblical counsel has given way to psychological counseling in which the person is not told that they are sinners and they need to repent restitution, but that they are victims so that instead of coming to a confession of their wrongs, they see themselves as victimized somehow.

Well, we are a nation victims. We have replaced responsibility with a belief that we have been victimized.

Sykes begins by telling the story of an FBI agent who embezzled government money, lost it all in an afternoon of gambling in Atlantic City and was fired. But he won reinstantement after a court ruled that his affinity for gambling withi other people’s money is a handicap and therefore, protected under feeeral law. Of course, the court was old fashioned because they called it a handicap. They should have said, in terms of the new terminology, that the agent was differently abled.

Another man was fired for showing up late at work and the school district fired him. He sued the school district saying he was a victim of what this lawyer called chronic lateness syndrome.

And in Farmington, Massachusetts a young man stole a car from a parking lot and was killed while driving it and his family sued the proprietor of the parking lot and so on and on, fantastic cases where, again and again, the persons involved are ruled to be victims, not sinners.

In fact, Sykes cites a case of a professor who admits he is not female, he is not black, he is not even poor, but he has a minority status. He is despised, he feels, as a minority member and he uses that term. What is his problem? He rides a bicycle from home to college and he feels that people who drive by look down on him. So he is demanding the status of a victim.

Well, Sykes has a few hundred pages of such accounts, raises the question: Are we all sick? Everybody wants the status, virtually, of a victim. And he gives some horrifying accounts. Of course, if we are not victims we are the victimizers. He points out that a training manual of the state insurance fund in New York says that, and I quote, “All white individuals in our society are racist,” unquote.

So we have a problem. We have a radical, moral decline. The churches are not confronting the issue. They are helping aggravate it with their psychologists, staff members who teach victimhood and pastors who even preach it. We have a very, very serious crisis morally as a result.

Well, with that introduction, Douglas, would you like to comment?

[ Murray ] Well, victimhood is a fairly recent term, because I tried to find the word in Webster’s new international second unabridged dictionary and that particular word doesn’t exist at the time that dictionary came out. I don’t know whether it appears in newer editions or not, but victimhood, it seems, has created a haven for people who are emotional cripples who find.... who see themselves as being disabled. And some of it, it... it seems so... so strange, some of the things that you just mentioned that it is almost as if these are tongue in cheek attempts to victimize society by coming up with the most bizarre attempt to paint one’s self as a victim and I... I think it has gotten to the absurd because no rational person can view some of the things that these people are claiming as being real.

[ Scott ] Well, judging from the examples that Rush just cited from Sykes’ book, these people made a pretty good thing out of being a victim. So I wouldn’t say that there was anything particularly wrong with them.... with their brain. They are taking advantage of a situation in which they can cash in on being a victim. And it is the government and the court and probably—to be more specific—it is the social science which influences the government and the court which is responsible for these definitions and for those kinds of awards and judgments.

We could go back a bit. My mother’s family was a working class family and if I look back upon it they had a very austere level of condition of living. I mean, chicken was a big thing. It was saved for special occasions. And, of course, we go back when radio was rudimentary. Most of us didn’t have it for quite a while and movies were once a week and so forth. So life was very simple. None of the people that the Mc Giveneys knew or none of their neighbors thought of themselves as poor, because they owned their own homes, they ... they were able to take care of themselves and so forth.

Today all the people in relatively modest circumstances consider themselves victims. And they have been encouraged and, in fact, instructed to so regard themselves. And you have the idea that if you don’t have ... I hear, for instance, today from young people mostly it is second removed from me, that they feel very sorry for themselves because they don’t think they are going to own their own home. Now it never occurred to most people that they ever would own their own home. They didn’t have to because rents were stable and if a family moved in and paid rent they expected to be there for life and they were there for life. They were there for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years. That was even true in New York apartments. The rent in New York City is what 99.9 percent of the people do. None of the millions of people in New York City expect to own a home, because house prices in New York are astronomical and only multi millionaires buy their own or the upper middle class.

