From the Easy Chair

Privilege

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 153-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161DB193

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161DB193, Privilege, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 303, December the sixth, 1993.

This evening Otto Scott, Douglas Murray, Mark Rushdoony—and we are happy to report that one of our staff John Upton is with us—and I will discuss, first of all, privilege.

Now the world privilege covers quite a terrain and it can be both good and bad. I recall when some years ago there was a line waiting to get into some event. One of the persons sponsoring the event spotted someone in the back who was a veteran who was crippled and had received some citations. He told him to come up to the front and treated him as a privileged person. On other occasions people who are totally undeserving but have position or power or money feel that they should be treated as privileged persons and can become obnoxious in demanding their rights.

But we will start from antiquity and wander back and forth. In antiquity, for example, in Rome, a ruler had privilege because of his status. The nature of the privilege was very interesting and we would say thoroughly evil, because the royal privilege meant that he was an exemption, had an exemption from the ordinary laws that bound other men. This is why we have problems with historians who either find it difficult to believe that this or that emperor was as bad as he was or who insists that he had to be mentally unstable when he was in office, men like Caligula, for example.

What they fail to appreciate is that in that era your power, especially as a ruler, made you exempt from the laws that bound other men. Even more, to demonstrate your power you broke the laws of gods and men so that whether it be incest or homosexuality or any number of offenses they were deliberately practiced to demonstrate how great they were, that they were above and beyond men, that they were on the level of the gods, beyond good and evil.

Now this hung on after the Christianization of the West in the royalty. The royal privilege made theme exempt from the other laws. It took a long time before the Church to put an end to polygamy on the part of rulers who claimed to be very devout Christians and in some instances, as with Charlemagne, were very intense Christians, but they still retained some notion of royal privilege.

Over the centuries this royal privilege concept was extended to others or seized by others, the nobility, church men so that you had church men who would, as against biblical law not only have mistresses, but would actually make of their sons cardinals, bishops and abbots.

In the modern era executive privilege has been very common. We have also had artists and others feeling that they are privileged people because of their particular profession or vocation and, therefore, immune to moral obligations which have necessitated and controlled other people.

So the concept of privilege is a very important one. It has a long history, mostly bad, some good. Nothing really has been done in the way of a study of privilege. One is long overdue.

So with that general introduction, Otto, would you like the pursue the subject for a while?

[ Scott ] Well, let’s bring it up to date. The privileged classes today are the professions.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And there are more in the American professions relatively speaking than there ever were nobles in any previous culture. We never had that many nobles. And today we have several million professionals and they range from anyone with a bachelor’s degree on up to the next couple of degrees and licenses to practice. Now if you have a degree you don’t have to pass a competitive examination to get a job with the government. All you need is an interview. That is a privilege. If you are a clerk or a mail carrier you have to pass a competitive examination. If you are a fireman or a policeman you have to pass an examination. We are now giving privileges in that respect to certain minorities who don’t have to get the top grade in order to get the job. That is privilege. And I was struck some years back by the various psychological experiments that psychologists undertake on their students in school or the fact that so many psychiatrists choose to write the inner most secrets of their patients and realize that not only is there a great deal of privilege under way, but there is a great deal of abuse of privilege.

For a government officials now are privileged. They violate the rights of the people and they are not punished for it. The IRS can present itself as a priest and I recall being shocked some years back. I ran into a young fellow who was sent into China as an agent for the CIA under the cover of a clergyman. And they ... he... he was caught in China and tortured and he came back mentally disturbed. So they gave him a small pension.

And what shocked me wasn’t that he was caught and tortured or even the pension, but the fact hat they sent him under the passport as a clergyman. Now the ... I am not sure that the clergy today still has the right of keeping the confessional secret. I mean it may... it may be a privilege that is considered obsolete and is no longer honored. I don’t know. I haven’t seen any references to it.

But what I am adding... getting to is the fact that we have more privileged people today than we have ever had in any society including the Roman and the Greek. So we are in a worse condition in terms of equality and justice than former cultures at a time when our bragging about how well off we are rises pretty high. I think the average person has forgotten what privilege means. Privilege means that you are able to do something not allowed to others.

