Neglected Lectures From the Sixties and Seventies

Evil as a Social Necessity

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, & Sermons

Lesson: Evil as a Social Necessity

Genre:

Track: 15

Dictation Name: RR256A1

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960-1970

Our subject this evening is Evil as a Social Necessity. About a year and a half, or two years ago, I wrote a little pamphlet, the first chapter of a longer work by that name on which I am at present working, entitled The Religion of Revolution. Tonight, as we discuss Evil as a social Necessity, we are discussing as aspect of the Religion of Revolution.

What is the Religion of Revolution? It is an ancient movement, going back deeply into Antiquity, which we find on every continent on the face of the earth. Apart from the Bible, no where has man believed in creationism. Everywhere else, man has believed that his origin has been in primeval chaos. Man has held that the universe and all life evolved out of a primeval chaos, and accordingly, the origin of all things is therefore, in chaos.

Now, the significance of this is far-reaching. In any system of though, in any philosophy, whatever your source, your origin is, there is also your power. If therefore, as a Christian, you believe literally that in the beginning, God crated in the heavens and the earth, then God, being the source of all things, is the source of your power. He is the source of your love. He is the source of all authority, but if you hold, as men did in Antiquity, and as a result of Darwinism which is simply a revival of the ancient cults of chaos, you believe that man evolved out of a primeval chaos, then the power in the universe is in chaos, and for you, law and authority must come out of chaos. Chaos is the source of vitality, of power.

Now what do you do then if you believe society needs regeneration? If you believe that things are going downhill and are in a bad way? If you are a believer in scripture, in God, in Jesus Christ, you say that man needs to be regenerated through the power of Christ, and to conform himself to God’s law. This is your source, you see, of renewal, of regeneration both socially and individually. But, if you believe that all things evolved out of primeval chaos, then your source of power, of regeneration, of salvation, is going to be chaos. Then how do you regenerate men in society? Why, through revolution. Revolution is simply controlled chaos, deliberately invoked chaos.

Now, in the pamphlet The Religion of Revolution, I point out how the ancient cults of chaos had rituals held annually when all law and order was dispensed with, when every kind of crime, when every kind of perversion was not only legal, but required. Why? To revitalize society, to regenerate it. It was their revival meeting, at it were. So that in the Roman Saturnalias, in the Babylonian festivals, in the Egyptian festivals, there had to be sexual relations with animals, incest had to be practiced, every kind of perversion because this was their annual revival meeting. It was their way of regenerating society, of saving it.

Now when man began to forsake creationism, when he began to forsake his faith in God as his savior and regenerator, where was he going to go for regeneration? Why, to chaos. Now, if you look at it rationally, it is ridiculous, is it not? To try to regenerate a society by going to work and shooting off the best by destroying all free enterprise, by destroying factories, by destroying everything. It isn’t a matter of rational belief. It’s a matter of religious faith, and that is precisely why revolutionists maintain that even if you have a peaceful takeover of a country through the ballot box, you must have thereafter, an induced revolution. You must proceed to liquidate and to destroy, to bring about revolution, because you want to regenerate the country. Thus, revolution is the non-Christian, the atheistic alternative to the Christian doctrine of salvation. It is, for non-Christians, salvation.

Moreover, there is another aspect to this. Several generations ago, when Max Turner, a prominent atheist of the day, wrote his book on The Ego and His Own, he ridiculed those liberals who had dispensed with God, but were still practicing marriage, or being moral, didn’t believe in theft or in murder, and he told them how ridicules they were, how inconsistent they were. How could they say that God was dead and man had taken God’s place if they were still living in terms of God’s law? This was an impossibility. Man is never his own god if he allows a law to remain over him, so the way to prove that God was dead was to destroy all law, to practice evil as a social necessity.

