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Sept. 5, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
46:40
THE GOP’S CHEAPSKATE PROBLEM Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep911
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Coming up, my new book, Vindicating Trump, is available for pre-order.
I'll give you some details.
I'm also going to consider the money gap between Republicans and Democrats and talk about the GOP's cheapskate problem.
Philosopher and author James Arthur Ray joins me.
We're going to talk about how to overcome adversity and live a successful life.
If you're watching on YouTube or Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast. America needs this voice.
The times are crazy, in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Guys, I want to make a short announcement before I plunge into my topic for the monologue, and the announcement concerns my new book.
It's called Vindicating Trump.
That's the title of the book.
Happens also to be the title of the new and forthcoming movie.
More about the movie later.
But with regard to the book, it's now available for pre-order.
And so you can be one of the first people to get it, get your copy.
And if you'll take a suggestion, consider getting a couple of copies for people you know who are, well, either like-minded or not like-minded.
For the like-minded, they'll be fired up by the book which makes the moral case for Trump.
It makes the moral case for Trump the man as well as the moral case for Trump's policies and his ideas.
I say this because there are so many people, including quite a few Republicans, I don't just mean the Never Trumpers, who say things like, well, I don't really like the guy, but I like the way that he governed, or I just wish that he wouldn't be so divisive, or I just wish that he would stop tweeting and saying those things he does on social media, or
Or it's, uh, regardless of how you feel about Trump, you got to admit that the guy did a good job when he was in office.
So all this, I would call it qualified defenses of Trump, all of which seem to say that Trump was, and is, a sort of defective character morally, but nevertheless may be efficient and competent as a leader.
And what we're looking for, Dinesh, is a leader But I take a different tact.
I look at Trump's character.
I look at the case against him.
He's an egotist.
He's this.
He's that.
And I make a careful and thoughtful defense of Trump the man as well as Trump's policies.
I do this, by the way, by looking at the landscape or the context of Lincoln's great Lyceum speech.
In which Lincoln predicted that there would arise on the American scene some sort of a dictator, an autocrat, a Caesar, a Napoleon, an Alexander.
These are the names that Lincoln gives us.
And Lincoln says, this person will draw on public lawlessness.
Lincoln calls it mobocracy.
And subvert our constitutional republic.
And the question I examine in this book is, is Are we faced with this problem of dictatorship, of tyranny?
And if so, where is it coming from?
Is it coming from Trump?
Is it coming from the left, from the Democrats?
And all of this is a way of dealing with this prophetic warning of Lincoln Issued in his own time, when he was a young man that has become relevant to our own time.
So, the book is available on Amazon.
It's available on Barnes & Noble.
It's a great companion also to the movie, because movies and books do different things.
A movie is a story.
A movie, of course, very entertaining.
As recreations, it's going to be fascinating, fun to watch.
But the book is a more systematic argument, well-supported, and of course with accompanying references and footnotes.
And there's also, by the way, an exclusive interview with Trump.
Trump, in a way, in a mode that I haven't seen him anywhere else.
edited transcript of that discussion.
There's a part of it shown in the movie, but the full version, just edited for clarity, is in the book.
So, time to get your copy.
Go to Barnes & Noble.
Go to Amazon.
Vindicating Trump is the name of the book.
And, as I say, do consider getting a few copies, one for yourself.
Maybe another one for family members and maybe even that left-winger or Democrat or guy sitting on the fence who's got doubts about Trump that needs to have a lucid argument made to bring him or her around completely.
All right.
I want to speak very briefly today about the money gap between Republicans and Democrats.
And there's an article about this in Politico, which is basically a sort of report that the Democrats are greatly outracing the Republicans.
And this is really not because there are more rich Democrats than there are Republicans.
Probably that number is about the same.
The Democrats, admittedly, are today more the party of the rich, so it could be that they've got some field advantage, let's call it.
But nevertheless, the advantage is proving quite significant The Republicans are something like $35 million behind the Democrats.
And so, the Republicans here are trying to raise this money not just for the presidential race, but also to hold the House, if they can take the House, and also to try to take the Senate.