[ Rushdoony ] Douglas, would you like to comment on the subject now?

[ Murray ] Well, the question of privilege, whether it is deserved or undeserved and, you know, who decides, who grants. In our society now a days the government is maneuvering itself into a position where it grants all privilege and it has the power to take away those privileges that it deems too much power in the hands of the people and in every ... in every phase of life. You mentioned, Otto, the clerics who used to be able to keep privileged information, but I believe that there have been cases where the cleric gave sanctuary to someone who was in trouble with the law or was supposed to have been in trouble with the law and they were held in contempt for not, you know, divulging what they ... what they knew. In fact, they were jailed... cases where people have been jailed for withholding privileged communication. Even the press which likes to protect its prerogatives in that area claiming the First Amendment, it has privileged sources, but there have been people in the press who have gone to jail rather than divulge those sources.

[ Scott ] Well, the press has assumed that privilege. The... the privileged information used to be restricted to clergymen and physicians. And, to an extent, to lawyers, but not totally to lawyers. Originally a lawyer was not supposed to defend as innocent a man that he knew to be guilty. He was supposed to plea bargain and present extenuating circumstances for a man that he knew to be guilty, but he was not supposed to present a guilty man as innocent. The clergy and the physicians where the only ones that I knew, not certainly... certainly not journalists, because anyone who believes in a journalist in the first place has got to be a little bit feeble minded. They never at any time have been known to the tell the truth, let alone to have ethics of any high caliber. Journalism has always been considered a very low profession.

The ... but if clergymen no longer have the privilege, I certainly know that physicians don’t have the privilege.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But a patient cannot get his own medical records from the physician.

[ Rushdoony ] Just a comment before I pass the matter on to someone else. You mentioned how privilege is now extended or claimed by a variety of groups, professions and persons. I ran across an interesting example of that recently in Dinesh Asuza’s Illiberal Education. He cited the fact, which is part Deconstructionism and part sense of privilege of professors who actually maintain that what they as academic critics say about persons like Shakespeare and Milton is more important that what Shakespeare and Milton said.

[ Scott ] Well, I know that the idea is that the critic understands the writer better than the writer.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But that is an expansion from Freud who understands what... who understood what you were thinking when you didn’t know.

[ Murray ] I had a college English teacher who was talking negatively about Shakespeare and I got thrown out of the class by asking him what is the last thing you had published since your master’s thesis?

[ Rushdoony ] Mark.

[ M Rushdoony ] I was just thinking of a couple of examples from what Otto said about the professions, especially about the medical professions, two recent examples. One is that Congress recently passed laws limiting the rights of picketers, peaceful picketers in front of abortion clinics guaranteeing abortionists privilege and exemption from the first right amendment of others.

Another example even more recently because I heard a preview of an interview Barbara Walters was going to do with Jack Kevorkian. I didn’t want to listen to the whole interview. I ... I heard enough in the one clip. Barbara Walters asked him, “Dr. Kevorkian, what do you say to you critics who say ... claim that you are playing God?” And he said, “Physicians always play God,” which tells you he had a ... an idea of his profession as one of privilege.

[ Scott ] Well, I wonder why they don’t help him commit suicide in his hunger strike.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. John?

[ Upton ] Well, I find it interesting what today people are convincing themselves that are privileges. I know men that have gone to school for six to eight years to get advanced degrees so they could go and work 80 hours a week for a salary, being enslaved to their job in exchange for a nice home and a German car. And that, to me, doesn’t sound like a privilege at all. So if privilege is something that most people perceive as something that ... that is rare, I would think that being a ... a non conformist in today’s age would be more of a privilege than conforming to what people believe are privileges today which are really enslaving them.

