From the Easy Chair

Regulations

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 163-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161DH203

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161DH203, Regulations, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 315, June the first, 1994.

This evening Otto Scott, John Upton and I shall be discussing a couple of subjects, in this hour regulations. Perhaps the overall title for both hours would be surviving in evil times.

Now, of course, times have been evil in much of history. We often look back to the past as a placid time because we were not there and we didn’t... had no awareness of the complications and troubles of past eras. But surviving in evil times is something we must learn to do because we are in evil times. And not as evil as some people have experienced.

One of the things that over the years has humbled me and made me think more than a little about my own short comings is the fact that my ancestors in the old country in Armenia were constantly in the presence of death. And yet their zest for life and their enjoyment of it was staggering. It was because they lived their faith.

And our times are difficult for us when our faith is weak. We see the enormity of the problems and not the greatness of God and that, too often, is our stance.

One of the things that makes this an evil time—and this is our subject in this first hour—is the fact of regulations. Regulations are fiats of the state whereby we are bound by rules we had no hand in making, rules which are very often radically arbitrary and they govern us. They are things we had no part in making.

To give an example of regulation in the sphere of the environment, a retired military officer bought a home and after he was moved in and settled he noticed that 25 feet from his door at the side of his lot there was a spot where a lot of dead leaves and trash had accumulated and water stood two or three inches deep because it was a slight depression. He proceeded to clean it out as far as the trash was concerned. Also he found that there were some snakes in it which, with a view to his grandchildren, he was happy to eliminate. He was arrested for disturbing a wetland and faces prison. Now that is a regulation. It is a regulation of the kind that we see vast numbers of every day being issued, regulations we are often ignorant of and yet readily in violation of. So the world of regulations is a world of arbitrary rules whereby we are controlled. There are enough regulations to eliminate all of us, to wipe us out, to tie us up legally for years to come. And I am constantly hearing from people who, because of some regulation they had never heard of are in court and in deep, deep trouble.

Well, this is the world we live in. This is the world we must change. So it is very important for us to be fully aware of a major problem here and to have an intelligent attitude towards it.

Otto, would you like to comment on this?

[ Scott ] Well, yes, the regulations, you know, began as a help, as a means by which people could work together, organize efforts, regulate them. It was a great advance in human history when men began to work according to rule instead of as the spirit moves. They were able to do a great many things more efficiently. I don’t really know of any society that has escaped the trap of organization, because it works so well when you organize efforts that there is a tendency to keep organizing and to organize them more and more minutely so that eventually the organization overtakes the goal and the whole business of having an organization and running the organization becomes more important than the purpose of the organization.

This is what has happened to us. This is what has happened to our government. Our government has gone berserk on organizing. Now Mr. Bush was the one... Mr. Nixon was the one who gave us the first environmental law. Mr. Bush the gave us the second which is the monster. There is no way this government has now regulated everything that moves, everything that is alive and everything that is organic and inorganic, insects, reptiles, fish, fowl and mammals are all governed now by the regulations of the environmentalists. It is really amazing. It is a from of lunacy. It is a form of idiocy. And you can hear the lunacy when you listen to one of these environmental meetings or one of these environmentalists lecturing or talking. I remember that I was doing the Raytheon history which must have been 15 or so years ago, maybe longer. One of their divisions was the Badger Engineering company which had a contract to do a nuclear plant in Maryland. It was a very large contract and a very large plant, probably 20 years ago or 25. I have forgotten now which, when nuclear plants were still being constructed.

And the man in charge of all this took me into a room, a rather large room, and it had book shelves, all four sides, and every shelf was covered, was filled and these were the plans of the plant, the engineering plans of the plant. And I have forgotten how many millions of dollars are involved, quite a good number. He said, “Now these are the plans.” And he said, “We have... we finished the plant. We... we have constructed the plant.” Told me where it was. It had... hadn't been opened yet. And then he said, “According to all we had to have one last public hearing.” And, he said, “It was flooded with Environmentalists. And we had answered every question in all the hearings before and we had filled this gap an that wrinkle and so forth.” And he said, “We thought this... this time we had it.” And somebody got up and said, “What would happen if an airplane fell on the roof?” And he said, “Well, it is not in a plane pattern.” And he said, “Well, suppose an airplane got out of the plane pattern and fell on the roof. Have you strengthened the roof against that sort of an accident?” And he said no. No, we haven’t.