Now one man, at the dawn of the modern revolutionary movements, put this very literally and consistently to practice. This man was the Marquis De Sade, one of the great heroes of the French Revolution, but finally, the French Revolution had to imprison even him. The Marquis De Sade is today, one of the heroes of the modern world, so that when I read you some passages from him, remember that his collected works which, throughout the civilized world, were banned totally until recent years are now being published. The Marquis De Sade said that, to demonstrate that God is dead, we must practice every kind of perversion, and he compulsively practiced every kind of perversion to the nth” degree and ended up in prison and in mental institutions repeatedly because he was such a menace, because he destroyed the sanity of various young women, because his perverted activities were such an offense to all public decency, and De Sade said he was a libertarian, that he did not believe in anything over man, no law, no God, and so he issued a proclamation to all Frenchmen at the time of the Revolution, and he summoned them to the task of remaking men and society. “Frenchmen, only strike the initial blows. Your state education will then see to the rest. Get promptly to the task of training the youth. It must be amongst your most important concerns. Above all, build their education upon a sound ethical basis, the ethical basis that was so neglected in your religious education. Let there then be the most scrupulous care taken to avoid mixing religious fantasies into this state education. Never lose sight of the fact that it is free man we wish to form, not the wretched worshipers of a God.”

The great step to freeing man from God is for the state to take over education, and for the state to teach the new morality, the morality that a man is free to do what he wishes, that every man is his own law, and so he said, equality must be the foremost law of your new government, and this, he said meant, among other things, sexual communism.

“Never may an act of possession be exercised upon a free being. The excusive possession of a woman is no less unjust that the possession of slaves. All men are born free. All have equal rights. Never should we lose sight of those principles, according to which, never may there be granted one sex the legitimate right to lay monopolizing hands upon the other, and never may one of these sexes or classes arbitrarily possess the other. Similarly, a woman existing in the purity of nature’s laws cannot allege as justification for refusing herself to someone who desires her, the love she bears another, because such a response is based upon exclusion, and no man may be excluded from the having of a woman as of the moment she definitely belongs to all men. The act of possession can only be exercised upon a chattel or an animal, never upon an individual who resembles us, and all the ties which can bind a woman to a man are quite as unjust as illusory. If then it becomes incontestable that we have received from nature the right indiscriminately to express our wishes to all women, it likewise becomes incontestable that we have the right to compel their submission, not exclusively, for I should then be contradicting myself, but temporarily. It cannot be denied that we have the right to decree laws that compel women to yield to the flames of him who would have her. Violence itself being one of that right’s effects, we can employ it lawfully. Indeed, has nature not proven that we have that right by bestowing upon us the strength needed to bend women to our will.”

Now, that this is a part of the revolutionary program, we had better take seriously. After all, when the Russian revolution was waged and triumphed, one of the first acts was to declare that all women were the property of the state and belonged to all men, and the only right any husband had was to stand first in line, and these laws prevailed through the thirties until thirty-six when, with the forthcoming war, they felt that the birthrate had declined so radically as a result of these laws, they had better change the law, not because they wanted morality but because they wanted to increase the birthrate.

And remember, when we had the radicals for a time controlling this country with their program of radical reconstruction, which was the socialization of this country, after the Civil War. In the state of Louisiana, all marriages were declared dissolved. That’s a part of our American history.

What De Sade said sounds fantastic, but let me remind you, he is being regarded today increasingly as one of the great thinkers of the modern world. Not only that, but his works are not only being republished but are being hailed even by those who call themselves conservatives. Mary Graham Lund has written an article in the last two years in “Modern Age,” which calls itself a conservative quarterly, in which she glorified the Marquis De Sade. Why? Well, if you are not a Christian, you are going to believe that man is his own god and his own law, and the man who applied this most rigorously was De Sade. Let us hear a little more from De Sade, so that you recognize the full flavor of this man.