And both of those are very, very close.
It's almost like the country is hanging right in the balance.
And so, the money is going to make a difference.
Money makes a difference in politics.
There's just no question about it.
For people who don't think this, and there are some people who don't think this, they think, oh, well, you know, what really matters, Dinesh, is grassroots activism.
Grassroots activism is important, but it's not, in fact, the most important thing.
Grassroots activism fueled by money is what makes the decisive difference.
Now, The point I want to make is that, where does the Democratic money come from?
It comes from Washington State.
It comes from Colorado.
It comes from California.
It comes from New York.
It comes from Boston.
Where does the Republican money come from?
Well, a lot of it comes from Texas and Florida.
And so you see right there, the Democratic sort of rich states do outnumber the Republican rich states.
But I want to make a further point, and that is that the Republican billionaires are more tight-fisted than the Democratic billionaires.
The Democrat billionaires will throw money at a problem.
Think of a guy like Soros.
He will throw not just millions, but he doesn't hesitate to throw billions.
And he's willing to put a substantial portion of his net worth at stake in play in order to have influence.
So this is a guy who acquires money but uses the money to buy political influence at a sort of incredible level.
Republicans, on the other hand, will say things like, well, you know, I maxed out to Ted Cruz, you know, I gave him the amount allowed by law.
Well, yeah, but Ted Cruz also has a PAC, and you can make unlimited donations to a PAC.
I'm always amazed when I, you know, I don't mean to use Debbie and me as examples here, but we throw ourselves into the fray.
We recognize what's at stake, and we try to spend money commensurate with that.
I mean, if America itself hangs in the balance, What's it worth to save the country?
I mean, how much should you put in of what you have to try to make a difference when you know that you can make a difference?
When you know that this could be vital in the swing state of Georgia or Arizona or Michigan.
Those are states in which, you know, a few thousand votes can tip the state one way or the other.
Now, the Democrats know this.
And they are hurling money into those states and there are ad blitzes going on as we speak in those states with nothing comparable on the Republican side.
So this is a little bit of a lament, but it's also a plea to Republican donors.
And there are some big donors who listen to this program to say, listen, you need to act in the manner of pioneers who are going out West and who recognize there are outlaws who want to encircle your homestead and burn it to the ground.
And it's not enough for you to say, hey, listen, we've got this trusty old sheriff and, you know, I bought him a drink at the saloon and that's gonna, that's gonna pep up his spirits.
No, the sheriff may be inadequate to the task.
You need to invest the resources that are necessary to win this critical battle.
You know that the country is at stake.
I'm not the one that's merely telling you that.
You often tell me that.
So that's your point of view.
And all I'm saying is you need to put your money where your mouth is.
You need to put your money where your convictions are.
Put in the kind of resources.
And that's what you have to give, right?
No one's asking you to go on the front line.
No one's asking you to be blasted by the media.
No one's asking you to have your anonymity shattered.
No one's asking you to take the risk of lawfare or being indicted.
There are other people who are on the front lines doing that.
But what you have and what you're able to do is contribute your hard-earned dollars that will make a decisive difference this year and more this year than perhaps at any other time.
And so it's time to stop being cheapskates, all of us.
It's time for us to sort of dig deep.
Yes, donate our time, our creativity, our effort.
I'm doing that.
But for me, it's not a matter of, hey, I'm making a film and therefore I don't need to donate.
No, you need to do both.
You need to put in your effort, your time, volunteer to the degree you can, and also cough up some cash because guess what?
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I'd like to talk in this segment about a letter that was written by Abraham Lincoln to his stepbrother.
His stepbrother's name was John Daniel Johnston.
And the letter is dated January 2nd, 1851.
So it's Really, just a full decade before Lincoln won the presidency.
Lincoln was, at the time, 42 years old, and his stepbrother was, well, just a year younger, 41.
And his stepbrother, this fellow Johnston, writes Abraham Lincoln, and what does he want to do?
He wants to borrow money. $80.