Well, that meant another x millions of dollars. They had to go back and strengthen the roof. And as far as I know the plant was never opened. It was never opened, never put to work. All the houses that it could have heated or lit, all the factories that it could have animated and so forth never got the benefit and the money, of course, was wasted. The utilities had to raise their rates because the utilities, I am sure, in Maryland it is like California. They now have brown outs and black outs because we don’t have enough utilities to take care of our electrification power needs. So that is... that is where regulations of nuclear industry have taken us.

So if I could summarize I would say that what we have here is a government out of control. We have people who are out of control in the sense that they don’t realize that there are limits to what is possible in terms of man’s power on earth. We are back to the renaissance idea that man can govern the forces of nature. And we think we have the technology which enables us to do it.

[ Upton ] Being... being a younger than... than both of you gentlemen, you were both my age when I was born. So I was born into the regulatory age. I don’t know anything different. I would like to know what it was like before, before people’s ... I look at regulation as... as people lose faith in God they regulate more. And what was it like in your lives when people had more faith in God and, hence, less regulations?

[ Rushdoony ] Otto pointed out that regulations are not new. I am glad you raised that question because it is a point that must be made. There was a time when most regulations began with a statement such as a gentleman does not do this or that, or a gentleman does thus and so or a Christian gentleman or a Christian lady doesn’t do or does do certain things. This meant that everybody was expected to be a self regulating functioning member of society. On top of that, society itself felt that there were certain standards that had to be maintained.

We no longer talk about social standards and the obligation of people in society to do certain things and to prevent other things from occurring. But it was not unusual for adults to take a hand in situations because they felt they had a social responsibility to set people straight, to correct them if they needed correction. They felt it was a moral responsibility.

Now I am ready to grant that this can be over done. And I don’t think it was over done in this country, but in England, for example, I have been told by an English woman that it was routine for her mother as a prominent woman in the community to visit the less fortunate people of the parish and to tell the woman when she called on her that she had things all wrong in the furnishing of the home and that she had the wrong tastes in dressing and also to make suggestions about proper diet, because she would know a great deal more than, say, this working man’s wife would or this farmer’s wife would.

Now this English woman told me that she was often embarrassed by the way her mother told these people, but the people took it. And it had its rather officious side, but it also was a ... an important part of the Victorian era in that it was functioning to bring a people up to a level socially so that we have had these societal and self regulations or regulating factors in our world at large.

To illustrate, as a boy I grew up partly on the farm and partly in a major city when my father was a pastor in a particular city. At that time whether in the country or the city, you didn’t get away with anything because if you were doing things you shouldn’t be or showing a disregard for someone’s lawn or backyard—and we would play up and down the street in and out of all the yards—but if we were out of line, our mothers would be called by some woman. And we would be reprimanded when we got home. Everybody thought it was their duty and they did their duty. They kept the kids in line.

Jane Jacobs commented on the loss of his factor when urban redevelopment broke up some of the old established urban communities. And she pointed out that there was a very low crime rate in those areas because everybody made everybody else’s business their own. So there as a great deal of policing by people. They are trying to get back some of that with the neighborhood watch idea, but it is not the same.

So a great deal of law enforcement used to be in the hands of the community, not in the hands of the police. And it made a different kind of society. But that doesn’t exist anymore. Or to a very limited degree.

[ Scott ] Well, the United States, my experience and life, has always been much more locked up country than it admits. I mean, when I was a boy or when we were boys we had prohibition. And that was quite a thing. The Americans weren’t ... had... didn’t have the right to buy liquor or to drink liquor. And this led to all kinds of abuse on the part of the government. They would break down doors, drag people off, put men in the penitentiary for having a bottle of whiskey. And it was ... it is astonished to the rest of the world because the United States talks so much about liberty and freedom and they locked... they locked the country up. It was a real nightmare. And there were, of course, people who didn’t drink and it didn’t bother them, but there were an awful lot of people who used to drink in a civilized fashion. Under prohibition drunkenness was no longer considered a social disgrace which was a big shift in the manners of the United States. People took pleasure in getting drunk and there was more alcohol, more misbehavior in drinking during prohibition than before or, for that matter, since. And it lingered for quite a while after repeal.