So the whole business probably—and I don’t want to go on too long—it probably began with World War II and the great wailing about the suffering of World War II on the part of some minorities. Now we lost 35 world ... the world lost 35 million people in World War II. I saw a certain small percentage of them go to their deaths personally. My best friend lost his life in the Battle of the Bulge after two field promotions, but it never occurred to me to think of myself or my contempraries as victims. If I had died in the war I wouldn’t. I wasn’t raised to think along those terms.

Some people had better circumstances and some people had worse. This is the nature of life. You know, what is happening here is that the nature of life is being misrepresented by our social scientists. And I think that it is beginning to unhinge our society.

[ Rushdoony ] Mark?

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, if you define people as victims then there has to be a victimizer, someone who has committed a crime. And if someone has committed a crime then it is responsibility of the state and the social scientists to do something about it to control those people who have been defined as the criminals or the victimizer. So the whole idea of victimhood to me is a way that people who want to control other people can rationalize the need to control other people.

[ Rushdoony ] I think an important point here is that victimhood was ridiculed in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. Do you remember the famous episode where Mark Twain was sent to bed, I think, without his super or with some kind of reprimand and he began to feel very sorry for himself. He saw himself as a victim of his Aunt Polly. So he imagined what would happen if somehow he had an accident, he met with death and they would all be there crying because he was gone and he was enjoying the thought of everybody crying and feeling sorry that they had been unkind to him or regarded him as something of a disobedient boy and so on and on.

Now that was one of the high points of Mark Twain’s account of Tom Sawyer. And when I went to school I had a teacher who read that aloud and everyone in the class laughed and she said, “Now, don’t you all sometimes do that? And do you realize how ridiculous it is?”

So to see one’s self as a victim was, when we were growing up, Otto, still a joke. And what changed it? Well, here I think both you and Mark put your finger on something. For there to be a victim there has to be a victimizer. Who is the victimizer? Sykes very early in his book singles out one man, especially, who made the majority of Americans, the white majority, feel like victimizers and took the heart out of them, Adorno.

[ Scott ] Does he really?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Theodore Adorno who made us all feel that we were somehow secretly racist, anti Semites, Fascists, Nazis, and so on. And that kind of thinking has saturated this country since World War II. And it has created the climate of victimhood, because if you somehow protest against it, a ho, you are the authoritarian personality. You are all of these evil things. You are the victimizer fighting against an honest description of yourself.

[ Scott ] That is interesting. I wrote about it in the...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... Chalcedon Report 10 years ago.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And I recently sent a copy of that to Pat Buchanan. And because it seemed to me that he didn't quite know the origin of the animus that he has aroused. And he wrote back that it was illuminating. That was his term. He said nothing else explains the berserk reaction to my ...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... speech at the convention.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, Adorno created that climate because it was picked up by the media. It was picked up by the writers in various forms. It became a part of our textbook world so that it has created a weakness in the majority of the people here.

[ Scott ] That is because there was no arguments presented against it.

[ Rushdoony ] That is right.

[ Scott ] It... in the first place, it appeared ... it appeared after World War II, very... not long after, but shortly after. And it first went through the Diaspora. It was ... that is where I learned about it because I was at that time married to Rose Massing and I was part of the Berkeley community. So, of course, we all talked about it. And it was interesting to hear the individuals whom themselves were not only apt to be authoritarian, but arrogant deploring the authoritarian personality. And it gradually seeped from there through academia and finally it is now part and parcel of the whole ethos of the United States, that is, in its first form, rudimentary form was that to be conservative was ipso facto to be anti Semitic, that if you had certain attitudes associated with Conservatism, whether you actually said or did anything anti Semitic or even thought anything anti Semitic was beside the point. If you had these attitudes you were anti Semitic.

