From the Easy Chair

Accountability

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 141-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161CW183

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CW183, Accountability, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 293, July the sixth, 1993.

This evening our subject will be, first of all, Accountability. Walter Lindsey is with us filling in for Douglas Murray who will be in Alaska for three weeks. Otto Scott, as usual and Mark Rushdoony.

Accountability is a problem in our time because people do not feel responsible. They do not feel accountable to their family, to their church, their country, their society or to anyone. This is not at all surprising. Whenever in the history of man men have lost faith in God, they have ceased to be accountable. Because accountability means that there is a chain of command, a chain of responsibility and a chain of authority. If you deny God, you are certain, in time, going to deny every human authority. Then you will be accountable to no one. This, of course, is now a matter of education.

In our state schools we have courses that teach values clarification. The gist of such courses is that no man need submit to an imposition of authority and of morality. Every man has the freedom to choose his own morals.

Well, of course, what you have, as a consequence, is not morality, but self will. And self will replaces accountability. And self will can justify almost anything.

Over the years I have heard a great many people explain away a variety of crimes, theft, rape, murder and more on the grounds that for some reason or other they were not responsible to someone and they were merely reacting to a situation.

Well, this type of mentality is increasingly prevalent. And the net result is that we have a culture today in which me do not feel accountable for their actions.

Walter, would you like to comment on the subject?

[ Lindsey ] I will defer that... this to Otto initially.

[ Rushdoony ] All right. We will come back to you then.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, there ... there is a... a reason for the evasion of accountability and that is that this evasion is encouraged.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...by the psychiatrists and by the government and by the sociologists and a great many professionals who argue that people are not really accountable, that their circumstances are responsible or, for that matter, that the government is responsible. The government assumes the responsibility. I remember when Lyndon Jonson spoke about the quality of life which I thought was something that only God could mandate and he talked about improving the quality of life in the United States. And we had a ... the argument that you present is a theological argument.

There is a book I reviewed once of the Chalcedon Report called Not God about alcoholism and it was written by a priest, I believe. And his argument was that the alcoholic refused to be limited in his behavior. He drank because he had a right to drink and he drank without any restraint because that was his privilege, his right. And it wasn’t until it led him into ruin that he realize that there was a higher power. But until then, it was a not God situation. There was no God of ht alcoholic. Once they assumed a respect for a higher power, then they began to recover from alcoholism. So you had a question of recovery of will, you might say, because what they thought was free will was really an enslavement to an addiction and free will began when they overcame that enslavement and began to use their will, but under God.

Now since society has made itself responsible for every human being, why shouldn’t the men... people say they are not accountable?

[ Rushdoony ] Mark?

[ M Rushdoony ] I agree that responsibility is being assumed very often by government, but what people will ... who ... when... when you assign responsibility then you also have to assign liability and a lot of times people want to feel free to assign responsibility without liability. The government will assume responsibility and wish to control everything, but they won’t, at the same time, accept liability if things go wrong. And it seems to me that accountability kind of bridges the gap between responsibility for doing something and the liability to accept the consequences of that action. And the government likes to assume responsibility and initiate things in doing things, but it doesn't accept the liability for the consequences. And I think that is very often people in our society they want to shift, make someone else responsible or someone else liable. And what goes around comes around. So the government is saying businesses are responsible. The tax payer ultimately pays or one person or another. And there is always shifting responsibilities. A psychologist will say it is your parents. It is your society. It is someone else’s. And eventually it is just passing the liability around which nobody wants to really assume. And you have to assume if you want the responsibility, then you have to assume liability which is what freedom is all about. It is assuming both.

[ Rushdoony ] A few minutes before coming I started to look at today’s mail and I opened the top envelope and it was the new Lofton letter. Did you get it and see it?

[ Scott ] Just finished.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, you finished. I had only looked at the first page and didn’t get more than a few sentences read. But they were marvelous. John Lofton began the Lofton letter with saying that he had a nightmare, namely that Jesus and the apostles studied psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary. Well, of course, you know what that would mean. Pastoral psychology nowadays has replaced God, the fall of man, the doctrine of sin, accountability with victimhood. And, as a result, we have an anti biblical religion taught from many a pulpit and by many a pastoral psychologist.