When I first started to cover conventions they were drunken brawls, believe me. Now you don’t see anybody drinking at a convention at all, wine at dinner or something like that. Men bring their wives to business conventions, but in the 30s and 40s—and I gather that the 20s were worse. I wasn’t mature in the 20s so I couldn’t say, but I had an uncle that made home brew in the cellar and everybody that I saw as an adult when I was growing up had a flask or offered liquor to their guests and so forth and so on.

[ Upton ] Was the uncle on the... on the Irish side of the family?

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Upton ] Ok.

[ Scott ] Yes. And... but it was true of the Germans also. It was true of most of the Americans. This was a hard drinking country before prohibition. And an awful lot of trouble came with it. The gang wars came. The black market came. The black market came in with prohibition, because the money flowed through the police and through ... and flowed though the banks. It corrupted the country. I mean we had gangsters, well, for instance, Mr. Dillinger got out of prison, broke out of jail with a pistol. They said later that he had carved the pistol out of soap. If you believe that, you will believe anything. Pretty Boy Floyd and his friends broke out and within days they had automobiles and sub machine guns and they didn’t get them from the corner grocery. They got them from the police. And that was one of the aspects of prohibition.

So you talk about regulation. Here you are talking about the dark side of regulation or regulations that are enacted without any attention to human nature, to custom, to culture, to tradition. And it began, in my opinion, with the abolitionist movement. And it flowed from there. At the time of abolition you had Feminism. You had prohibition. You had all kinds of let’s make the other guy good movements which is one of the great pitfalls of the North American culture.

[ Upton ] So... so would you say that we moved away from the thou shalt nots to the thou shalts?

[ Scott ] Absolutely.

[ Upton ] With... because the... the thing about... you wrote about a caring nation. It fascinated me in that what I never thought of is that what did Carey Nation for people like her do to change the face of the future?

[ Scott ] Well, they...

[ Upton ] ... without intending it.

[ Scott ] They made a lot of things worse, because now we are talking about a war against drugs. Now this is a regulation. This is a regulation. It has gotten so far that the physicians are afraid to give pain killing drugs to their patients because they are ... the doctors are monitored by the drug agencies and if a doctor happens to have too many patients in pain and puts out too many pain killers a red flag goes up. The local pharmacist’s records are monitored and the physician that gives up too much pain killers is investigated. He might lose his license. The... the definition of narcotics has been expanded as far as possible to include even chemicals which do not create euphoria, but only kill pain like the products of Burroughs Welcome, emperin they used to call them. I think they call it codeine now.

So when we get into regulations this is an attitude.

Anne and I moved into San Diego and we got what, I guess, is called a town house in a group of these town houses that are all connected. They are good looking and the grounds are all kept and there was a swimming pool and it was a good place to spend our first year while we looked around. And we had a little dog, a little West Highland terrier, white Scottie, you might say. And I would take the dog on a walk through the place around the place every evening. And it would go past one woman’s town house where she had two or three little dogs who would go crazy behind their fence when my dog went by. And she came out and wanted me not to walk past her place again. And I said, “You know, the whole place thinks that you are a lunatic and should be institutionalized.” And she was astonished to hear this. But at any rate it was the first thing that came into my mind that I was dealing with a nut who didn't want me to walk past her house.

But the longer we lived there the more I became aware of the number of rules that the residents had organized and enacted. They had as many rules as the American Congress for the residents of this little area. And I think this is an American disease, to regulate.

Did you know that Mr. Nixon after he left office couldn’t move in to a cooperative apartment building in New York City because the tenants voted against him? He couldn’t buy an apartment. So we can put this on a national scale, which is one thing. We put it on a personal scale it is something else.

Everywhere you go now there are regulations. The restaurants. Can you smoke? Can you not smoke? The highway. In Germany there is no speed limit. There never used to be a speed limit in Britain. I think they have one now, but I am not sure.

[ Rushdoony ] {?}

[ Scott ] But Germany... Germany has no speed limit. The Germans don’t believe that once you are adult you should be regulated to that extent.

[ Rushdoony ] But they regulate when you can water your window pots,

[ Scott ] So they are not...

[ Rushdoony ] ... when you can hang up the...

[ Scott ] They are not consistent.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But we are still on 55 miles an hour long after the oil, gasoline emergency is past. And I have a car that can go 120 miles an hour. What good is it?

