Our Threatened Freedom

Who Makes History? (03:11)

R.J. Rushdoony

Transcript:

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:00 Who makes history? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:08 America’s UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, in her book “Dictatorships and Double Standards” wrote most tellingly of an illusion common to many of our professors, bureaucrats, statesmen and politicians.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:25 This illusion is the idea that vague social forces shape events rather than people. Ambassador Kirkpatrick tellingly cites evidences of this very dangerous myth. If social forces create events, then it becomes necessary for civil government to engineer those forces which will create the desired results. Such a belief however makes people the creatures of forces rather than God’s creation.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:58 It also reduces man to a helpless piece of driftwood on an ocean of social forces. Such thinking is radically alien to our Biblical faith and heritage. Our civilization and our country are the products of men of faith and action who shaped events and set forces in motion rather than being shaped by then.

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:25 I submit that this belief that social forces shape events is a new religion, not sound sociology. I submit also that it is a very damaging faith. It produces pessimism and a sense of futility. It cuts the vital springs of human action and channels energy in a self-defeating concept.

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:49 History is not a product of vague social forces, but very real peoples who by faith embarked on grave ventures and made great steps forward. Behind every great age of advance in history, we find men of action vitalized by a powerful faith. Forces do not exist in the abstract.

R.J. Rushdoony: 02:14 A social force is the product of a people’s faith and action. It has no existence in and of itself, and it cannot exist apart from a people’s beliefs.

R.J. Rushdoony: 02:27 Social scientists in talking about such forces have fallen into a naive deification of their own ideas. History is a human product, not an abstraction’s work.

R.J. Rushdoony: 02:41 Unsurprisingly, these scholars have converted history into social studies to strip events of their human source and to ascribe them to vague social forces. Such a faith however denies man freedom and reduces him to a product of vague and non-existent entities or forces.

R.J. Rushdoony: 03:07 This has been R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.