[ M Rushdoony ] Privilege is often used as... as a derogatory term to anyone that has anything of... of... of value... value or wealth. They are referred to as the privileged, as opposed to the under privileged whose rights have to be expanded through social programs and welfare and special privilege of their own. So the privileged... to be called the privileged is to be said, in effect, well, you are privileged, therefore you ought to pay more taxes. You ought to pay through the nose and you don’t have a right to object when we do this to you.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. There are very interesting variations in the concept of privilege. I recall about 17 and 18 years ago speaking to various persons and groups who felt, at least the university students among them, that farmers were gouging the public and were making too much money and so on and on. And I knew what the average income of most farmers in California was. It definitely was low. And I said, “Why should you be averse to a farmer making 40 to 50,000 when he works hard from one end of the year to the other?” And they felt that he had no right to make so much on food. And yet when a little later I asked them, I said, “I know someone who is a rookie and a bench warmer on the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team. His first year and he is receiving 105,000 dollars.” And I mentioned that this person I knew was black. And they didn't see anything wrong with him getting that kind of money.

So the idea of privilege today is someone I like is entitled to more than anyone else. It has not relationship to any moral quality as far as most people are concerned.

[ Scott ] Well, the ... I don’t know if you recall. At one point for the Chalcedon Report I wrote a column called “New Crimes.” And that was because of the mistreatment of patients by the social scientists. And I remember that I lost a job from that opinion once that the American management association was looking for a writer to interview chief executive officers to see how they handled their task, but the financial people or the advertising people or whatever in the hopes that over a period of time they would have enough interviews to find some common denominators and set up a special course for those who wanted to become CEOs. Of course, my own opinion was that anyone who has the capacity to become a chief executive would be too smart to take such a course, but that is beside the point.

In the final interview, which was at lunch, I was asked about an experiment I believe in Harvard, I am not positive, by a social science professor of psychology and a very famous experiment. He had a student all wired up sitting in the middle of a room. There was a glass panel and behind the glass panel he had another student facing what appeared to be an electrical board with buttons on it. And the buttons would light up when they were pressed. And presumably each button would give the fellow in the chair in the center an electrical shock every time he answered a question incorrectly. And the shock would increase in severity with each error. And almost all the students—I think one or two said they didn't want to make the other fellow feel so much pain and wouldn’t do it, but the rest all did. And the conclusion of the professor was that this proved that blind obedience to orders or to authority was the heart and soul of Nazism and all things that went bad in the modern world.

And I had recently at that point made a private oath to myself that I would answer all questions truthfully if I chose to answer. So they asked me if I knew the experiment and I said I did. And then they asked me what I thought of it. And I said, “Well, the ... the professor was an authority figure. And he told the students that the thing was electrified and he lied. Now what that liar thinks of the students is immaterial to me. I couldn’t go by anything that he says or believes.” And, of course, I lost the job, because I had... I displayed the wrong attitude toward authority that everyone in the United States accepts which is a professor.

Now ... so professors have great privileges. And we have ... we have the police that have privileges and that use them. We have attorneys that have privilege. We use them. We have physicians and so forth. When we watch television we see the detective, whether he is in uniform or out of uniform throwing people up against the wall, choking them. And this is considered realistic drama. So apparently everybody in the United States is being taught that you should push your weight as far as you can on every possible opportunity under any possible pretext. Now we get to a fine point here. Does a society of that sort, of this sort continue to be regarded as civilized? Is there a structure at work here? Or does everybody push everybody else around as much as possible under the theory that anything goes? All you have to have is the right kind of license or the right name for what you are doing or who you are.

If you are a minority and you don’t have a professional status you can still have privilege because you can insult non minorities with impunity and if they insult you back, they can be arrested and held for a hate crime. So the whole thing is beginning, it seems to me, to be approaching a chaotic...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...situation.

[ Murray ] Well, one of the bell weathers is that the number of police officers are shot in the line of duty is going up faster than the population in this country.

[ Scott ] Faster than the population increase even counting our aliens? That is pretty fast.

[ Murray ] Yeah. You know, people aren’t... people are not afraid.

[ Upton ] Well, it seems as a derivative creature everything that we get from God is a privilege, the privilege to breathe, to live. Everything that we derive from him is a privilege so it... it seems obvious that what we should do is since we are derivative, is to find out what the rules are and what the sheet music is and define privileges and rights in terms of that, not where it is today. It is a privilege to serve God with the talents that he has given you. It is not a privilege to be a slave to fashion or to conformity or... or... or to politically correct thinking. And people have lost that vision of it being of everything being given by God as a privilege. It is not a right. I don’t have the right to breathe. The only rights that I have are privileges that... that... that God has given me. God allows me to breathe. That is a privilege.