[ Rushdoony ] I cannot see you, though, driving at 120, Otto.

[ Scott ] You would be surprised.

[ Rushdoony ] I will be.

[ Scott ] I haven’t found.... I haven’t found a place that is safe to do it, but I will do it as soon as I can.

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Scott ] But with regulations are an America disease.

[ Rushdoony ] I think England and France and Germany, everybody is in a race to out regulate everybody else, I am afraid.

[ Scott ] But we are not ... but we are not a free country.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, no

[ Scott ] That our rhetoric, our children are taught.

[ Rushdoony ] We are not the free country we were in the 30s.

[ Scott ] That is true.

[ Rushdoony ] When we had a great deal of freedom and accept for the very wealthy no income tax.

[ Scott ] We had ... we did have freedom of speech. Now that was a very big freedom. And I agree with Tacitus that the loss of freedom of speech means the loss of everything. We do not have that today.

[ Upton ] Well, I would like to talk about when we turn the tape is how the United Nations is trying to regulate the world.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Upton ] And how the world is responding to it by putting bodies into rivers and ... and it is... it is just incredible.

[ Scott ] Well, for a Rwanda has not been criticized, believe it or not, because there really is an indifference in the United States and in the U N to blacks killing each other. If there were some whites that they could blame it would be different.

[ Upton ] No, Otto, if they kill one gorilla... because that is where they filmed Gorillas I the Mist. If one of those gorillas got killed we would have ... we would all be over there fighting to save the gorillas. But, you know, 200,000 poor black folks can get killed and we think it is a shame.

[ Scott ] Wouldn’t you think that Burundi and Rwanda would redraw their nationality borders? Wouldn’t you think they would reshape the borders so that one tribe could be in one country and the other tribe in another country and that would be the end of it? Don’t you think that black Africa really should have a mass meeting of their governments and redraw their lines, their... their ... their countries along racial and ethnic lines so that these internecine wars would not be necessary?

[ Rushdoony ] John, you mentioned regulations from the international, the U N level. An example of that is the fact that any kind of private enterprise with regard to space or the moon or the sea is now abolished. The treat of the sea which we are almost the last to resist signing, Clinton apparently is planning now to sign. This means that any independent or private exploration of the minerals in the sea or any exploration by a particular nation will be illegal. Everything will be controlled by the U N.

Now this is regulation with a vengeance. Moreover, the very idea that this can be done is threatening, because you might be sufficiently Socialist that you agree with the treaty of the sea. But what kind of prejudice can a treaty embody if an international body approves of it? And the governing force behind prejudice today is Equalitarianism.

To illustrate, the newest thing—and it does not come from the deaf or the hard of hearing—I am hard of hearing. The idea now is to say that someone should have a hearing aid is discriminatory. You are acting as though your norm of hearing should be the norm for everyone and that somehow there is something lacking in him if you try to get him to use a hearing aid.

Now, of course, that borders on insanity. However, we have had that for some time. Some companies have had to take extremely obese people on as operators. And because of their ostensibly handicapped status, they have been free to break all the rules, to stay home when they choose and to carry on in a flagrant way because the corporation is afraid of violating minority rights.

Now this is the kind of thing that regulation leads to. And as I said, behind a great deal of these regulations is an Equalitarianism. Why? What is wrong with saying that a person who cannot hear needs something? I know I do and one of these days I will probably get a hearing aid again, because the old one no longer works. I am handicapped. So what? That very word handicapped is own banished. We are being regulated into a uniformity, into an Equalitarianism in which to excel is to sin.

[ Scott ] Well, the law of the sea is an interesting example. I understand that there are... there are vast amounts of manganese at the bottom of the sea, the bottom of the ocean. And manganese happens to be one of the minerals which is ... whose supply is being jeopardized by the revolution in South Africa. We need it very badly. If it comes under the U N and we don’t know what other minerals there are in the ocean bed. Very probably all of them, because they are ... they exist in the surface of he earth and the only difference between the surface of the earth and the ocean bed is that the ocean, you know, there is water over a part of the earth.

If we don’t have access to all those mineral treasures, I don’t know what the future would do. The idea, however, that the U N can regulate human behavior and enforce it brings us back to the fallacy involved I regulations. You have to tailor the regulation to what is possible. If you over regulate then you are faced with something entirely different. You are faced with rebellion. You are faced with eventually a collapse of the system.

