Ep. 33 - The Cancer In The Bloodstream Of American Culture
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
177.73459
Summary
In this episode, we take a look at why a civil war would not happen in America today, and why it never would have happened in the Civil War. We look at the experiences of the men who fought for a cause, and how they were willing to sacrifice their lives for it.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
People will often ask me why I'm so blunt, why I'm so direct in my approach.
00:00:08.560
And oftentimes they'll phrase it in a way that's a little bit less flattering than that,
00:00:21.860
But first of all, I'm not interested in attracting flies.
00:00:29.140
For the sake of the expression, why would you use the one thing that nobody wants to attract?
00:00:35.980
But second, I don't think the expression holds anyway, because it appears to me that one of
00:00:42.260
the great problems in American society and really kind of the film, the protective coating,
00:00:49.480
the shell that covers everything in our culture is indifference, apathy, intellectual and moral
00:00:59.860
So if you want to get through to people, if you want to reach them, if you really want
00:01:03.160
to engage them, you got to break through that sometimes.
00:01:06.200
And that means necessarily being a little bit more blunt.
00:01:10.380
And if in the process they end up feeling attacked and judged, and if you hurt their feelings a
00:01:21.180
You got to make them feel something first, make them care, even if that's how they just
00:01:25.060
just, you got to get them there first, where they actually care and they're angry.
00:01:37.100
Because I think most people don't care about like anything.
00:01:42.360
We're always told that the real problem, the biggest problem for America today is that
00:01:48.340
there's so much division and there's so much partisanship and there's bigotry and people
00:01:53.980
are so firm in their beliefs and they refuse to compromise or to see from the other perspective,
00:02:05.520
We have to fight hate speech and hate crimes and hate in every other form.
00:02:08.680
There's just, there's so much hate everywhere, which I think is so clearly not the case, not
00:02:16.420
When I look around America, I don't see people who are so firm and resolute and dedicated to
00:02:22.860
their beliefs and so just on fire and passionate about life and about what they believe and
00:02:30.440
to a dangerous extent where now it's even hateful.
00:02:34.200
In fact, I'm even told, people even worry that we're headed towards a civil war.
00:02:38.760
We're going to break out in war again like we did in 1861.
00:02:42.020
I think we flatter ourselves when we start talking like that.
00:02:46.600
There's not, I hate to tell you this, but there's not going to be any civil war.
00:02:55.880
We don't care nearly enough about things for a civil war.
00:02:59.480
Now, I know the conditions are different in 2018 than they were in 1861, but just consider
00:03:04.120
what these men, during the real civil war, the first civil war, the only civil war so far,
00:03:11.600
consider what they went through, what they endured.
00:03:16.140
I mean, we're talking about, especially in the South, we're talking about these barely even
00:03:21.780
men, a lot of them, 16, 17, 18 years old in many cases.
00:03:29.680
You know, they were, they were walking like through the, the, the Shenandoah mountains
00:03:36.220
without shoes on, marching 20 to 25 miles a day, eating salt pork and black coffee that
00:03:47.520
Um, they were charging headlong into cannon fire.
00:03:52.420
They, they, they would stand just yards apart and, and, and, and blow each other to pieces
00:04:01.240
So if a limb had to be amputated, well, you're going to take a swig of whiskey and, um, it
00:04:07.160
So that's the kind of conviction that these men had in the civil war.
00:04:14.220
And they really believed in a cause you could disagree with the cause that we, we could
00:04:20.720
The point is they believed in something they believed in a cause and, um, on both sides
00:04:25.480
and they were, and they were willing to fight for it.
00:04:31.000
Most of us, we don't have anywhere near that kind of conviction.
00:04:34.920
I'll tell you why a civil war wouldn't happen because a civil war, uh, would almost certainly
00:04:40.140
mean that we're all going to lose, that there's not going to be cable or internet for a while.
00:04:49.060
The moment we started losing our luxuries, we live in this country with such insane, indulgent
00:04:57.360
The moment we started to lose those things, we would say, oh, nevermind.
00:05:05.480
Like our electricity goes off and we're out with, we're without air conditioning for two
00:05:15.260
I mean, I did, I, I thought we were fighting a civil war.
00:05:17.880
I didn't know I'd have to sacrifice my video game time.
00:05:20.180
I mean, nobody told me that was part of the bargain.
00:05:22.320
Now I don't say this with, with disappointment, by the way, I don't mean to come across like
00:05:28.960
600,000 people died in the civil war was a horrible, horrific thing.
00:05:32.260
I'm just trying to make the point that hatred is not the thing destroying our society.
00:05:40.940
Division, partisanship, all those things can be, can literally split apart countries
00:05:51.440
The cancer in our bloodstream, I really believe, is indifference.