[ Murray ] The granting of special privilege by some men to other men, then, is a rebellion against God.

[ Scott ] It is not proper. Rights are supposed to be inalienable in the sense that they cannot be surrendered or taken away. If you have rights that is something else. The right is the same right that everyone else has. Some people should not have more rights than others. And in the ages of faith the sovereign, the baron or whoever was supposed to have limited authority. He wasn’t supposed to have unlimited authority. But what can we say about what is happening now? We can... what are the limits of American authority? What are the limits of the governmental authority of the United States? I doubt that anybody is able anymore to... to name them.

You can’t say that we don’t have... that certain people don’t have the right to murder after Waco.

[ Rushdoony ] Very true. Well, we have a lawless situation and the whole concept of privileges I terms of their origin the royal privilege meant a right to be lawless and we have extended it downward progressively. And we wonder why we are creating a lawless society.

You yourself, Otto, were ticked off by one scholar for calling attention to James I’s homosexuality which scholars had refused to deal with simply because it was a royal privilege as you were told.

[ Scott ] That was by a professor.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] He said it was a... a regal vice. And I said, “Only in academic circles.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. But once they start thinking of the royalty as privileged to do things others cannot do in time that concept extends to everyone. And you have, as has been pointed out, minority groups feeling they have rights, they have privileges which render them immune to the kind of treatment that others have. As, for example, the 13 year old minority boy in Miami sobbing for his momma with a string of crime to his record culminating in murder. And yet he couldn’t understand why he should be held without bail. All of this involves a concept of special privilege which is common place every time we turn around. We find it as a preventive to justice on all terms, on all sides.

[ Murray ] Well, I think the glaring example in our society today of privilege is the U S Congress and that, of course, opens up a big area, but specifically more and more people are becoming aware of the fact that they have exempted themselves for quite a number of years from the laws that they write. They have granted themselves pensions and all kinds of perks that the rest of us don’t enjoy. And they have achieved a level of allegiance and that is hard to equal anywhere else. And I think people because of the competition that this been fostered between various groups, people are... it is beginning to come back on them. You know, you have got the ... the young versus the old and the social security conflict and people are beginning to look to take a look at the purse that the Congress has given it self and, again, to ask themselves why. You know what are we getting for our money?

They can commit virtually any crime. They can steal. They can lie. They can cheat, commit any moral crime and for some strange reason which is... which escapes me is that he people let them get away with it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, a very telling example of royal privilege or executive privilege today which is developed as this concept has become prominent in our present day culture is the executive order. It has no roots in American history. And yet suddenly since the 30s the executive order has become law, arbitrary law comparable to a king saying, “Let it be thus and so and nobody has any right to take any exception to what I say.”

[ Murray ] Ruling by decree.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. It is ruling by decree so that we are governed increasingly by the outlaw. It is not only the executive order, it is the bureaucratic fiats which are not passed by any legislative body, but some bureaucracy in the government issues these orders and considers that it is a kind of executive privilege for them to do so. So most of the law that today governs the United States is in the form of some executive privileged order. And we don’t even know about these laws. They come suddenly and we are hit with them when it is too late.

[ Scott ] During the ages of faith there was a struggle between the church and the rulers for authority and they both managed to inhibit one another. So it was a very good struggle. And, of course, over all, theoretically, at least, the Bible, biblical rules governed so there was gradually the various states and localities extracted from their ruler’s certain rights. And amongst other rights were mandated was a limitation on the right of authority. It was the limitation against legislators making up their own salary. It was felt that it was unjust that a man should both pass a law and then be able to pass a law paying himself so that the people who paid put limits. You shouldn’t be taxed or you couldn’t be taxed in most of the localities in the middle ages without the consent of the citizenry.