And to expand... expand that definition into opinions on general subjects was to create a net so wide that practically nobody could evade it. And, of course, the association with Semitism is an association with being a victim and I think in this respect that the Jewish history has been misrepresented, because for most of the Jewish history has been a history of prosperity and safety interspersed with periods of great difficulty, persecution and so forth, but, by and large, if we were to exert the 12 years of Hitler’s Germany, for instance, the German experience for the Jewish people was, in the main, one of great prosperity and success.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I think what has happened and I asked you to give Dolly the Adorno article because I felt we ought to reprint it because prior to reading Sykes I encountered several references to Adorno. For the first time, for years, a few here and there are beginning to understand the devastating revolution created. It is an international thing, because what we see now is that virtually every people on the face of the globe see themselves as victims. We feel we are victimized by Japan. We feel we are victimized by other countries. Britain feels victimized by us. France feels victimized by the whole world. And wherever you go, people see their nation as a victim of the reset of the world.

[ Scott ] Well, to a great extent, of course, victims exist. Countries ... peoples have been abused. In your background, as an Armenian, you know this very well. There is nothing mythical about the treatment of the Turks against the Armenians, which, by the way, is a very long standing, many centuries.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Not simply a single episode, but a whole series, much like the Irish under the English.

But this is the nature of God’s world. It is not an equal employment world. And it is not a world where everyone has the same experience. We get tested. People get tested. Nations get tested. It is, I think, the... one of the best things my father ever taught me when I was a boy and we were in Brazil. He pointed to some men who were creating bricks with chisels and hammers, regular square, rectangular bricks of stone which they were chipping out and you would hear that tap, tap, tap going all day long for hours not far from the hotel Copa Capana. And we could see them working.

He took me out on the balcony and he said, “Do you think those men are hard working?”

And I said, “Yes, of course. Yes. They certainly are.”

He said, “How much do you suppose they are paid?”

Well, it was a very small amount that he told me. I have forgotten what it was. And I was shocked at how small it was.

Well, he said, “Let that be a lesson to you. It takes more than diligence and physical effort. You he to think.”

And the injustice of the world is part of the world.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, you are right that many people have been victims, such as the Armenians and the people in the Balkans, but the interesting thing is when you look at those peoples who are their heroes? The men who resisted and fought and even though they may have lost in the long run, they were viewed as men who triumphed.

[ Scott ] They didn’t go down wailing.

[ Rushdoony ] That is right. One of the greatest of the heroes of resistance of the Turks was Scanderbeg in what is now Albania. He is a hero to people in the whole region, because of the courageous way he fought most of his life time even though finally he lost his life.

So they didn’t see themselves once as victims. They fought. They lost and they were going to fight again.

[ Murray ] They saw themselves either as victors or survivors.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Very well put, victors or survivors.

[ Scott ] Well, here we are, Christians, with the pattern of Jesus in front of us and we all know the nature of his end on this earth which the Romans got. The Romans got crucifixion from the Orientals. And it was reserved for the lowest and the worst because it was the most painful and protracted and public and humiliating. And it is very difficult, as a Christian, to go through the problems of this life and feel sorry for yourself if you have any faith at all.

[ Rushdoony ] One of the things that Sykes calls attention to and one chapter is victim chic.

[ Scott ] Well said.

[ Rushdoony ] And... And a classic example would ... with which he begins his chapter is Leonard Berstein’s famous party for the black panthers which Tom Wolfe wrote about where the black panthers kept insulting Bernstein and the other whites there and they kept saying amen to it all and laughing it up and praising them for being so gross in their comments about their hosts. And he cites as one of the leaders in this kind of victim chic professor Reisch who is now with Clinton in the White House. So you can see how victimhood or victim chic pays off.

[ Scott ] Well, it paid off for them. They were taken to the penthouse. They were wined and dined and had their feet licked and collected a lot of money and got away with murder and robbery and blackmail for years while the United States government and the FBI and the courts sat there and applauded.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, Reisch went so far as to extend victimhood down to school children. He said an examination or a test is a form of violence. Compulsory gym to one embarrassed or afraid is a form of violence.

[ Scott ] Who said this?

[ Rushdoony ] Reisch.

[multiple voices]

[ Scott ] Our Reisch?

[ Rushdoony ] {?} Clinton’s great scholar. The requirement that a student must get a pass to walk in the hall ways is violence. Compulsory attendance in the classroom, compulsory studying in study hall is violence. The amount of violence in high school is staggering, says Reisch.