Well, this kind of thing has become so prevalent that today it is routine for people to feel that almost any excuse will justify any behavior on their part.

This afternoon the new Insight for July the 12th, 1993 arrived and Dorothy called my attention to an article titled “I stand by what I meant to say.” It is about Sinead O’Conner. What do you call her, a pop singer or what is she?

[ Scott ] She is just a singer.

[ Rushdoony ] She is a singer. Well, at any rate, she is, of course, someone who has never been good at winning friends and influencing people. She gained national attention by ripping up a picture of pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live. Well, she says that her goal is she just wants to be loved. And she has written a 106 line poem published in a number of Irish papers which opens with a line: “My name is Sinead O’Conner. I am learning to love myself. I know I have been angry, but I am full of love, really.” And she... she does not deserve, she says, to be treated like dirt. “I deserve to be listened to. I am a member of the human race.”

She goes on to say her biggest problem is the great affliction of the 90s known as low self esteem. “If only I can love myself. If only I can fight off the voices of my parents and gather a sense of self esteem. Here is how you could help. Stop hurting me, please, saying mean things about me.”

Of course she can say nasty things about everybody, but she wants to have only sweetness and light directed towards her. And what is her justification? I am a member of the human race. No sense of accountability of anything she has ever said or done, just a feeling that people owe her love.

Now the theological premise of this is: If a man does not accept God as God it is because after Adam they have submitted to the tempter’s plan to be their own God, determining good and evil for themselves. So people should be accountable to them. People should love them. And they have no obligation to show any kindliness or thoughtfulness toward anyone else.

Now Sinead O’Conner manifests something that is commonplace. She has put it into better words than most in her poem, but 99 out of 100 people who go to a pastor for counseling are really refusing to be accountable. They want the world to be accountable to them. So their complaints are directed against others. It is not common for people to go and say they have sinned. They want grace to overcome their sin.

Years and years and years ago I recall at a dinner meeting a priest saying he never heard anyone confess to being stingy. He had heard a great many confessions, but never that.

Well, I think if he were still alive today—and he was an old man and this was the 60s when he made this comment—he would find there are very few people confessing anything nowadays. They are mostly complaining and confessing other people’s sins. They are very, very sure the world and the human race is wronging them.

[ Lindsey ] It is hard to be accountable to what does not exist...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Lindsey ] There are a number of... researchers now in my own field, playing with computers who are apparently going to bring us to the next great evolutionary step, who want... use terminology like the idea of that reality is an illusion and so that reality is composed of many illusions. And that... and what we live in is a consensual hallucination, that it doesn’t really exist, but that the consensus of all of our hallucinations merges into particular things and they are going to bring a true... attempt to bring about certain kinds of technology to make us better at consensual hallucination things and the term here is often used virtual reality. And I was rather shocked to read the term that we live in this illusion called reality as they call it. And it struck me that it is hard to be accountable to what does not exist and if they are simply echoing the belief of many people, then without God then these other things have slipped, a reality on what is real and what is not real has been ... our grip on what is real and what is not real has been broken to the extent that it is an illusion in our minds.

[ Scott ] Well, that is very interesting. There are a number of people, obviously, who do not believe in holding any one else accountable if they feel sympathetic towards their circumstances. We see this in these trials in courts when the jury awards an enormous sum of money not to the person who is accountable, but to somebody who can be held accountable, because they have deep pockets.

I remember when a woman making a telephone call from an outdoor booth was injured when a truck ran into the booth, lost is bearings in some way and ran into the booth. She sued the Firestone tire store across the street because the Firestone company had more money than the truck driver and the case was accepted in court. I don’t know how it came out, but I could go on. And, of course, we can all go on on a number of lawsuits that have been in which a third party, an innocent third party has been found guilty of liability. They are now talking, for instance, about having gun manufacturers held liable if the gun is used in a crime. And that is because of the recent shootings of the lawyers in Sacramento. And there is even talk about making shooting a lawyer a hate crime which is probably appropriate, but I don’t think it would be very legal.