The United States is moving into the area of regulation where it is so extensive and it is causing so much trouble and is so expensive and is interfering with our economy and our life to such an extent that we either have to withdraw some of these regulations or change the government, because we cannot continue under this sorcerer’s apprentice system of regulation. They have forgotten how to turn it off.

I understand that representative Army is putting in a sunset proposal, a sunset law proposal regarding our agencies. He wants them to be reevaluated every two years to look at the results of their activities to see whether or not they are worth continuing. And that is, I would say, a crack I the dike. I don’t think it will get anywhere with a Democratic Congress because if they had their way they would put us in handcuffs and leg shackles all the time. I have never understood why they do this, because once they get out of office they are under the same regulations as the rest of us. But I think it is a thought in the right direction that we have, perhaps, reached the limit.

[ Upton ] One of the... the most murderous regulations of our age are the ideas on economic sanctions against...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Upton ] ... a country, which ostensibly do not prevent food or medical aid or materials to get in, but they literally smother any ... any effort in a... and we were trying to help the former Yugoslavia by delivering food to the country and in preparation of doing some research we sent over some camera people, camera crews to record what was happening on the Serbian side of Yugoslavia. And in one of the hospitals the... a little boy came in who was a hemophiliac who fell off of his bicycle and they couldn't stop him bleeding and the.... the... they didn’t have any factor A at the hospital. And they said, the doctors said, “We can’t help your son. The only thing you can do is go to Budapest in Hungary which is about an eight hour drive and get the factor A and bring it back.”

Well, the only problem is, is that they didn’t have any gasoline to put into the car. And they had to sell their house. So they didn’t have a house to ... to... to sell to get the gasoline and it was such a mess that this kid just died. He died for... because somebody in Washington or Bonn or somewhere else in London thought it was a good idea to impose top down controls to bring Serbia into line. We are seeing the same thing in Haiti.

And the only thing that the economic sanctions do is it creates millionaires out of thugs, because the tough and the strong in the culture they know how to make things happen. It is the people that are the ... the... the weaker people in the culture who usually don’t have a say anyway into ... in a political system that... that suffer. And that, to me, is one of the most evil of the regulatory spirit of our age.

[ Scott ] Well, we ... the Germans tried to do it to the English in World Wars I and II. And the English and the Americans did it to the Germans in World War I. We are still doing it to Iraq and that includes a boycott of medical supplies.

[ Upton ] Now what... what can Iraq do wrong? I still haven’t figured that out.

[ Scott ] Iraq invaded Kuwait...

[ Rushdoony ] Without permission.

[ Scott ] And the... and with our encouragement and the argument was that it would next attack Saudi Arabia and take control of Middle ... Middle Eastern oil. That was the ... the two arguments. Well, Iraqi oil is now off the market so if we wanted cheaper oil there is very little reason to keep Iraq from selling its oil. And why the boycott is still on and why we are still maintaining an aerial military surveillance over Iraq has never been explained and nobody has ever asked the question.

[ Upton ] So why... why do you think that is?

[ Scott ] I have no idea. As a... as an old journalist I don’t come up with conclusions when I have no evidence and when I don’t have all the information. The story, as far as I am concerned, is incomplete.

We don’t get all the information we need to make a proper and intelligent assessment of what our government does. We know that there are reasons that have not been disclosed. But we don't know what they are.

[ Upton ] I remember a... a ... a pivotal ins... incident in that whole Iraq affair was the falsification of some type of a child being tortured.

[ Scott ] Oh, they took this... the ambassador’s daughter said that she saw infants taken out of oxygen tents and allowed to strangle to death through loss of oxygen. And it was a fabrication.

[ Upton ] And the media got whipped up and... and ... and ... and ... and there we go. And I remember George Bush standing in front of the television talking about it was... was that... is... he was reading a bad script about the Saddam Hussein and I forget the term that he called him, but he...

[ Scott ] He always called him Saddam, Saddam Hussein. That is always kind of funny.

[ Upton ] But and it... it was just really pathetic and here we are 10,000 or 15,000 of our people who are sick later from something that was in the air over there or something that... some kind of chemicals and somebody thought it was a good idea. It was a good ... a good thing to do at the time.