“What about small children? What about very young girls?” This is what the Marquis De Sade had to say. “There remains but to fix the woman’s age. Now, I maintain it cannot be fixed without restricting the freedom of a man who desires a girl of any given age. He who has the right to eat the fruit of a tree may assuredly pluck it ripe or green, according to the inspiration of his taste, but it will be objected there is an age when the man’s proceedings would be decidedly harmful to the girl’s wellbeing. This consideration is utterly without value. Once you concede me the proprietary right of enjoyment, that right is independent of the effects enjoyment produces. From this moment on, it becomes one whether this enjoyment be beneficial or damaging to the object which must submit itself to me. Have I not already proven that it is illegitimate to force the woman’s will in this connection? And that immediately she excites the desire to enjoy, she has got to expose herself to this enjoyment, putting all egotistical sentiments quite aside. The issue of her wellbeing, I repeat, is irrelevant. As soon as concern for this consideration threatens to detract from or enfeeble the enjoyment of him who desires her, and who has the right to appropriate her, this consideration for age ceases to exist. For what the object may experience condemned by nature and by the law to slake{?} momentarily the other’s thirst, is nothing to the point. In this study, we are only interested in what agrees with him who desires.” And if you think this is simply a mad man of 150 years ago, whom even the revolutionists had to lock up, remember this. He is not only being republished now and praised by prominent people, but the very point I have read to you about child molestation has been given scientific sanction by the second volume of the Kinsey Report. So that now it is considered as having scientific standing.

The Marquis De Sade, I could go on at great length to cite his opinions, but for example, he advocated and said, in fact, incest should be required, because he said, “It loosens family ties, and the citizen has that much more love to lavish on his country.” Therefore, he went onto say it should be required by governments to break down the family. Now, this is nothing new. In one of the chapters in the study that I am writing, I deal with the Mazdekite Revolution, one of the first times in history in which communism seized and controlled a major state. The Mazdekites were a communistic movement, a cult of chaos, a religion of revolution, which took over the ancient Aryan peoples, Aryan or Iranian, we call them Persian, a great people in Antiquity, but they fell prey to this thinking, and the Mazdekites, the latter part of the fifth century, took over Persia, and they ruled it for better than half a century. They required this. They required every kind of perversion. They instituted a total communization of all wealth, all money.

Second, a total communization of all property. Third, a communization of all women. At the end of the fifty or sixty years during which they governed the country, it was said by scholars that there was scarcely a child who knew who his father was in all of Persia. A very fine emperor, Khosrau Anushirvan came to the throne and momentarily overthrew them, but the country had been so gutted economically, morally, and genetically, that in a few years, they fell prey to the Muslims, and today, they are living under conditions that their ancestors would have despised. They were destroyed.

This sort of thinking has always gone hand-in-hand with communism, with statism, with the attack on God’s sovereign, with the attempt to make man sovereign, because of man is going to become god, then the way to do it to prove that God is dead is to destroy God’s law, to do it by practicing evil as a way of life, as a social necessity, and so man says, has God said thou shalt now? I say thou shalt, and I will prove thereby that God is dead, and hence, there is the compulsive necessity for evil. Hence the necessity of these people of all sides of us, on the college campuses to do everything which is deliberately perverted and evil. It is their way of saying, “We shall prove that God is dead.”

Altizer, one of the leaders of The Death of God school, wrote a couple of years ago on the Christian scholars, that man must become the true Christ, his own savior, and he said the transcendent God must be dead to us, and he must as it were be reborn for us as the epiphany of Satan. In other words, we have worshiped good, we have worshiped righteousness, we have worshiped God too long, so that to do away with him, let us consider power in the universe to be the epiphany of Satan. So that let God be dead and be reborn as evil, and let us worship evil so that we rid ourselves of any hangover of righteousness and good, and then after this is over, man will become truly god. Man must, in other words, destroy God’s world, God’s order, and create a totally manmade world. Hence, destroy everything that has meaning in terms of God, destroy art that has meaning. Make it totally meaningless so it won’t have any connection with God’s language, with God’s world of meaning, and then you will be truly free.