The ... the question of what is real and what is not real, which is something else that you have brought in, it is very interesting because now we have reached the stage where the President of the United States is misrepresenting the activity of his predecessors in office. We all know that he is lying and his argument, his unstated argument or position is that if he repeats the lie often enough it will be accepted as reality, because the argument goes that what people believe becomes real because they believe it.

You are... you are getting into that territory. A shared hallucination is no different than a shared lie and so hallucination is... is false, something that is false that imitates reality. There is a whole question of guilt and innocence is being recast in unstated terms. The word... we still have the old words, but the actions of the court, for instance and the actions of... of the people are becoming increasingly divorced from the old traditional language. We have ... we are getting... we are... we have gone into a whole new area of law. I wrote about it recently in the compass on murderers who have been released because a psychiatrist has decided that they have a subsidiary personality that takes over against their will and forced them into murder which they had no recollection of doing. Now in the old medieval days we would have called this possession, possessed by a demon. But now this is called multiple personality. I find it difficult to see the difference. But that means that words can overcome actions in this stage of our society. So we come back to where we started that who is held accountable.

[ M Rushdoony ] When you hold somebody else accountable who is not morally responsible then you are remaking society as a perfect tool for anybody who wants to put one class of society down and elevate another. You just assign them accountability. You assign them a liability. It is their fault. Now we do something to punish them, have a social revolution, economic revolution, whatever you choose to make of it.

[ Rushdoony ] You mentioned the lawyers who were shot. In one of the papers I read today, newspapers, there was a statement that every one of us who has ever told a joke about lawyers has contributed to the hate climate that led to the shooting of these lawyers.’

[ Scott ] So we are guilty again.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] We are always all guilty.

[ Rushdoony ] Which means that some lawyers who delight in telling jokes about their own profession have contributed to the murder of other lawyers. It is the kind of insanity that sets in when you destroy the moral foundations where accountability is primarily to God and to an established series of authorities, laws and persons. So having destroyed true accountability we are going to make everyone who tells a lawyers joke guilty of murder.

[ Scott ] Oh, you know where that is tending. Certain groups want to be held inviolate.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They do not want to be criticized and they do not want to be contradicted. They do not want to have jokes told about them.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Even though they may number in the millions and they may vary in the millions, we can’t laugh at any of them.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, we do need a sense of humor and humor today, I think, has suffered by the loss of accountability, because a healthy humor deals with the real world where people make disproportionate claims for themselves and where things are skewed and you ridicule them with humor. But if you deny any and all authority and all accountability, what can you have to make fun of?

[ Scott ] Well, this is the reason that Saturday Night Live and others have turned to the Church and to Christianity, because the Church and Christianity has a standard of right and wrong and these people are running out of material to satire because satire in itself is from a moral basis. You make fun of society from a position of morality. But if you make fun of morality, where are you? And this is where Saturday Night Live has reached. I am amazed at the Irish singer offended the people on Saturday Night Live who have themselves offended everybody in the country time... week after week.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, one reason why was that a few prominent entertainers like Frank Sinatra took violent exception to what Sinead O’Conner had done. So they created a kind of civil war within the entertainment world.

One of the problems, of course, with a loss of faith and then a loss of accountability is that humor does become warped. It becomes macabre. It becomes evil, just plain nasty a good deal of the time. And so much of the humor today is nastiness. You have often pointed, Otto, how humor in the 30s was kindly. But since World War II it has become more and more hateful and is unpleasant.

[ Scott ] It is put downs.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] There is nothing really funny about put downs.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] It is a form of cruelty.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Everyone I have known in the course of my life who has had a sharp sarcastic tongue has always felt that it entitled them to invulnerability and if you respond in kind, they got very upset.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And this is true of the put down people. They don't want to be put down in return. So you wind up with a very unpleasant situation all around.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. They are very thin skinned. I have seen that again and again. Sharp tongued...