I don't know quite how that would work out today, but I'm assuming we're talking about a substantial amount of money—$80 in 1850.
Now, here's Lincoln's reply, which I want to read because I think it encapsulates, in a way, the conservative philosophy.
Your request for $80 I do not think it best to comply with now.
Lincoln is saying, I'm not going to do it.
At least I'm not going to do it now.
He's not saying I'll never do it, but I'm not going to do it now.
Why not?
At the various times when I have helped you a little, you have said to me, we can get along very well now, but in a very short time I find you in the same difficulty again.
Aha!
We see here the problem with the welfare state.
You can't support yourself, you get a check from the government, next month you need another check, and another check the following month.
And this is happening to Lincoln.
His brother's very happy when he gets the money, but pretty soon he's back in the same situation.
Lincoln continues.
Now, this can only happen by some defect in your conduct.
Boom!
Let's note right here that this is something that the welfare state never says to anybody.
The welfare state never says, hey listen, you had an illegitimate kid and we were giving you $300 or $400 a month to support that child.
Now you turn up with another illegitimate kid and you want more money?
There must be some defect in your conduct.
No.
The welfare state just goes, hey, One kid equals $400, two kids equals $800.
We'll send you another check.
So, the welfare state is incapable of, um, insisting upon any kind of moral responsibility, but Lincoln is, so let's see how he deals with it.
What that defect is, I think I know.
You might expect Lincoln here to say, you're lazy, but he doesn't say that.
You are not lazy, he writes, and still you are an idler.
So here's a very interesting distinction.
The stepbrother isn't lazy, but he's an idler.
Now why is he an idler?
Lincoln writes, I doubt whether, since I saw you, you have done a good whole day's work in any one day.
You do not very much dislike to work, and still you do not work much, merely because it does not seem to you that you could get much for it.
So now we see his stepbrother's motivation.
The guy thinks, listen, I mean, what am I getting paid?
A few cents?
He goes, it's not even worth it.
So it's not that I don't like to work.
I would work, but I want to be paid more for my work.
And since I'm not being paid more for my work, I'm just going to sort of become an idler because to me, it's not a very good use of it.
I'm not getting much to make it worth my while.
Here's how Lincoln responds to that.
This habit of uselessly wasting time is the whole difficulty.
And it is vastly important to you, and still more so to your children, that you should break this habit.
You need to break the habit, not just for yourself, but because you are a parent, you have to support your children, you have to teach your children industry and hard work, and so it's really important for you to work.
And now Lincoln does something very interesting.
He says, He says, uh, it is more important to them because they have longer to live and can keep out of an idle habit before they are in it easier than they can get out after they are in it.
And then Lincoln offers his solution.
He says, you say you would almost give your place in heaven for $70 or $80.
So think about, first of all, what a bum Lincoln's stepbrother is.
The guy goes, if I could get $70 or $80, I'd be happy to forego going to heaven.
So this is a very narrow-minded and a shallow guy.
And then Lincoln is right on top of it.
And you say, if I furnish you the money, you will deed me the land.
And if you don't pay back the money, you will deliver possession.
And Lincoln just goes, nonsense!
Nonsense!
for four or five months work.
And you say, if I furnish you the money, you will deed me the land.
And if you don't pay back the money, you will deliver possession.
And Lincoln just goes, nonsense, nonsense.
If you can't live, if you can't now live with the land, how will you live without it?
And Lincoln basically then says this.
He says, look, I'm going to give you some money.
You work and you get $10.
And when you get $10, I'll give you 10 more.
So in other words, if you think that you're Your work is not worth the time.
You're being paid too little.
All right, I'm going to double your income.
Because when you make 10, I'll give you 10.
If you make 20, I'll give you 20 with a limit.
And Lincoln's point is, in this way, I am teaching you to get out of this laziness.
Get out of this idleness, as Lincoln calls it.
I'm teaching you to cultivate habits of industry.
So, in a way, what Lincoln is doing here, I think, is what an enlightened conservative public policy would do.