Now we have lost that consent. And, of course, the lawyers draw a distinction between what you might call violations of the real law like murder or assault or robbery and violations of man made law which are the regulations that Rush is talking about. These are not moral laws. They are simply regulations. We are absolutely covered totally with regulations, completely. And the Supreme Court has betrayed the people because it has refused to even accept a case against any of these regulations. One of the most flagrant was Roosevelt’s seizure of gold.

Now gold was money in the United States. It was written into the Constitution as money and there were contracts written in gold were common up until 1933 and contracts that, incidentally, ran 99 years in gold. And one of the individuals who lost money by Roosevelt’s orders took the case to court. And the Supreme Court ruled that the president had the authority to do what he did. So they turned the entire Constitution and the... all the limitations of the presidency were abolished by the Supreme Court.

Now, of course, Lincoln set about the court on the Taney decision. He was asked what he thought of it and he... he... I... I don’t believe he said it was a bad decision. I don’t think he gave an opinion. What he said was, “Well, the court has made a decision, but it has made decisions in the past and it has changed them and I am sure that the court will change this opinion in time.”

Now the Supreme Court at one time everyone agreed like Lincoln that if they made a bad ruling in the case of Roosevelt they could have made a different ruling a year later, but they haven’t, because now there is a myth aboard to the effect that the Supreme Court should never change its rulings. It is... it is now taken the papal position. Its rulings are permanent.

But now matter how you slice it, the greatest privilege in this country, the holders of the greatest privilege are the people who are officially supposed to be our servants.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. There is an interesting little bit of history in connection with all of this. About 25 years ago this very wealthy man told me that the growth of executive privilege, the development of a vast bureaucracy creating its own laws probably was something that led to the Protestant Reformation. And he was sure that canon law had become the same jungle of executive privileges. And I told him no. That is not what you will find. I am not defending all canon law, but basically it was simply biblical law, because canon means rule. And the rule of canon law was what do the Scripture say so that at that... in that era there was none of the bureaucracy that since has developed in church and state. Well, he didn’t believe me and he went to an historian of some note and asked him to research the subject and the historian told him exactly what I have and he was dumbfounded at that. What he did not realize is that we have created through the bureaucracy a new area of privilege such as the world has never seen before, what was the {?} or the province of kings and of a handful of people and popes exercising it from time to time has now become the every day, not the unusual, power of the bureaucracy.

So privilege has been extended far and wide.

[ Scott ] It is {?} the old Chinese system of squeeze them. The time comes when it falls apart. Right now men are going amuck. Just the other day, a week or so ago, some fellow armed himself with a couple of rifles and so on and went in and began shooting the clerks in an ... in an unemployment office. And we have recently had another one in San Francisco who shot some lawyers. And I watch these episodes with considerable interest because I wonder how long it will take the government of the United States and its officials to realize what is beginning.

[ Upton ] Or all the way... I read with interest in the Compass your review of the movie Falling Down and the other day driving up here I felt like the Michael Douglas character. I parked my car in the middle of a ... of a... of a city to have lunch and there were three signs about how I could park the car. The first sign said I had to back the car in. The second sign said I had to park within the stalls. And the third sign said I couldn’t park there on Sunday from such and such a time to such and such a time.

So I pulled in and got everything right. I went to lunch and I came back and there was a ticket on my windshield and I was incensed. I got on the phone and I said, “I want a policeman to come down here immediately because it is 30 dollars and tell me what I did wrong.”

So a policeman came and he looked at the car and I ... and I said, “Officer, I have not moved this car.” And he said,... I said, “What did I do wrong?”

And he said, “Your wheel is not within six inches of the curb.” And I said, “Officer, is that something that I am supposed to know that I have to park within six inches of the curb? Because when you back your car in... it is easy when you are pulling your car forward because you hit the curb with you front wheel. But the way cars are designed, they are too low to back in. So is there any way you could cut me some slack on that?”

And he... and he... he handed me some forms. He said, “Fill these forms out and maybe they will give you an exemption on it.”

So we have allowed ourselves to become tangled up, enslaved by these privileged people who write rules that have no relationship to real life. And I think that is a result of gelding the individual in our culture. Rush, you pointed out a book to me that was written a long time ago called What Now, Little Man?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Little Man, What Now?