[ Scott ] Exactly. They hate pride.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Lindsey ] They use a put down to the wrong group.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, accountability, having been dissolved in our time, it is giving way to warfare. Every man’s hand is lifted against everyone else. It is a world in which the put down, the venomous retort, the hostility to anyone who is superior is only increasing. And, of course, one of the things that de Tocqueville predicted about the United States and the whole world as it moved to an Equalitarian society was that in an Equalitarian society there would be universal hostility, because there would not be the ability to respect anyone who was superior. And if everybody has to be equal and it is obvious that the world is not made up of equals, the reaction is going to be to put down everybody who is obviously superior. So we see this from the classroom in a public school on up to the highest levels of society. The demand for Equalitarianism means that the superior have to be put down. They have to be dehumanized sometimes. They are hated to such an intense degree. And, of course, de Tocqueville saw this as a logical conclusion of the Equalitarian temper.

[ Lindsey ] That indirectly wages war against authority.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Lindsey ] For example in the family that if somebody has a superior family, then that immediately means that the family must be attacked and torn down.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, superiority is intolerable in an Equalitarian society which means, then, as Charles Hodge said about 110 years ago that in such a society the lowest common denominator eventually triumphs. And we are moving towards the triumph of the lowest common denominator not only here, but abroad, because this temper now is at work in every continent.

[ Scott ] Well, I see it in trivial ways that are not really so trivial. An issue arises that the TV decides to notice, lots of issues the TV doesn’t decide to notice. But say some issue comes up. Why then we get... we are regaled by what the man in the street thinks. Now what he man thinks is usually babble. Whatever the latest newspaper has told him to say. But this is paraded as the voice of the people and the opinion of the not experts. Heaven help us. The experts that they do produce will never shut up. You can hardly get through two or three experts in the course of an hour on TV because they go on at great length. They can’t tell you succinctly.

[ Rushdoony ] I would like to turn to another facet of the subject of accountability, although basically the same, namely, that if you remove God from the picture you destroy accountability. But I want to localize it. If you remove God from the picture then you destroy accountability in law.

Quoting again from Insight magazine for July 12, 1993 page 24, I would like to read about a crime and the article is titled “Justice is blind,” reading just a portion of this article.

“Wearing a stocking over his cap Timothy Anderson walked into a Milwaukee Mc Donalds in early May and pulled a gun on the restaurant’s manager. As Anderson was helping himself to the contents of the cash register, John Hobson, a security guard ordered him to drop his gun. Anderson turned to point his gun at Hobson and the guard fired, wounding him. Anderson made it to his car where he was found a short time later unconscious behind the wheel. Anderson, who was convicted in the case was scheduled to be sentenced in June. Now he is suing Hobson, the security company and the Mc Donalds owner for unspecified monetary damages saying excessive force was used against him.”

And Anderson’s attorney says, “‘The mere fact that you are holding up a Mc Donald’s with a gun doesn’t mean you give up your right to be protected by ... from somebody who wants to shoot you,’ he told the paper.”

Well, the conclusion of the article: “Actually the wound may not have been all that detrimental to Anderson’s career, because the claim is he lost earnings because of the injury. At the end of May after his release from the hospital and before his conviction Anderson was charged in another case. According to a criminal complaint Anderson robbed a man who was making a phone call from a pay phone, taking 50 dollars. With his crutches in the back seat, the complaint says, he drove up beside the man, pointed a gun at him and demanded money. Anderson, who pleaded not guilty in that case faces trial in August.”

Now can you imagine that? And yet it is becoming commonplace.

[ Scott ] Can you imagine the court accepting the case?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. That is the horrible part. And it is because there is no real accountability in law any longer. It has been destroyed. So the courts are clogged with cases of this sort.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, it is our fault in a way to allow men like that to stay on the bench.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] There should be cases brought against them or action brought against the judge of that sort on the basis of incompetence and lack of intelligence, stupidity, in other words. He is not smart enough to be allowed to sit as a judge because he has no common sense to take such a case. It is as obvious on the face of it.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the courts are taking such cases because their goal is universal jurisdiction and the state supports them in that. They claim the right to control us from cradle to grave in every aspect of our life.