Namely, to provide people with incentives, ladders of opportunity that they can climb, that give them a motive and an incentive to better their lives and build it upon a strong foundation where they then can sort of soar and succeed on their own.
Guys, with the big election around the corner, a new movie coming out, I'd like to invite you to check out my Locals channel and become an annual subscriber.
I post a lot of exclusive content on Locals, including content that's censored on other social media platforms.
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I also have a movie page, Dinesh's movie page, up on Locals.
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It's Dinesh.Locals.com.
I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
Again, it's Dinesh.Locals.com.
Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
His name is James Arthur Ray.
He is an author, he's a philosopher, he's a consultant, he's worked with over a million people from over a hundred countries through his coaching and leadership programs.
He's the author of six books and his story is told also in a CNN documentary called Enlighten Us.
You can follow him on x at James A. Ray, R-A-Y, or his website, jamesray.com.
James, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you.
I gotta say, you are recommended to me by one of my Twitter followers who says, you just have to talk to this guy.
He's fascinating.
And so I confess, I'm coming as a bit of a newcomer to you and your work.
And I assume that A good number of my viewers and listeners are in the same position, reading about you.
You seem to be very much a man on a mission, and so I thought I'd start by asking you, tell us something about the man, and tell us something about your mission.
Well, my mission is to bring more of God's will and God's law into the world, and I think that we need that now more than ever.
You know, you and I, you're not new to me, Dinesh, and I'm very familiar with your work, I'm familiar with what you've been through, and we have a similar background, as a matter of fact.
In in many ways and so that's the mission the man is i guess i would say that i was hugely successful.
Any of your viewers might remember this this movie documentary called the secret they came out years ago and i was one of the people featured in the film as well as a co-author of the book my business exploded around the world after that came out.
And then very quickly thereafter in 2000, that was 2006, 2009, my business crashed and burned.
And I became in the crosshairs of a weaponized legal system.
And it was due to an unfortunate accident.
And I don't know how much detail you want me to go into, but there was a extreme amount of lawfare which we're seeing in the world today.
32 counts of prosecutorial misconduct, a Brady violation, suppression of evidence in my favor of which the state was sanctioned.
And yet I was still convicted of a crime which Anyone that was viewing what occurred, who thought for themselves, apart from the mainstream media, realized it was a horrible accident.
It broke my heart, literally.
It was a horrible accident, nonetheless, and yet it was the first time in history, my case made case law, first time in history that Deaths in a sweat lodge, which was part of an activity that I was involved in, we'd done it for five years prior, was prosecuted as a crime.
And so, ever since 2013, when I came out of two years in prison, I was acquitted of manslaughter.
They charged one of me for 30 years, and by God's grace, I was acquitted of manslaughter, which is intentional harm.
There was no shred of evidence for any intentional harm.
And this is all public documented.
It's all publicly available.
And you have to dig a little bit to find it.
But nonetheless, I was convicted of negligence and ended up doing two years in prison.
Came out in 2013, which really wasn't that long ago.
And I was $20 million in debt.
I was homeless.
And I was alone, and I had to dig really deep and ask myself, who is James Arthur Ray 3.0 going to be?
Which presupposes, Dinesh, that there was a 2.0 and a 1.0, which are different stories.
But nonetheless, since 2013, as I stood in the desert, I had to dig really deep and say, okay, what am I really committed to in the next page of my book, if you will, the next stage of my journey.
And what I realized is that I was committed to righteousness and to higher purpose and to God's will and to principle and morality and not going to fall prey to the programming that we've been conditioned in immensely in today's world of money and materialism.
I'm not anti-money by any chance.
But when you make it your God, that's when it becomes problems, a big problem.
And I really believe in my newest book, God, Money, and Sex, I talk about all of these things in great detail.
And I think one of the big problems, Dinesh, in today's world is that we are worshiping at the altar of money and materialism, and it has brought us to where we are, and we see this all around us.
With yourself, I know what you've been through, with what I went through, with certainly Donald Trump is going through, and so consequently, there needs to be a shift in consciousness.