[ Scott ] Well, we couldn’t do it again, because the military has been cut back to such an extent we could no longer mount that kind of an operation. And as it was, we had to rent vessels from the Soviets to transport our troops. We have no merchant marine any more. We don’t need it. We have only got two oceans, you know, one on each end of the country. So we don’t need ships.

[ Upton ] Well, let’s back up. Let’s act like journalists. Who benefits when we decide to set up a phony...

[ Scott ] Well, Kuwait...

[ Upton ] ... phony premise.

[ Scott ] Kuwait... Kuwait benefited and Kuwait is a very wealthy, small, but extremely wealthy country. And what we are talking about here is a situation in which many billions of dollars exist. And generally speaking when there are billions of dollars floating around somebody gets some of them. But these are just speculations. I... I have no... we have not been given any hard information or justification... why, for instance, are we concerned about the Kurds? What does that mean to the average American whether the Kurds have a piece of that country or not? What do we care?

[ Rushdoony ] The major beneficiary in any kind of war or military action is the state. War and military actions give the state an opportunity to increase its powers. And that is what has happened. With each successive little military engagement or large one, we have seen Washington’s power grow and ours decrease.

[ Upton ] And now we are talking about North Korea again.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Well, we didn’t declare war in Korea. Truman’s mistake in the first place was to go into Korea under the U N instead of declaring war.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] We didn’t declare war in Vietnam. And we didn’t declare war in the Persian Gulf, the Gulf War. So we are now sending troops around the world without congressional permission and without a vote and without a voice of the people. So you are quite right I this. The war making power has been spread between Congress and the President so that we just don’t declare war anymore. We don’t do things by the rules. There are no rules. Well, if there are no rules on international levels, there is... there is many rules on a domestic level. I mean, this is the disparity we are ... we are caught in right now.

But you... you started on the sanctions. Now they applied sanctions against South Africa. And I remember when I got a call from a friend in Washington who said Reagan has declared sanctions in order to keep Congress from declaring worse sanctions. And I said, “I am not pleased.” He said, “I thought you would be.” I said, “He wasn’t elected to that. He was elected to conduct decent foreign policy and not to attack our friends, our allies.”

Now once he declared sanctions he had to enact a regulation and the regulation was that South Africa presented a clear and present danger to the United States of America, which meant that anyone who entered the South African embassy was followed by the FBI and his name was put down as having dealings with the enemy, because we made South Africa an official enemy country. You have to do that before you can apply sanctions. I don’t know what they are doing about Haiti. But that was the rule then.

And now if you wanted to make the condition of the blacks better in South Africa you would have invested money in South Africa so that they could give them jobs and hospitals and so forth and so on. The sanctions created such a depression, they created a pre revolutionary situation in South Africa. That is how the South African government was brought down by our sanctions and our leading a crusade against the white government of South Africa.

Now in all this interim months you had an escalation of murders. It became the murder capital of the world. And each month our press kept saying they are getting closer to the end of Apartheid. And isn’t it wonderful?

Well, it is all gone now and the blacks are in charge and we will see how long it lasts.

[ Rushdoony ] And they are no longer any honest statements about what happened to Africa and how a continent that half a century ago was highly productive is now a shambles and in need of aid.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes. Well, the world is beginning to get bored. How long can you operate on the theory that the white race is on earth to take care of the black race?

[ Rushdoony ] And is to blame for the faults of all the peoples of the world.

[ Scott ] Everywhere.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Upton ] Well, the thing that you have to ... to... to... getting back to Rush’s point about the regulations... In... in ... in our culture we are not going to be able to say that some men are inferior to other men. And that is a problem. I think that is...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Upton ] I think that is ... that is something that in your generation it was presupposed that until somebody became a civilized productive Christian that they were, in some sense, an inferior person. And today my generation will never ever admit or even say that some people are... are... are inferior than others.

[ Scott ] Well, you can’t even say anymore than some people are stupid.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. When ...

[ Scott ] But it is an obvious fact.

[ Upton ] Yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] In my years on the American Indian reservation where is served as a missionary the Indians would not hesitate to say the whites are better than we are. They beat the pants off of us. But they would ... they were not happy with the term Indian, because they did not feel that the various tribes were related.

[ Scott ] So they had their own tribal name.