[ Scott ] Well, in that case, we are not accountable for anything we do.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. One of the remarkable things, rare in this century, was Clarence Thomas’ statement with regard to a case when he was on the appellate court that no judge should hear such a case. That type of judicial restraint is now very, very rare.

[ Lindsey ] Is it that we have a lack of accountability or is there accountability, but the rules simply constantly migrate and change?

[ Scott ] People are held accountable. If they are representatives of a large corporation they are held accountable today by law. If, for instance, the Valdez had run upon a reef today and spilled some oil into the bay, the chairman of the board or the CEO, the chief executive officer at Exxon would be held criminally liable. Now this opens up a Pandora’s box. But this is highly selective, the way you said before, Mark, the... the... the needle travels around. It reminds me, in a way—and I just thought of it—of the primitive tribe in Africa, more than one, have witch doctors. And when problems hit the tribe they call the witch doctor in. Now the first task of the witch doctor is not to solve the problem, but to find out who is responsible. And he will put the men in a circle and he will dance around the inside of that circle and he will finally flick with his switch the guilty party, the responsible party. And thy have an uncanny way of selecting the one individual that the tribe doesn't like. That individual is held accountable.

The first thing is to find out who is responsible, who is accountable, not responsible, but accountable. We hear now when there is an airplane accident or when there is anything a search for the reason. Now why this man shot eight people seems to me to be of lesser interest than the fact that what is going to happen if ... if he had been arrested. Would he have had a trial that lasted 16 years? Would he have another 30 years of appeals? But right now we have a... a sort of a theory floating through the United States very similar to the primitive civilization, the primitive tribe that nothing happens unless somebody is responsible for it. There is no such thing as a true accident.

[ Rushdoony ] An interesting side light on that is that as Dr. Russell who began with a position of skepticism found out when he, as a medievalist researched witchcraft trials in those instances cannibalism, human sacrifice and a great many other things were actually involved. However, in primitive tribes the world over witchcraft trials for fancied crimes supposedly casting spells or thinking evil that would destroy a person, have been common place.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] The Iroquois killed off vast numbers during the colonial period because of their suspicions during a whole series of witchcraft crazes.

[ Scott ] Yes, primitivism.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But we have the rather similar... we have witches here only we call them corporation executives.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. There is one area of American life where accountability is very strictly applied, the IRS.

[ Scott ] They believe in accountability.

[ Rushdoony ] They believe in accountability.

[ Scott ] But not for themselves.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] Not of the IRS.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] If they make an error over the phone or in advice...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... to a citizen they cannot be held responsible.

[ Rushdoony ] But we are all accountable to them on their terms.

[ Scott ] They {?} so by law impersonate a clergyman, listen to confessions. They can impersonate a physician. They can change their name. They can give you a false name. They can do a great many things which are crimes for others. And they are not held accountable.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] So we have here a structure... a civilized structure in the process of decline.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. If you damage accountability in a society decline is the consequence, because for freedom to exist, for a society to function there has to be accountability. And as we have destroyed it legally through court decisions, though false psychologies, through false preaching, we have destroyed freedom. We have destroyed responsibility. We have destroyed everything that made our society once truly a good and essentially godly one.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, you are talking about the destruction of the truth and the idea of truth and truth, you know, “What is truth?” said Pilate. Truth is relative according to a great many people. When I told a man once that I believed that in truth, he was awed... absolutely struck silent for several minutes. He didn’t know how to recover from that statement. It seemed monstrous to him.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, that goes back to what you spoke about, Walter, the denial of truth and of reality. We are at the point where centuries ago Chinese civilization arrived and from that point on declined. It was only revitalized as foreign groups seized power and for a time gave vitality to China. But the Chinese philosophers decided that reality was an illusion. It was comparable to a dream and, therefore, there was no way of knowing what reality was.

[ Scott ] Well, we have heard a lot of talk from our new president about paying the fair share of taxes. But I was told the other day that although the people who have benefited most—as he puts it—as though they didn’t earn their money—should pay the most. There will be exceptions made for people I the theater and in sports.