And I'll stop there and throw it back to you.
I mean, I remember, as I think back to, I wasn't in prison, but I was in a confinement center, and there were a lot of guys who were coming out of prison, going to the confinement center, before going back into society.
And I looked at them, and a lot of those, some of them were blue-collar guys, but some were white-collar guys.
They were doctors, they were sometimes political officials, and so on.
But I thought to myself, I wonder if a single one of them is going to really get their life back.
Because these are doctors who, by and large, couldn't practice again.
And this was a guy who, you become pariahs, and of course you have the scarlet letter.
It seems like you're someone who has that inner strength in which you were able to pull yourself back onto your feet And I'm curious how you did that.
It seems like it also changed you as a person in that you shifted your, if not your values, your priorities.
How did that experience change you in that way?
I'm a much better human being, and my wife will attest to that.
She wasn't my wife at the time, but she's seen enough of the videos and known enough of who I was prior, and it's changed me immensely in many, many, many great ways.
I can tell you, Dinesh, That those of us who fall and get back up are stronger and wiser, potentially, than those who never fell.
And so I get it when it's very easy.
When I was, you know, I was 54 years of age, I was homeless, I was alone, I was 20 million dollars in debt.
If you're if you as a viewer broke today my heart goes out to you and you know not to minimize that at all but broke look good to me at that point in time it was twenty million dollars over my head and so.
I think what I really leaned back upon, my history is in applied behavioral sciences, psychology, and philosophy.
And when we look at the great philosophers, Dinesh, throughout history, without exception, whether it's the Buddha or Plato or Socrates or the Christ, first of all, none of them had easy lives.
They just didn't.
And none of them taught us how to make a lot of money.
You know, Christ said you cannot serve two masters.
You can't serve both God and money.
And yet so many people in today's world, and if you look at what's happening in our current society in this country, they're worshiping at the altar of money.
And the things that are driving them are money, power, and greed.
And that's what's happening with our legal system as well.
And so it caused me to see things clearly.
I grew up in America.
As an American citizen, and I bought hook, line, and sinker.
You know, if it said it in the mainstream media, it was true as far as I knew, you know, and I was told that I had a lot of liberties and a lot of rights, which turned out I really didn't when it came down to it.
When I got in the crosshairs, it was not about any of those things.
It was about, let's take this guy down and let's prove a point.
I was, I was, uh, you know, at the brunt end of a, of a district attorney who was running for reelection.
On a, on a platform called tough on crime.
And so consequently, who better to take down than the guy who lived in Beverly Hills and was a media star had been on Oprah and Larry King and the today show and all these great things, which seemed so great at the time, but it also made me a very, very attractive target.
And so for me now, those things of this world are not.
As important as they once were.
You know, what's most important to me is truth.
And what's most important to me is to stand for what I believe in.
And, you know, if that brings me great worldly success, so be it.
That's God's will.
It's not—that's up to God, rather.
It's not up to me.
And so, you know, I believe—we talked to—my wife and I talked to a gentleman who went through a similar situation as you and I.
And he said to us the other day, he said, you know, in this world, and you even mentioned this, it's kind of a mark of, what was the term you used?
I used the reference from, you know, I used the scarlet letter from Hawthorne's book, of course, but which he used it in a different context, but I would just meant it's a sort of a disgrace that is, that you're not really expected to recover from.
That's right.
In this world is a scarlet letter, but in a greater world, which, by the way, science tells us we live in about a 5% world of visible light.
There's 95% in this universe that we can't perceive because we don't have the sensory acuity to perceive it.
And beyond this world, it's actually a badge of honor because if you look at the Bible, for instance, a large portion of the Bible was written from prison.
If you look at Nelson Mandela, you know, he spent time in prison.
So many people who have made great impacts in the world have been attacked and have been gone after by the current regime because they're going against the grain.
And for me, you know, it's kind of like the old Janis Joplin song, Freedom is nothing more than nothing left to lose.
When you have nothing left to lose, then I decided, hey, I'm going to stand for what I believe in.
I'm not going to ride the fence.