[ Rushdoony ] Each had their own name.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] ... which was we are the people.

[ Scott ] Sure.

[ Rushdoony ] That is all the name we have. But they are the Paiutes.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Rushdoony ] Or the Comanches or whatever. And they rated the various tribes as worthless or very good or superior. They are better than we are. But we are better than those people are. It was a very realistic assessment of the various Indian cultures and their own culture as compared to the whites.

Now when you have that realistic assessment you say that, well, we can improve. We have got to improve. But if everybody gets the same grade, let us say, in a classroom, who needs to improve? It used to be that students would compete for the better grade. They would have spelling bees and other contests in order to establish a level of excellence. And that is gone.

[ Scott ] Well, when you issue a regulation it is done on the assumption of equality, because the regulation treats everybody equally. There is no exceptions. Well, if there is no exceptions there is no exceptional people. But beyond that, if you are totally regulated your personal authority has been taken away. You are under the authority of the government or some other group. And when you have no authority over yourself, you have no responsibility for your behavior. So a lack of personal authority leads to irresponsible behavior.

[ Rushdoony ] It leads to irresponsible behavior on all levels. Plato in his Republic held that most people had to be ruled by the philosopher kings. Therefore, they had to be strictly regulated and controlled in every aspect of their life. They would have no personal freedom, because they were incapable of it.

This, however, meant that on the top level, the philosopher kings, there was no accountability to anyone.

[ Scott ] Well who could... who could hold the king accountable?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] That was the... that was the query that the English solved when they took Charles I into custody. How do you charge the king? Because the king is the law. Well, they charged him with being an enemy of the people. And they executed him for that. That is where the phrase first came from. And so public enemy is not exactly invented here.

[ Upton ] And then you... you also have the evangelical tendency to regulate people through church life and to create an artificial life that is sort of given by the pastor and by the elders and this is ... this wife and...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Upton ] And it goes against Calvin and... and what Calvin stood for. But I think that is interesting how we have swallowed regulation in the church and once we can swallow it in the church we can swallow it everywhere else.

[ Scott ] Well, a lot of these churches wouldn’t have accepted... wouldn’t accept Calvin if he were to come back. He wouldn’t... he wouldn’t come up to their level of austerity, but it is usually an austerity for each other. I am not saying it corporally, but it is a pretended austerity.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, Calvin would be censured immediately by a great many supposedly Calvinistic churches. He preached every day at the cathedral and it ... he did a great many other things. So he was a very, very active man. And he looked forward to bowling on the green Sunday afternoons.

[ Scott ] And he liked his wine.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. At bowling on the green would have him up before most consistories...

[ Scott ] So would the wine. Well, the regulations have become self defeating. And this happened to the Catholic Church. The organization overtook its own purpose. So just to keep the church going became its purpose. This happens to corporations today. I have seen corporations with policy books that are six inches thick. They try to govern every possible contingency. They want salesmen to memorize a sales talk. They don’t take it for granted that he will be able to answer different customers. They want to tell him how to dance with each customer, the same dance. This is like restricting you a waltz.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the churches, Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox, all of them are governed now by the law of God, but by church regulations and it is leading to a decline in the level of the life of the laity, because they have been made subject to man made rules and regulations which too often carry more weight than the Word of God. And the result is loss of respect for the church.

If a church stands for God’s law, God’s total Word, people can disagree, but they can never evade the fact they have to respect God’s law, willy, nilly. But when the church stands for itself it doesn’t get much respect.

[ Upton ] Yet Calvinists are the ones that are being accused of once we gain power... and I have always ... I have... I always marvel at that one, when once we have gained power we are going to start to institute all of these laws....

[ Scott ] Well, you know that famous cartoon where the two men are spread eagled against the wall and one says to the other, “This is my plan.”

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our time is about up. Any last words?

[ Upton ] Well, what is the way out, Rush? What do we need to do to fix this? What regulations do we have...

[ Rushdoony ] The way out...

[ Upton ] ... {?}

[ Rushdoony ] Regulations are the epitome of man’s word. And we are being strangled by man’s proud attempt to create a new paradise on earth by regulating everything. God’s law takes only a limited number of pages. And it gives man freedom. It is called by our Lord’s brother James the perfect law of liberty.

Well, thank you all for all for listening and God bless you.

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