There will be limits, though, on what corporations can pay chief executives. But no limits on people in theater and in the theater and in sports.

[ Rushdoony ] The rationale is that their peak earning period is a short one. However, in the business world it is a short one also.

[ Scott ] Well, the class...

[ Rushdoony ] Quite frequently...

[ Scott ] ...takes generally 30 years to get to the top. It never takes less than 15 or so even now. And position at the top generally is not too long. Seven years is considered a very long time. In fact, there is some argument now that a man is worn out in seven years at the top, not because of the ... of the task, but because of the pressure of the task.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, if pressure and the shortness of time at the top holds for athletes and entertainers it should for corporate executives, but they don’t reason that way.

[ Scott ] Well, this is a anti business administration.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] This is a Socialist administration.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] In every sense of the word. It is authoritarian in the name of compassion.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, compassion is one of the most abused terms of our time. It covers a multitude of sins.

[ Scott ] It certainly does. Now there we come into the old question of accountability again, because if the individual is considered mentally ill, he is not to be held accountable. Now this definition, of course, was accepted at a time when illness of that sort was restricted to the openly psychotic, but when it moves into the neurotic or when it moves into total fantasy as it does in the instance, let’s... let’s say... I recently received a letter from a Mrs. Harrington in San Jose, California as a result of a compass essay on witchcraft today. She wrote she is a mother of 12 children, all grown. And she wrote that one of her daughters has gone to a therapist who has restored her memory of being sexually abused and used in satanic rituals when she was a child. And this was brought back to her mind by the therapist and her daughter is now running up and down the state talking to church groups trying to raise the money to sue her parents for these atrocities.

And I wrote back that I would advise them to put some detectives on the therapists’ background and see how many such cases he has managed to discover amongst his patients and so forth. Take a... take a good look at that therapist as a matter of defense, because this, of course, sounds like what the French call the author of the crime.

Now here we have moved into an area, I would say, of new crimes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now there is a judge who has already ruled in one such case which he accepted in his court, that the statute of limitations should only apply from the time she recovered her memory.

[ Rushdoony ] I am familiar with that case and it is so flagrantly bad that neither the social workers nor the district attorney would accept it. That is why she wants to sue on her own. Given the fact that district attorneys and social workers have been notoriously eager to involve themselves in cases which undermine the authority of the family, the reluctance in this case indicates a very, very bad a case that exists. The idea that people have buried memories, of course, is itself something of recent manufacture. The idea that you can undergo something that horrible and then forget it or suppress it and only a psychiatrist can help you to recover it, is a totally unproven one. There is no evidence for it.

[ Scott ] Well, they are holding some parents accountable.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Cases have been... juries have brought in judgments against them. Most... most of these instances the parents have some money. {?}, of course, you can’t sue people who don’t have any money, it is... all you get is the satisfaction of making them miserable. You have got to be paid for your effort. But ... and it really falls into another category, the memory category. But I really bring it up because this woman is being held accountable for a fantasy.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... for a nightmare that her daughter had which sent her to the psychiatrist in the first place.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, there is a false memory syndrome organization...

[ Scott ] Nonsense.

[ Rushdoony ] ... of the parents who are falsely accused of such crimes.

[ Scott ] Yes, but to me it is the idea that they are being held accountable.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...that is at issue.

[ Rushdoony ] That is right.

[ Scott ] ...at this point.

[ Rushdoony ] In other words, it is a false concept of accountability and that is what happens when you remove accountability to God. You create all kinds of false accountabilities which are psychiatric of socialist in origin, which are really a hostility to authority, because most, if not 99 percent or 100 percent of these false memory syndrome cases involve parents who are strong Christians and who are of better than average success economically. So it strikes at an element of leadership in our society just as the real malefactors, according to television and the movies are businessmen. They are the scoundrels, the thieves, the exploiters of humanity.

[ Scott ] It is interesting in that respect that there is a new movie out called The Firm in which all the lawyers in the firm are supposed to be criminals, really. How this fits to the idea of hate crime against lawyers and the shooting in Sacramento I don’t know, but I am sure somebody will put it together one of these days.