I'm not going to play the party line.
If I'm going to take arrows and barbs and attacks, so be it, but I'm going to be who I believe God wants me to be.
One of my colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute years ago, Michael Novak, used to say that man does not live by bread alone, but it takes bread to know that.
And what he meant by that is that when you are suffering from poverty, scarcity, it seems like getting more stuff is going to be the remedy for your problems in life.
And so you become very contemptuous of people who tell you money is not important, money is not the most important thing, because to you it seems like it is.
I think Novak's point is that, however, when one has sort of climbed that mountain, when you've reached a certain amount of success and prosperity, Then you're actually much more open to the understanding that my problems haven't all gone away and I'm still dealing with family issues and spiritual issues and issues of my life and its meaning and the problem of death and sickness and so on so that I wonder if this is kind of what you're saying.
In other words, if kind of what you're saying is not that material goods are unimportant, but I think the philosopher Aristotle would put it this way, there are certain things that we need that are infrastructural goods.
There are things that we need to give us the freedom to do other things.
So, for example, you have a little money, you can have a little library in your house in which you have a lot of interesting books to read.
If you have no money, you're going to be spending it all on food, and you can't do that.
Right.
Money doesn't provide the happiness in any way, but it does provide the infrastructure that you need to buy you that leisure, to buy you that time for contemplation, to buy you that time to do good things with your life.
What do you think of that?
I think you're spot on, Dinesh.
You know, and that's why I quoted the Christ earlier, who said you cannot serve two masters.
He didn't say you can't have the full spectrum of life.
My New York Times bestseller, Harmonic Wealth, I talk about The full spectrum of life and here's here's was my objective in writing that book if you trace the etymology the word wealth back to its origins is not what we define 99% of the people if you ask them what wealth means they'll instantly say something with regards to money but if you trace the etymology back to its origins it literally means well being.
Now, I've worked with enough millionaires and billionaires, and maybe you have too, who have a lot of money, but they're not very wealthy because they don't have a lot of well-being.
And so consequently, I totally agree with you that what comes up for me as you're talking is Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs.
You have to have those safety and security needs met at some level.
But when you make them your God, which so many people have done in today's world, in my experience, Then that's where you really fall.
That's where you really run into problems.
So you have enough to take care of your safety and security and your food and all the things you mentioned.
But, you know, here's the reality.
We have a God-given right to abundance.
We don't have a God-given right to excessiveness.
You know, how many, how many times do we see people on social media who talk about, oh, look at my plane, look at my watch, you know, look at this, look at that.
Well, I look at that and I've been there and I say, you're a prisoner because the things that you own sometimes very frequently begin to own you because no one is more afraid.
And if you're a viewer today, this is going to sound counterintuitive, but take it from experience.
You know, no one is more worried and concerned about money than the poor than the rich.
The rich, in my experience, are more worried about money than the poor in many, if not most cases, because they're so afraid they're not going to be able to maintain their lifestyle that they've built up around them.
And unfortunately, lifestyles tend to grow as do expenses with the amount of income that's coming in.
And so my advocacy is right in alignment with what you're saying, is not to divorce yourself of the physical world.
That's spiritual illusion.
What we must do is we must learn to devote ourselves to a higher power, to an organizing principle, call that God, and then bring that power into form.
You know, every great tradition has told us that we are co-creators, we are created, brother, in the image and likeness of God.
Well, if that's true, Then we have to be creative.
We have to be creators, because that's what God is.
So, absolutely correct.
Absolutely correct.
Spot on in what you're saying.
Guys, this is very interesting stuff.
We've been talking to James Arthur Ray, author and philosopher.
Follow him on X at James A. Ray.
The website, JamesRay.com.
James will have to do it again.
Thank you very much for joining me.
God bless you.
Thank you so much for having me.
Keep doing great work, Dinesh.
Thank you.
Chapter 11 of Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery has a pretty good title, Making Their Beds Before They Could Lie on Them.
And you see here summarized Booker T.' 's general outlook, his philosophy, and that is you want to create the conditions that are going to make your life easy and successful.