And how to make people believe that this is going to be a brave new world? Well, teach them to accept evil in the name of love. You must love. You must love everything. You’re not really a Christian, you are told, if you don’t love. This is not biblical love. This is the total toleration of all evil. Love the perverts. Love the murderers. Love the communists. In other words, tolerate them. Subsidize them, and then, you will truly be a moral man, so the new morality has it.

And pervert, wherever you find innocence, wherever you have godliness destroy it. Hence, the compulsion of those, for example, who take LSD to pervert others. Just this weekend I have learned of several cases, tragic ones, where people have had LSD put into their coffee or into their water. It is odorless, colorless, tasteless, and a child as well as an adult can be given LSD without knowing it because he cannot taste it, and why the desire to do this to totally innocent persons, but the desire to destroy and to pervert.

Law enforcement men say one of the growing problems is what is called the Lolita Complex. Precisely the desire to pervert, to molest very small girls. This is becoming a major factor. One writer on the subject, Trainer, has commented on it, and I’d like to read his remarks in analyzing the causes of child molestation. “There is little hope for any final successful resolution of the Lolita Complex. It, like our looser sex life generally will continue to toll its call and gain its people because all of us have become obsessed with the importance of love. Mr. Milton Oaken{?}, enunciating his theories for this report, stated, ‘All of us in this country are caught up in a very serious national illness. It is the overvaluation of love. It is something everyone thinks he must have. People will do all sorts of things to gain it, and because sex has become synonymous with love, they’ll do all sorts of things for sex, too. Love has become a necessity, a study, and an overused media lord. People cannot escape the importance that has been place on love, daily sometimes hourly. Everyone is reminded that we must love and be loved. That we must love our parents, children, mate, and self, and we must strive to love everyone. We must give it generously, without it, we cannot know the satisfaction of sex, the glow of health or life everlasting. Love has become the cause and the cure, the goal and the reward. Husbands and wives try for it and battle over it. Children are imprisoned by it. Organizations sponsor it, and the analyst’s couch investigates it. No one can bear to be without love. It must be obtained at any cost. Sometimes, the cost is mighty. Love can kill initiative, stifle individuality, and be used as an excuse for failure.” “Love is nice,” Dr. Oaken assures us. “It’s comfortable, it’s very nice to have, but it’s not essential to life. People do live without love, but it’s not food or water. We can exist without it, and many people do quite successfully It is doubtful that love and the things that are done in the name of love will ever lose its attractiveness for American society. It offers too many loopholes for problems. It too frequently clouds reality, and fortunately, for the vast majority of people, love is quite too satisfying and rewarding for its influence to be lessened. So, in both the colors of truth and as a disguise for perversity, the overvaluation of love will continue to channel many to the net of the Lolita Complex.”

So, as some practice perversity as a religion, the rest of us are told to accept every kind of evil as a part of our religion of love. The jist of this new faith is nothing is true, and all is allowed. Evil today is becoming a major force all around us, because it is being practiced with an evangelical fervor, with a missionary, crusading fervor, and we had better realize it. Evil is not accidental to what revolution is doing. It is at the heart of it. It is its way of life. Because it believes that chaos is the source of all power in the universe, it must evoke chaos, moral chaos, every kind of chaos, economic chaos, political chaos, in order to revitalize society and create paradise on earth. We cannot contend against this without recognizing this is an either-or situation. You either believe that chaos is ultimate or you believe that God is ultimate. If you believe chaos is ultimate, every man is his own law and every man does that which is right in his own eyes. If you believe God is ultimate, then you believe God’s law governs all men, and you must believe also as the Puritans did, and as our forefathers who established this country did. “There is no gospel without the law, and we are saved by grace that we might fulfill and keep the law of God, that we might worship the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, and being, that we might honor our father and mother, that we do not kill nor commit adultery, nor steal, nor bear false witness, nor covet, and apart from God’s law, there can be no effective action against the believers in chaos and evil. Evil, like a flood, is rising around us. It threatens soon to destroy us. The question in this is where do you stand in terms of this struggle? with God or with chaos? Thank you.

End of tape