[ Murray ] What... this fellow Adorno. What was his motive? What did he hope to gain with this revolutionary approach of his?

[ Scott ] Adorno was after the ... after World War II, you know, he... he was a German, Jewish refugee and a debtor unto the bauhouse. He said if ... it first came to my attention and the attention of a lot of others when he said there should be no more poetry after the Holocaust.

He wanted to stop the entire human race from making poems again. And I think his argument... of course, I said at the time that he was mis... he was... he was confusing German conservatives with American conservatives. But he was later known as the famous... as... as the original Dr. No, they called him.

What we have here is an interesting thing of a juxtaposition of cultures. Theodore Adorno is one of the icons of the international Diaspora, Jewish Diaspora. He is one of their leading philosophic figures, leading cultural figures. And there are a number of them. But most non Jews do not know their names or their writings because they just don’t circulate around in the general community. Adorno has broken out of that limitation. He is dead now. And there are a few others, but ... and I think I wrote this recently. I am not sure. But I said, for instance, to Delmar Schwartz is a New York Jewish poet and rather a good one, too. His first poem which really caught attention when he was 21 years old was taken from a title of a Goya painting in dreams that are responsibilities. And it was ... I was trying to think of... Sydney Hook, was it... was it... was his teacher, Schwartz’ teacher.

Sydney Hook, also Jewish, said and a... and a... and a very interesting scholar and ... and an admiral one in many ways because of his honesty. Sydney Hook said he had the strange experience of having a poet in his classes who as only 21 years old who was already world famous. Well, he was world famous in the Diaspora. He was not world famous anywhere else. To this day most Americans have never heard of Delmar Scwartz, but if you read commentary and {?} and the other Jewish literary outlets, you , of course, you would know his name.

So what we are talking about here in Theodore Adorno is a representative of a culture that most of us are not well acquainted with.

[ Rushdoony ] Shortly after World War II one or two scholars began to analyze the strange phenomenon that you described, Otto. And very quickly they became ancient in dead history. But the gist of it was this. The Enlightenment created a class of me who regarded themselves as distinct from the rest of their people. And these people looked cynically and critically on both church and state. They regarded Christianity as beneath their dignity and they regarded the state as really a problem, because they were not in charge.

After the French Revolution these Enlightenment ideas began to race through the Jewish community and when Napoleon tried to bring the Jewish community up to the present, as it were, they resisted. But very quickly elsewhere in Europe the Enlightenment ideas made deep inroads into the Jewish community. So you had a Jewish and Gentile element throughout the western world that was engaged in total war on Christian... against Christian civilization, against the existing order that wanted revolution and they were not necessarily Marxists. Some were. But they wanted the overthrow of everything that existed because it did not meet their standards.

Well, we felt that trend to a much lesser degree than any other country until World War II. And a great many refugees came here from Europe and they brought this revolution with them. And Adorno, as a key thinker in this, became deadly in his influence because he influenced the entire world of advertising and through the world of advertising the media and scholars. But in adverstising the law was laid down, I believe, first of all.

[ Scott ] Well, it is sort of like the chicken and the egg thing.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The cultural influence that runs through as quickly as his did... Sydney Hook and some others pointed out immediately that it was invalid, but their voices were swamped in the fact that you take a ... a fraudulent idea is always over... over... it over simplifies and is easier sold than the complicated truth.

[ Rushdoony ] Sydney Hook lost a great deal of his standing because he spoke out against it. Out of that Adorno concept which made everybody a victim of the white Christian majority developed the student revolutionl, the children’s rights movement, Feminism, the gay revolution and much, much more.

[ Scott ] Well, it really opened the gates to all those things.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I was going to say something on... on the whole question of advertising. The people in advertising are very much like the people that Burkhart calls the Humanists. People with a smattering of education, not specialists in anything, living by their wits, picking up every fashionable idea that floats through the room, verbal, quick and surface. And I would say that entertainment and all that area of spectrum picked up Adorno’s ideas and it is now accepted as absolute gospel. I remember I called ADL public relations office about 20 years ago when I was in New York, maybe 30 years ago now. And I said, “Do you still... do you guys still believe in the Adorno theory?”