He begins by talking about the fact that now that Tuskegee has become established, is up and running, he says, we had a visit from General Marshall, the treasurer of the Hampton Institute, who came, inspected everything, and was very pleased.
This is the guy, by the way, who had lent Booker T.
$250 at a critical time.
He reports back to Hampton that he's very pleased with the progress at Tuskegee.
And then, says Booker T, a little later, Miss Mary Mackey, the teacher who had given me the sweeping examination.
Remember, when Booker T first showed up at Hampton, there was a teacher who said, hey, if you want to enroll here, why don't you start by cleaning these rooms?
And Booker T did a magnificent job and made the floor so shiny that you could see your image in it.
Well, this teacher comes to visit Tuskegee, and then a little later, General Armstrong himself shows up.
And then says Booker T, And he goes on to discuss what this character is.
visit with General Armstrong made to Tuskegee gave me a chance to get an insight into his character that I didn't have before.
And he goes on to discuss what this character is.
Let's remember General Armstrong is a former military general.
A general who fought in which war?
The Civil War.
On which side?
The Northern side.
So this is a guy from the North who is now living and working in the South.
And here's what Booker T says, before this I had thought that General Armstrong having fought the Southern white man cherished a feeling of bitterness toward the white South and was interested in helping only the colored man there.
So.
Bye.
See why this is a very understandable thing for Booker T to think.
And in fact, it is rooted in accurate perceptions about a lot of people in the North who were very vengeful toward the South.
And after the Civil War, their main goal was to humiliate the white man in the South.
degrade him.
And so, at the same time that Northerners were giving Blacks the vote in the South, they were taking away the vote from the white man.
This may seem like an odd thing to say, but it was in fact going on.
By and large, there was the idea that these people had participated in—well, we hear the phrase today all the time—an insurrection against the government.
Therefore, They should be prohibited from running for federal office, for local office.
And so as a result, you may say that there were certainly some white men who were being disenfranchised at the same time that blacks were being enfranchised.
And you can see also why this is a recipe for turbulence in the South.
So Booker T knows this.
And he thinks that maybe this guy Armstrong is the same.
He too thinks the same.
But he says, I soon learned by his visits to Southern white people that he was anxious, he was as anxious about the prosperity and happiness of the white race as the black.
He cherished no bitterness against the South.
In all my acquaintance with General Armstrong, I have never heard him speak in public or in private a single bitter word against the white man in the South.
And then Booker T. from this draws a lesson, and this is the lesson I want to highlight.
It's a lesson that has nothing to do with the white man or the black man.
It's actually a lesson right out of philosophy.
It's out of Socrates.
It's to some degree out of the Gospels.
It's an insight into human nature.
Here's what Booker T. Washington says.
I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred.
I learned that assistance given to the weak makes the one who gives it strong and that oppression of the unfortunate makes one weak.
Now, here is Booker T. Washington in a very subtle way without... notice he doesn't specify any evils and yet what he's saying dramatizes the horror of slavery.
Why?
Because think of what slavery is.
It's a strong man grabbing a hold of a weaker man by force and saying, hey, you have to work for me for free.
You're my possession.
You have to do what I say because I have power over you.
And if you don't, I will whip you, I will sell you, I will kill you.
And so Booker T goes, this is actually oppressive to the black man, oppressive to the slave, but it is also ultimately morally oppressive to the master.
Why?
Because the master is, in a moral sense, degrading himself.
Let's keep going.
It is not long ago that I learned this lesson from General Armstrong and resolved that I would permit no man, no matter what his color might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
Think back to Booker T. Washington's story that he learned from Frederick Douglass.
Frederick Douglass is trying to board a train.
He is in the so-called white compartment.
They tell him to leave and go to the other compartment.
And basically, other whites apologize to Frederick Douglass.
We're very sorry, Mr. Douglass, this is happening to you.
They shouldn't be degrading you in this way.
You're a famous and important man.
And Frederick Douglass is like, Well, they can't degrade me.