[ Upton ] Little Man, What Now? And we have castrated the individual in our society. We have allowed ourselves to become castrated and people who take their place are eunuchs who will enslave us with their inane humanistic rules.

[ Rushdoony ] What city or town was that in?

[ Upton ] Ventura.

[ Rushdoony ] Ventura, oh.

[ Scott ] Now this is why the Germans now call us the people of the rules, because Americans now want to know what are the rules everywhere they go. And once we are told what the rules are, why, then we know what we can do, what we can’t do. That is it. People of the rules.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

Well, we have as many rules and more than Hitler ever had.

[ Scott ] Much more. Hitler only had 30,000 secret police.

[ Upton ] Rush, when did the individual start to become diminished in ... in ... in history? When did the... they start attacking the individual?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. It happened at different times in different countries. But in this country it did not happen really until after World War II, I believe. Would you agree, Otto?

[ Scott ] I would say that it began, really, in the ... in the war.

[ Rushdoony ] During the war.

[ Scott ] During the war. We have 14 to 16 million, I have forgotten which, in uniform. And I will never forget some of the minor things that I saw. I was on a troop ship going in the Pacific and everybody was in khakis and nobody was wearing insignia, you know, just summer khakis which had been issued. And there were a lot of men on... on deck, soldiers. And I saw a soldier starting up a ladder to the boat deck, an upper deck and an officer was coming down. And the officer put his hand in the soldier’s face and pushed him back a step at a time all the way down the ladder.

Now later on I ... I did... I took a little time to check out some of the... some of the climate in various other armies. The German army, contrary to general myth there was a very close relationship between the officers and the men. It was not at arms length at all. And the same was true of the English army. The officer... in at least up to World War II in the English soldiers respected their officers. In the American army the officers were very bad. They abused their position and an awful lot of men came out of the army with a hatred that they didn’t go in with. And I think one of the reasons was that the officers were not well trained and they were coming out of a society, an American society in which proper behavior on the superior level was just simply never discussed.

[ Rushdoony ] I know that we stopped before the war the ability of men to go up to the top through the ranks which was a long standing fact in the American army. You could go in as a buck private and wind up a high ranking officer. And I knew one such man very, very well, an outstanding man. But during the war I saw two cousins go into the service. One was a college graduate, well to do, a momma’s boy who had no ability to do anything because he had never had to work, never exercised any independence or freedom. His cousin was from the poor branch of the family, a first cousin, had gone to work very early and demonstrated remarkable abilities at management. And he served in the ranks. I forget what his position. He did become a non com, but he couldn’t rise above that. And yet there was no question he was superior. He was absorbed into the family business after the war by his uncle and a good deal of what he was doing was covering up for his cousin and the uncle knew he was doing it, but he knew that there would be trouble with his wife if he did not wink at that.

So we made it clear that merit had nothing to do with it.

[ Scott ] Well, we substituted schooling and on a false premise, too, and that is that... that schooling necessarily made a fellow better. The nobility in England, at least up until World War II very seldom went to college. They didn’t... it wasn’t necessary. They had a position. And in any event if there was a family business you were not allowed to go through college. You went into the business and you learned the business in the business, which had nothing to do really with social status. Not going to college didn’t make the son of a nobleman a commoner. And ... and it was more a matter of birth and circumstance. And here we did have ... we had foremen and we had sergeants and we had a great many men in business up until fairly recently. I would say when I started to write about business there were still a large number of senior executives who had started in the... at the bottom.

But today you don’t find any.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Let me say that I also came to know a great many highly competent officers who were college men.

[ Scott ] Of course.

[ Rushdoony ] But... but our mistake was we limited it to a status and not to merit.