And the fellow said, “Well, sure.” He said, “It has been proven.”

[ Rushdoony ] Proven because they believed it.

[ Scott ] Well, it... it becomes a truism....

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...if enough people believe something then it is a form of reality.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, Sykes calls attention to a very, very important point in passing. He said that once the intellectuals and the left began to catch on to this, they went directly to the courts with the argument. And this created a legal revolution in the years since World War II in that the courts have, again and again, validated, in their eyes, the standing of people as victims. So we have all kinds of groups crowding into the courts to demand the status of victims.

And...

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...special compensation.

[ Rushdoony ] And someone, Fred Segal, has written on that on the plank that the people have been bypassed and the courts have taken over to carry on the victimhood revolution.

[ Murray ] It is an indictment against the legal profession, because they can no longer tell the difference between real injury and being conned.

[ Scott ] Well if they can con the jury... we have over 600,000 lawyers. And the legal profession in the United States has been over crowded for several generations. There is a great many lawyers that are almost starving. It... it becomes a desperate situation. Will they do anything to make a living? And I remember reading about Clarence Darrow and the biography of Clarence Darrow and the condition of lawyers in Chicago in his day. And I remember the condition of lawyers in the Depression when it was almost impossible to make a living as a lawyer. And even today you will find that most lawyers are not to be found in courts.

[ Murray ] Somebody pointed out over the weekend that the top 16 jobs in the Clinton administration are all lawyers.

[ Scott ] Well, a lawyer is an expert on society in one removed. He doesn’t hire people particularly. I mean, they do, of course, clerks and what not. But I recently talk to a young lawyer who said that a Seattle discussion about the Fifth Amendment told him more law than he learned in three years in law school. I don’t know wwhat they teach them in law school. They really teach them how to be quick on their feet.

[ Murray ] Procedure.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. One lawyer, high placed and very successful told me he had never heard a discussion of what law means. What is the idea of law? Until he talked with me.

[ Scott ] Yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] It was never brought up in law school. They are trained technicians in a particular field.

Well, the cost of litigation has become so costly that fewer an fewer people are going to be able to use a lawyer and the profession is going to go downhill because of what has been done to it by this concept of victimhood.

[ Scott ] Well, what you are talking about is the legalization of social situations.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now the law used to be only concerned with behavior. And now the law is concerned with attitudes, with education, with backgrounds, with race.

[ Murray ] Thoughts.

[ Scott ] Thoughts. Yes, bad thoughts. In .... in part of the legal actions against the Weaver family they have brought up the suspicion that they were white supremacists. Well, if you have a black supremacist that would not surprise anybody in the United States. What makes a white supremacist suspect as compared to a black supremacist?

[ Rushdoony ] By definition now it is increasingly ... increasingly said that minority groups cannot be racist.

[ Scott ] Well, they make a good imitation, don’t they?

[ M Rushdoony ] You know, who is it that it was radio commentator talk show host, King, Larry King said, “By definition blacks cannot be racist.”

[ Scott ] Well, he is... he is... he is {?}. He is... he is... he is... he is a correct thinker.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the situation has become so bad that the Salvation Army has been sued by an employee they fired not too long ago because they found her using ... using their copying machine to copy satanic rituals for the group of which she was a member.

[ Scott ] She was in the Salvation Army?

[ Rushdoony ] She was an employee.

[ Scott ] She was an employee.

[ Rushdoony ] So when they fired her, her rights supposedly were denied and she went to court claiming victimhood.

[ Murray ] Well, you wonder how these snow... who pushes these snowballs and starts them going down the hill. I... it is very instructive about this Adorno thing. I had... I had always felt that the government was governing though a divide and conquer approach. If you get everybody at each other’s throat then nobody is watching what the politicians are doing.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, Donna Shalalah who holds a very high position in the present administration was chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and she said and I quote, “The University is institutionally racist. American society is racist and sexist.” Moreover, when at her university there was a physical attack on speakers by a minority students, it was excused on the grounds, and I quote, “that the attack was a result of the systematic oppression by this university, this city and the nation.”