Laws can't degrade me.
These people are degrading themselves.
They're revealing themselves to be narrow and petty.
The fact that they're exercising power over me doesn't degrade me in any way.
Here's Booker T. I am made to feel just as happy now when I'm rendering service to Southern white men as when the service is rendered to a member of my own race.
Now, think of how impressive it is for Booker T. Washington to say this.
He is in a civilization where the white man has been on top.
Admittedly, there's been a civil war and the situation has changed, but it's still true that the powers that be in the South, there is a kind of white establishment.
And guess what?
It happens to be a democratic establishment.
Booker T. Washington is a Republican.
But what he's trying to do, and he's trying to do this through moral effort, is rid himself of any sort of racial... seeing the world through colored lenses, seeing the world through a racial perspective.
In this sense, this is what Booker T, he's inventing without using the phrase.
I don't believe the phrase colorblindness ever appears in this book.
And yet, that's quite clearly Booker T. Washington's philosophy.
And I sometimes wonder, did he not know the phrase?
Why would he not use a phrase like this?
And I think I know why he wouldn't.
Because colorblindness, if you think about it, is a defect.
Right?
I'm colorblind, which means that there is color out there in the world, but I can't see it.
I am in some way impaired.
And this is, of course, not what we mean.
This is why the phrase colorblind is a little bit of a misnomer.
What colorblindness really means, politically, is I see race.
I recognize there's a black guy, there's a white guy, but it's not important to me any more than it would be important.
Hey, there's a guy with longish hair.
Hey, there's a guy with shortish hair.
Hey, there's a guy with a mustache.
Hey, there's a guy with bushy eyebrows.
So what?
These are interesting sort of data, more data to take into account, but it is no reflection on the man's worth, his intelligence, his character.
So colorblindness is not a refusal to see race, but a refusal to make something that is Irrelevant?
Make it count.
Now, the more I consider the subject, the more strongly I am convinced, writes Booker T. Washington, that the most harmful effect of the practice to which people in certain sections of the South have felt themselves compelled to resort in order to get rid of the force of the Negro ballot is not wholly in the wrong done to the Negro, but in the permanent injury to the morals of the white man.
Now, this is a very philosophical statement.
Essentially, what Booker T. Washington is saying is, you step in and take away the effect of the Black vote.
And remember, the effect of the Black vote is to vote for Republicans in the South.
And the Southern Democrats are, in fact, trying to do that.
And what Booker T. Washington is saying is that that hurts the Black man, for sure, because it dilutes his vote.
But it also hurts you.
Now, how does it hurt you?
It doesn't hurt you in a political sense.
In fact, the white Democratic Party in the South benefits from suppressing the black vote.
But Booker T. Washington says something can benefit you politically, it can benefit you financially, but it is injurious, it injures you morally.
And in saying this, Booker T. Washington is echoing the great doctrine of Socrates in Plato's Republic and also in another work, a more minor work by Plato called the Gorgias.
And in this work, Plato discusses this question, which is this.
Is it better to be a person who inflicts wrong on other people, or is it better to be the person who suffers wrong?
Now the intuitive answer is it's obviously better to be the person who inflicts wrong because you're inflicting wrong to benefit yourself.
You're going to come out ahead.
Why would you want to be the guy who suffers wrong?
But Socrates insists that the answer is the opposite.
It is better to suffer wrong than to be the doer of wrong.
Why?
Because ultimately the most important thing about human beings is their soul.
And if the most important thing about you is your soul, and you do wrong to other people, what are you doing but debasing and injuring your own soul?
And for the guy who suffers the wrong, he's suffering a material wrong, maybe a wrong to his body because you beat him up.
He's suffering a wrong.
But that wrong can be corrected.
That wrong can be remedied.
The injury to the soul is far worse than the injury to the body.
So these are philosophical ideas that are in no way brought up by Booker T. Washington.
I'm not even quite sure if he's fully aware of them.
But they are hovering in the background of this kind of work.
And at least when I read these sorts of sentences, I realize that there is a great philosophy behind them.
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