00:05:57.580
The problem is we've misdiagnosed all the symptoms.
00:06:01.560
So for instance, we see these occasional bursts of violence and chaos in the streets on the
00:06:05.780
part of BLM or Antifa or that one time when it was white nationalists.
00:06:09.420
And we see that and we say, okay, well, that's bigotry.
00:06:17.640
There's people, they're just looking for an excuse to throw rocks and to burn cop cars
00:06:23.900
But that's really, it's just a destructive impulse.
00:06:27.460
Remember famously, the mayor of Baltimore, during the riots in Baltimore, she said, well,
00:06:38.200
It was really, they just wanted a space to destroy.
00:06:41.320
Why they were destroying things, you know, didn't really matter.
00:06:44.600
In fact, if you had asked, if you had pulled any one of them out and interviewed them,
00:06:48.940
and some people did do this, well, what are you, what are you so upset about?
00:06:53.100
But in many cases, they couldn't even tell you what they were upset about.
00:06:57.500
They just were looking for a reason to do this.
00:07:02.400
The same can be said for many of the recent mass shootings.
00:07:05.840
I make this point every time there's a mass shooting, because I think it's, it's so
00:07:09.260
important to realize that in most cases, when you hear about these, these,
00:07:14.600
these monsters who go in and slaughter innocent people, in most cases, this is, they are not
00:07:24.800
The Charleston church shooting is a different case.
00:07:29.540
But most of the time, I think it's not bigotry.
00:07:35.760
Even if the person is shooting up a school and he has some grudge against the people in
00:07:39.960
the school, but I think that's not really what's driving it.
00:07:43.420
And because what, what do you hear from the survivors of these shootings, the ones who
00:07:48.420
witness this happen and they see the guy in the act, what, what do they always say?
00:07:54.420
You almost never hear about a guy walking into a building, screaming obscenities and just,
00:08:05.440
there's, you know, his face is red and he's on fire with rage and he's spraying bullets at
00:08:14.340
That's kind of the, the scene you would expect to see, right?
00:08:18.580
But no, what you always hear is that they walk into a building and they have a blank expression
00:08:25.000
And they are practically yawning while they go around killing innocent people.
00:08:33.640
And if you could zoom in and just see their face and see nothing and see and hear nothing
00:08:38.440
else, you would almost think, well, that's the face of a man waiting in line at the post
00:08:42.380
office or at the DMV, you know, that's what you would think because it's just, or that's
00:08:56.600
So again, that goes to this emptiness and this indifference.
00:09:01.280
Every, every day on the news, you see another example of, of this kind of thing.
00:09:09.140
You may remember the case a couple of years ago of, um, the, the people who kidnapped the
00:09:15.900
disabled man and, um, tortured him and broadcast it live on Facebook.
00:09:22.500
I don't know if you remember that case, but right after it happened, there were people
00:09:29.520
No, because they were laughing while they did it.
00:09:35.200
They didn't have anything against him personally.
00:09:38.000
They were just utterly indifferent to his life.
00:09:41.580
And so they thought they would amuse themselves by torturing him.
00:09:47.760
What they felt towards him was something even lower than hatred.
00:09:51.780
Another case of teenagers who, uh, laughed and made fun of a guy while he drowned in a
00:09:59.420
There was a very troubled man who went out and drowned that, I guess he trying to drown
00:10:06.900
And there were teenagers that happened to be standing on the shore and, um, on the bank.
00:10:19.420
And instead they just laughed and they made fun of him.
00:10:24.740
They were just completely indifferent to his life.
00:10:27.400
Think again of all the cases of, unfortunately, there are so many cases of, uh, people committing
00:10:34.780
And what do you hear about every time one of this, these things happen, you'll always
00:10:38.060
hear about the people that watch the live stream and they cheer and they encourage the
00:10:52.260
Less extreme, but still another example is, is most of the vitriol and the vile, putrid
00:11:00.480
filth that you see people spewing at each other online.
00:11:04.460
You look at the comments under a YouTube video or on Twitter or whatever, and people say the
00:11:10.240
most vile, awful things to each other and about other people.
00:11:18.480
Look, I get, I get a lot of the, I mean, take it from me.
00:11:20.700
I get so much of this myself and I would even, I'll even, you know, for, for lack of a better
00:11:27.400
And I get so much of it and anyone right now, you could look at the comment.
00:11:31.320
I mean, I, no matter what I say or do online, the comments section will be filled with people
00:11:39.560
But on the rare occasion, when I make the mistake of reading some of that stuff, what I find is it's
00:11:43.960
not, it's like, they don't even really seem angry.