Now that is the kind of garbage we are getting it has a standing under law.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, none of us have ever bought or sold a slave. And the fact that every other nation in the world had slavery is never taught here. I read that we eliminated slavery. We didn’t. We eliminated slavery in the United States. There is a difference. Slavery existed in a great many places much longer than our experience and certainly the latest generation of black people in the United States could not in justice claim that they have been mistreated. They have received a trillion dollars in aid.

[ Rushdoony ] Sykes quotes the fact that, well, let me read part of a paragraph from Sykes. “A Time magazine report on the subject,” that is, a rape, defined not by physical... well, let me go back. Quotes a female student arguing that rape is a subjective experience, defined not by physical assault or actual penetration, but rather by the feelings of the victim In other words, you may not lay a hand on a girl or a woman, but you have raped her. It is perfectly legitimate in some cases, she argues, to use accusations of rape as a means of calling attention to the general issue of the oppression of women. If a woman did falsely accuse a man of rape, the student insists, she may have had reasons to. Maybe she wasn’t raped, but he clearly violated her in some way. This politicized approach to accusation was echoed in the same article by an assistant dean of student life at Vassar who explained the time the value of a flexible use of the term rape and the acceptability of relativized standards of truth in leveling charges against male students.

Quoting from her, “To use the word carefully would be to be careful for the sake of the violator and the survivors don't care a hoot about him,” she contends. Since males must be sensitized to their status as potential rapists, she see benefits even for those falsely accused. Quoting, “They have a lot of pain, but it is not a pain that I would necessarily have spared them. I think it ideally initiates a process of self exploration.”

How do I see women? If I didn’t violate her, could I have? Do I not... Do I have a potential to do her ... to her what they say I did? Those are good questions. End of quote.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, we are talking her about hatred of man, hatred of man by a woman.

[ Rushdoony ] And insanity.

[ Scott ] And it is possible that all these social scientists are correct in that God made a mistake when he gave people physical gender. And it was really a matter of choice after that no matter what the plumbing. But what we are... we are seeing, I think, an avalanche against white males. And it is interesting because Christians aren’t the only white males in the country. Why persons of Christian descent aren’t the only white males in the country, but some white males appear to feel invulnerable to the condemnation of white males in general. All but us. The whole business of child abuse as we know, Rush, a good friend of ours has a {?} a preschool in which one child slapped another and it was escalated into an accusation that the child was slapped by a teacher which then escalated into the accusation that whole troops of children were marched out into a private home and shown pornographic movies and asked to repeat what they saw.

The police were called in and found no grounds for this and the police where then put on television and the policeman was maneuvered into a position where he apologized for not finding evidence.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, Shebly Steele has written on this and I quote. “The race holder whines or complains indiscriminately not because he seeks redress, but because he seeks the status of victim, a status that excuses him from what he fears. A victim is not responsible for his condition. And by painting a victim’s status, the race holder gives up the sense of personal responsibility he needs to better his condition. The price he pays for the false comfort of victim’s status is a kind of impotence,” unquote.

[ Scott ] Not quite. It seems to me that the person who claims to have been victimized has used... has picked up a spear and plunged it into somebody else whom he accuses of being responsible for his victimhood. And these are acts of hostility. Somebody has to pay. And in many... in most instances somebody does pay.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, Sykes calls attention to the fact that it is unjust now to call attention to such facts as the average black woman earns eight percent more than a white woman with identical employment.

[ Scott ] Black professors make more money than white professors.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. So all the same, this is not regarded as anything but a form of racism.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] Moreover, a symbolic racism means voting against a black candidate. Now you may have no prejudice, you believe, but if you did not vote for a black man who... or a woman who was on the ballot, you are a racist, whatever your politics may be.