But going back to the accountability, false accountability and so forth. In these instances, and also in the instances of murder and various sex crimes and what not, the psychiatrist is the one who decides who is accountable and who isn’t accountable. And the judges have allowed the psychiatric opinion to prevail.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Lindsey ] Even to the extent where a young woman—which was the case, I believe, recently—who re... remembered hundreds of occurrences of rape from her father from the time she was young and so much so that her father had to pay her 400,000 dollars, I believe it was. The rapes continued until the time she was 16. Yet even when 16 she forgot them {?} absurd likes. It is unimaginable.

[ Rushdoony ] You would think they could never forget that many rapes. But supposedly they do and bury it until a psychiatrist uncovers it.

[ Scott ] Well, they psychiatrist is the judge. And I was very surprised when I looked into the definitions of insanity that are being plied in the California courts. I received a letter of protest from a psychiatrist about it. He is... he is attached to the state department and it was a fairly good letter. He said, first of all, I had used a very small number of instances and that they were not representative of psychiatry as a whole. And also I had credited Freud and he said all psychiatrists are not Freudian. In fact, today, most psychiatrists are not.

Well, of course, without Freud they wouldn’t be in business, which is another matter. But the thing that really struck me was that the jurors, the judges had listened to the most outrageous psychiatric interpretations without protest and were willing to find a person who had murdered somebody in public innocent.

[ Rushdoony ] The whole issue of accountability may be before the Supreme Court shortly in the Jeffrey Massone case, because the journalist who manufactured quotations and actual incidents apparently or so Massone alleges, that case will be heard by the Supreme Court. Up until now the attitude of the magazine and the media generally is that there should be a license granted to them to set forth what the person meant whether he sent it... said it or not. So hopefully if this case does result in a victory for Jeffrey Massone, there will be some return to accountability in the media.

[ Scott ] Well, the New Yorker was let off the hook because they claimed that the writer was really under contract and was not an employee and, therefore, as a contractor, an independent contractor, the magazine could not be held responsible for what the writer wrote. And that was ... that was approved by the court. And so that meant that the deep pockets immediately vanished because Massone, of course, wanted to collect that money from the New Yorker. Now, of course, the writer did make up the quotations and you are not supposed to make up quotations and every writer knows that. So her defense is pretty feeble.

The ... there is, however, some talk of a second trial which means that the whole case may go on like Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Dickens until all the individuals are dead and buried. It is... it is one of those peculiar cases in which one’s sympathy is not with anyone involved, either the plaintiff nor the defendant. But I...I.... I must say that Massone has a right to sue, because to be unjustly quoted is an absolute intellectual crime and it comes under the category of slander. I don’t understand why he didn’t sue for slander.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I read both the books written about the matter and it was startling to see how accountability, as a concept, as eroded.

[ Scott ] She was defended by many.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] She made up the quotes and immediately a whole bunch of writers who appeared who have been making up not only what people said, or presumed to have said, but what they thought.

[ Rushdoony ] Wasn’t her husband the editor?

[ Scott ] Her husband was her editor.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh.

[ Scott ] They have contract editors. Everything that the New Yorker did in terms of the writing side was on contract. Nobody was an employee. Everybody was a contract. And I tried for a long time to be one of those contracted writers and never succeeded.

[ Rushdoony ] You are too good for them.

[ Scott ] Well, I don’t know. It just seemed like a soft berth. All you had to write was two or three articles a year. God has decided long ago that such ease is not for me.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our time is nearly up. Is there a last word that any of you have that you would like to get in?

[ Lindsey ] Just that it seems dangerous to live in a society with such strange concepts of accountability since the gun can be turned. It is like having a loose canon or a machine gun in a lawyer’s office. It is easy to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, the ultimate accountability is the judgment seat of God. And you put it in that perspective then, you know, we all have to assume responsibility for our actions. And even when we look at some of the insane things in our society we know that ultimately justice will be done if not on this earth, then ultimately and will get their just desserts and accountability will be placed where it belongs.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, thank you all for listening and God bless you.

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