[ Scott ] Not all I interviewed in my recent trip to Spokane had a... a.... I taped an interview with a very interesting, very moving recollections of a man 75 years old who retired as a colonel who was in the Bataan death march which, as you know, was one of the worst of all experiences.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And he escaped from a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines together with nine other men. All 10 of them got away. Had they been captured, of course, they would have been killed. There was one... only one point where he lost my sympathy temporarily and he was a very modest and... and he told the story very well. He... he ... he choked up a couple of times. And that was when one of the men that they invited to join them wanted to bring along three enlisted men and he said we were all officers. And he said we had trouble with that. He said we had... we talked about it and we thought about it an they said at the end of three days we kindly decided since we wanted him so badly that we would... we would take three... accept the three enlisted men. And I looked at him. I had really... I think... even in that desperate situation they were so proud of their epilates and really we are in the... this is... the American people are not what they think they are. This is a great country of sobs.

[ Rushdoony ] You ran into that at Annapolis, didn’t you, John?

[ Upton ] Well, that is a story. We used to be graded by our peers, ranked in our platoon. There would be 40 men in our platoon, or boys in our platoon and the peers would rank one through 40. And what would happen is that the people who had the most leadership qualities, the ones that you would want to be in a foxhole with or, you know, were the ones that always wound up at number 40. In fact, Admiral Chester Nimitz was kicked out of the academy for sneaking in women and booze and he turned out to be a fantastic admiral.

[ Murray ] Resourceful.

[ Upton ] A resourceful admiral and so when they told... when I wanted... asked for permission to leave I had to start with a lieutenant and work up to an admiral and each one told me I was going to fail in life. If you quit this now you are going to quit in everything else. And I said, “You know something?” I said, “What you are doing is you are breeding mediocre order takers here.” I said, “The guys who really would do you proud are finishing at the bottom. The rats and the ... and the cheats and the guys who know how to work your system are finishing at the top. And unfortunately that is what... that is the system that you have set up here.”

So I left... I left that place and I am not sorry that I did, but... but another thing that is interesting is the perception of privilege. It seems to be our lower classes perceive privilege as not having to work, of not having responsibility and the so called upper class people perceive privilege as having power over people. And I would be interested to hear from you fellows what you think the Christian concept of privilege should be.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our Lord said, “He that is the greatest among you, let him be minister of all.” If you truly have greatness and power you don’t lord it over others as you said as the Gentiles do. You exercise it for the welfare of God’s kingdom to further the benefit of all. So it is a radically different concept and our Lord made a contrast between the concept of power among the Gentiles and their leaders and the concept of power that he wanted his disciples to have.

[ Scott ] Well, I have always thought authority was a... a real burden. Men that I gave orders to would play a child’s role and I would have to listen to their troubles and everything else and it was a pain in the ass. And I never enjoyed it. I never enjoyed it.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our time is just about up. Is there a final statement that any of you would like to make?

[ Murray ] Well, there is a lot of responsibility that goes with privilege and I think each of us has to guard against the misuse of privilege and think a lot about it before we even accept it.

[ Rushdoony ] I think—and this is opening up another subject and perhaps a can of worms—one of our problems today is that the Feminists believe that men are privileged and they want to have those same privileges. And what they are failing to recognize that there are responsibilities that they are abandoning and there are responsibilities that men have that they have no awareness of. They are simply equating privilege with irresponsibility and freedom from any kind of orderly situation.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, they are caught in a trap. They want them men to give them the privileges.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Upton ] Well, it is a privilege to be sitting here with you people, because I have listened to these tapes for many years and sitting here and partaking of is very much a privilege.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, you have joined the ranks of the high and mighty, John.

[ Upton ] So I didn’t fail. The admiral was wrong.

[ Rushdoony ] No. You didn’t. The admiral is wrong. And here you are recognized for your work around the world in helping orphans and doing it without any bureaucracy and just going and doing it. And a lot of people are sitting on their duff trying to figure out how to do something when they are doing nothing.

[ Upton ] And, Otto, I will pray for you because you said... asked. I am going to...

[ Scott ] Well, thank you very much.

[ Upton ] I will... I will pray for you.

[ Scott ] Thank you very much.

[ Upton ] In fact, why don’t we just lay hands on Otto?

[ Scott ] Well it is a good... {?}

[multiple voices]

[ Scott ] It... it ... it expresses exactly what I wanted to express.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our time is up. Thank you all for listening and God bless you.

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