[ Scott ] You can boil some of this down. It boils down to social complaints. Not being accepted in a club, not having a social equality of some other group... now this belies the fact that most people don’t want to have social interaction with different groups. Most black people prefer to live with each other, because it is a lot easier on the psyche and this is true of every group in the country without exception, every one. And yet there is a big official fiction to the effect—and we see it in the soap operas and we see it on television and we see it on the ads. There is a great social fiction that all the races intermingled here socially on an equal level and I have never seen this either here or anywhere else in the world.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, we have, I believe, at the heart of this problem a theological error. According to the Bible and, in particular, according to the reformed faith man is depraved. He is a fallen creature. He does not want responsibility. And victimhood is an assertion that one is not responsible.

[ Scott ] Somebody else is responsible.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Somebody else is. And, of course, the first person to promote victimhood was Satan in the Garden of Eden.

[ Scott ] Equality. You are going to be equal to God.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And God was victimizing them by denying them equality with himself. To teach personal responsibility according to these preachers of victimhood is itself racism. And that type of teaching is endemic to our society and to many churches. So until we get back to a sound biblical basis, until we see that our problem today is that people do not see themselves as sinners they are not taught that they need to confess their sins, whether to a priest, a pastor or God, I won’t go into, but confession of sins is gone.

[ Scott ] Well, if you don’t confess your sins to somebody else or to yourself, there is no way that you can overcome them. But to go back to your business on depravity. The world is depraved. Now you can’t go out of your house without seeing that. This is a depraved world. It is a fallen world. To expect paradise in a fallen world is illogical.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It is insane.

[ Murray ] You know, the government is {?} give us enough money and we will create it for you.

[ Scott ] Well, look what... how they are doing it. Look at Waco. They are talking today...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...about finding the Koresh’s cadaver. They are not talking about the infants. They are not talking about the effect of gas...

[ Rushdoony ] Poison gas of... of whatever they call it. They call it non lethal gas, but that non lethal gas would kill an infant. And to put gas in where you have a number of children in a crib. They are not talking about this at all.

[ Rushdoony ] The...

[ Murray ] The authorities release the information that they had found his cadaver to the press before they notified his mother.

[ Scott ] That fits.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] That fits with a compassionate government.

[ Rushdoony ] And nothing about the inflammable character of such gasses.

[ Scott ] Well, if you look at that and, you know, the road to hell, paved with good intentions. You might say paved with laws.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Really, we are in worse shape than we have ever been in my lifetime on a social...

[ Rushdoony ] Definitely. Yes.

[ Scott ] ... in a socially...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...and psychological sense.

[ Rushdoony ] And I do not believe that we will ever take the road back without a confession of sin on the part of the people and on the part of the nation, because we have to confront the fact that when we see ourselves as victims we are as silly and childish as Tom Sawyer was. But on top of that, because of the consequences of our sowing... so doing, we are monstrously evil.

[ Scott ] Well, we are... even watch what we are talking about, really, is selfishness. This... to pout everything else aside into self pity...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now the woman you quoted... Sykes quoted, what is her complaint, being female? What can we do about that?

[ Rushdoony ] Sykes quotes...

[ Murray ] One way ticket to Denmark.

[ Rushdoony ] One... he... he quotes a case of one grossly overweight woman who could not sit behind the wheel of her car no matter how far back it was put. She sat in the passenger’s seat next to the driver and reached over and was trying to drive a car that way and when she was refused a license she claimed victimhood and discrimination.

[ Scott ] Discrimination. Well, of course, they discriminated against her and she was a crazy driver.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, victim... discrimination is a necessary thing in life. Without it we would all be dead in a hurry. We need discrimination to see dangers. We need discrimination to distinguish between good and evil. And today discrimination is seen as itself an evil.

[ Scott ] Well, it is a terrible thing in the face of a suffering world with people in Africa homeless by the millions and with people in Asia living under monstrous despotisms and people that I have known, seen in Latin America under very desperate situations for a fat country like this to specialize in creating victims...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Is really ridiculous. If you go across the border into Mexico you... I am struck immediately by the fact that the people seem happier there in that poverty stricken country than they seem here. But, of course, to go through this exercise is to know why people are unhappy.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, our time is about 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.