Our Threatened Freedom

Are We Using Language to Confuse Ourselves

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: 131-169

Genre: Conversation

Track: 131

Dictation Name: Vol. K - Part 01 - Are We Using Language to Confuse Ourselves

Location/Venue: Unknown

Year: 1980’s – 1990’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] Are we using language to confuse ourselves? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

Too often in our time the terms we use to organize our thinking are created by statist agencies and serve to mislead us. One such set of terms, created by the Internal Revenue Service, is profit versus non-profit. Profit making activities are taxed, non-profit enterprises and agencies are not. People have come to classify activities in terms of these two terms as though they described reality, instead of a statist taxing category. Would it be not much more realistic to classify things without reference to the IRS? If the IRS were to disappear in the next decade, how useful would these terms be? After all, they have reference only to tax states. I submit that the terms productive versus non-productive are much more useful. Churches, schools and libraries are non-profit, but they are at the same time among the most productive agencies civilization has ever known. To eliminate them would be to eliminate civilization. Civil government is emphatically non-profit; often it is not productive of too much good. But one kept within its limits can be productive of social order.

The family is a non-profit community, but it is most emphatically a productive agency, and its decay is the decay of society and civilization.

Because we have emphasized the profit versus non-profit perspective, we have tended to falsify our view of life. In every area, intellectual, industrial, and personal, we have downgraded the productive man in favor of the profiting man. Production has thus been displaced by administration by the visible symbols of profitable power in church, university, state, and business, which have gained ascendency over the productive mind and hand.

Religiously speaking, this means that form has become more important than substance, and pragmatism has replaced theology.

When we look at the world through categories governed by the IRS, we have beggared ourselves intellectually, and we have allowed the taxman, rather than the Lord God, to frame our thinking. We need to remind ourselves of St. Paul’s words, study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not be ashamed, rightly divining the word of truth.

This has been R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.