00:11:47.000
They're just, these are just empty, sad people who are just reacting this way.
00:11:52.240
They're reacting this way because they find some amusing, it amuses them.
00:11:56.920
And also for me personally, the kind of things I talk about where I'm trying to get to, you
00:12:00.600
know, if I'm, if I'm trying to break people out of that apathy and out of that, um, out
00:12:06.240
of that indifference, well, they're going to react strongly against that because for them,
00:12:11.960
they, they, they cling closely to it and to, and to be, you know, when you try to separate
00:12:17.160
them from it, they start to feel vulnerable and scared and afraid because this apathy and
00:12:22.280
this indifference is also kind of a defense mechanism.
00:12:26.560
The rising suicide rate itself is speaks to this indifference.
00:12:31.000
The drug abuse epidemic, our, our supposed mental health crisis, throw in all of our
00:12:36.200
obsessive TV watching and, uh, our addiction to smartphones and the internet and the rabid
00:12:41.440
kind of materialism that you see in our culture, the collapse of the family, the decline
00:12:45.320
in religion, all of this goes back to the same thing, emptiness, indifference, apathy.
00:12:51.240
So here, here, here's the secret about the nature of the disputes in our country.
00:12:56.180
Most of the combatants screaming and fighting at each other, you know, and, and,
00:13:09.380
They're, they're, you know, saying what they think they're supposed to say.
00:13:13.080
They're repeating their lines that they've been given.
00:13:17.140
And the people on the other side are, are giving their lines, but it's all just theater.
00:13:31.520
I was just, just one example of so many that you see online, but I was scrolling through
00:13:36.040
Facebook a few days ago and I saw on my newsfeed, someone had posted something about Trump's
00:13:43.540
And so in the comment section, there were five, five or six people going back and forth fighting
00:13:48.520
And it was a very contentious, angry fight and they were insulting each other.
00:13:52.400
But just reading through it, I got, I got the distinction, distinct impression reading
00:13:58.880
I got the distinct impression that number one, nobody involved in this discussion knows what
00:14:07.040
It really appears that none of them had even thought about this issue prior to that morning,
00:14:17.800
And, but now suddenly they're pretending to not only know about it, but to feel passionately
00:14:24.040
all of a sudden they've, they're, they're on fire with passion about it.
00:14:28.620
But, um, it's, I find their passion really unconvincing.
00:14:33.400
So you get the impression, number one, that they don't know anything about it.
00:14:38.300
And if they're having this fight and it's just something to do, and then they'll quickly
00:14:42.720
You can even imagine, I mean, in your head, you can imagine like one of these guys in line
00:14:46.980
at Starbucks, typing furiously, no, you're so stupid.
00:15:01.240
It's just something for him to do while he's doing other things.
00:15:12.020
I think it's indifference that informs every aspect of American life.
00:15:16.980
And hollow, indifferent, callous people, they don't fight civil wars.
00:15:27.140
And I think that's going to be our fate if we don't stay on our current trajectory, if
00:15:38.980
But our unity is not any kind of, it's not due to any kind of common understanding or
00:15:51.840
Or maybe it's more accurate to say that we're together because what else are we supposed to do?
00:16:03.580
Hatred really isn't, hatred isn't such a terrible thing.
00:16:07.460
I mean, it's not good, but you can work with hatred.
00:16:11.580
When somebody is hateful, you know, like if somebody really hates you, really hates you,
00:16:19.040
It's not, you know, you'd prefer if they didn't.
00:16:20.860
But that means that they, there's something, they feel something towards you.
00:16:26.900
They care about you in a negative way, but they do care about you.
00:16:32.420
There's a, there's a caring, there's a, there's a passion directed at you.
00:16:39.640
You know, you've got the raw material to work with.
00:16:43.760
So all you got to do is just turn it right side up.
00:16:46.280
It's not that hard to turn a hateful person into a loving person.
00:16:49.300
Because you've already got that fire and that passion there.
00:16:54.180
I mean, all you got to do is just, you've just got to make things right.
00:16:57.340
You've just got to put them in their proper place and context.
00:17:08.760
And if somebody's indifferent to you, well, then that's the worst thing because there's
00:17:15.840
And I think that's what we struggle with in our society.
00:17:22.900
On our own, you can't take an indifferent person and make them not that anymore.
00:17:31.360
But in the meantime, I really think that if there is any antidote aside from prayer to
00:17:38.200
indifference, it is real passion and conviction.
00:17:41.800
And so I try to bring that to a discussion because, as I said, I think that's the only
00:17:48.000
If there's any way to break through that indifference and get to the core of a person and make them
00:17:55.680
Thank you for caring enough to watch this whole ramble.