Bernie Madoff and America’s Selective Outrage

Posted on by
2

Like seven million other Americans last week, I watched Madoff,  the ABC miniseries chronicling the life and financial crimes of the infamous Bernie Madoff.  Madoff, chairman of Madoff Investment Securities from its start-up in 1960 until his arrest on December 11, 2008, operated the largest corporate Ponzi scheme and financial fraud in U.S. history.  The film, which starred Richard Dreyfuss and Blythe Danner as Madoff and his wife Ruth, aired for four hours over two evenings.  The film had the highest viewership of its time-slot, but earned only modest reviews.  After the film, ABC aired Madoff: After the Fall, a one-hour documentary hosted by ABC’s chief investigative correspondent, Brian Ross.  I gave the whole production two-and-a-half stars; it pretty much held my interest for the duration, the acting was solid, and compared to the usual drivel on prime-time television, it was informative and engaging.

On March 12, 2009, Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 federal felonies, including securities fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering, making false statements, perjury, theft from an employee benefit plan, and making false filings with the SEC.  He was sentenced to 150 years in prison.

In November 2009, David G. Friehling, Madoff’s accounting front-man and auditor, pleaded guilty to securities fraud, investment adviser fraud, making false filings to the SEC, and obstructing the IRS.  Friehling fully cooperated with federal prosecutors and testified at the trials of five former Madoff employees, all of whom were convicted and sentenced to between 2½ and 10 years in prison. Friehling could have been sentenced to more than 100 years in prison.  Because of his cooperation, however, he was sentenced in May 2015 to one year of home detention and one year of supervised release.

Madoff’s right-hand man and financial chief, Frank DiPascali, pleaded guilty to 10 federal charges and, like Friehling, testified for the government at the trial of five former colleagues, all of whom were convicted. DiPascali faced a sentence of up to 125 years, but died of lung cancer before he could be sentenced.

Madoff and his associates defrauded their clients over an estimated twenty-year period.  Losses were initially estimated at $65 billion.  This amount was later significantly revised downward to a range of  $10-20 billion.  A court-appointed trustee estimated the losses at $18 billion.  $7.6 billion of the losses have been recovered, but pending lawsuits only $2.6 is actually available.  More recovery is expected.

The fallout was tragically not limited to financial losses.  On the second anniversary of Madoff’s arrest, his son Mark committed suicide by hanging himself in his Manhattan apartment.

Even if one accepts the highest estimate of investor losses at $65 billion, Madoff’s fraud pales in comparison to the $2.7 trillion embezzled from the Social Security Trust Fund by the United States Government.  Unlike the Madoff case, it has all but been ignored by the media and government watchdogs and lapdogs.  Even the AARP, who pretends to be the greatest friend and protector of our senior citizens, has been silent about the matter.

In 1983, anticipating the flood of “baby-boomers” approaching retirement, Congress passed and President Reagan signed into law major Social Security reform legislation.  The legislation included a payroll tax hike ostensibly earmarked for the millions of additional baby-boomer recipients.  The increased payroll taxes created a $2.7 trillion surplus in the Social Security Trust Fund.

Everything was looking rosy for the Social Security Trust Fund.  Before the ink was dry on the reform legislation, however, Congress began borrowing money from the Trust Fund to finance current programs and all our undeclared wars, preferring to borrow from the Trust Fund rather than the Chinese.  In return, Congress issued IOUs in the form of special Treasury bonds which are physically kept in a binder in a non-descript office building in Parkersburg, West Virginia–the Bureau of Public Debt.  (You just can’t make this stuff up.)  Unlike most T-bills and other debt instruments, however, the special Social Security bonds are non-negotiable, which means they’re worthless.  As one commentator noted, “The IOUs are the equivalent of a bank robber leaving a note in the vault of the amount stolen.  The note specifies the amount of money taken, but does nothing to help retrieve the funds.”  It’s just a random act of kindness on the part of the perpetrators.

By 2010, the surplus was completely looted, embezzled by Congress and the five presidents in office during this time.  Beginning in 2010, Congress had to borrow the money from foreign creditors to pay current Social Security benefits.  The money is gone and will never be repaid.  It’s called embezzlement.

Embezzlement is defined as a kind of property theft.  It occurs when a defendant, who was entrusted to manage or monitor someone else’s money or property, steals all or part of that money or property  for the defendant’s personal gain. The key is that the defendant had legal access to another’s money or property, but not legal ownership of it.  Taking the money or property for the defendant’s own gain is stealing; when combined with the fact that this stealing was also a violation of a special position of trust, you have the unique crime of embezzlement.

Depending on the amount stolen, embezzlement can be a felony or misdemeanor.  It’s safe to say that the embezzlement of $2.7 trillion would be a felony.

Unlike the crimes of Bernie Madoff, Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo, or the Enron Gang,  the looting of the Social Security Trust Fund has been met with a deafening chorus of silence.  I don’t recall hearing about it on the evening news, there wasn’t a primetime mini-series about it, and it didn’t even merit a segment on 60 Minutes.  There have been no interviews of the victims.  The media clearly employs a double standard when it come to white-collar crime versus public corruption, and they likewise selectively employ the Mafioso code of omerta.   Why?

Corporate big business has been the proverbial whipping boy of the chattering and academic classes since the beginning of the Progressive Movement, near the end of the 19th century.  Actually, the merchant class has historically been civilization’s bogeyman; it has been held liable for mankind’s every affliction, from prickly heat to global warming.  The government’s good intentions trump every tangible life-improving contribution ever made by private inventors and entrepreneurs.  But since the intentions of such private innovators are considered self-serving, it matters not.   Embezzlement is a crime, be it in the private or public sector.  When a CEO of a large firm embezzles his clients, he is given the equivalent of a complete rectal exam by the media and respective government regulatory and law-enforcement agencies.  But when an agency or department or branch of the government is accused of similar offences, they are ignored or excused because, after all, the government is our friend and their intentions are ever noble.

The mainstream media operates as the de facto Ministry of Information and Propaganda for the U.S. government.  Sure, they take sides, in a well-choreographed, stage-managed sort of way.  Fox News supports the GOP and so-called conservatives, while the rest of them zealously support the Democrats and so-called liberals.  Fox supports the War on Terror and its attending wars and foreign adventures, while the other networks support the War on Poverty and all its failed programs.   But none of them ever questions the legitimacy of the State itself, or regularly calls the federal government on the carpet for having acted outside its constitutionally imposed limitations.

Taking on Bernie Madoff or Long-Term Capital poses little if any danger to the respective journalist or his employer.  Taking on Congress or the Administration is another matter.  You may find yourself in the unemployment lines or have your White House creds revoked.

The government’s emptying of the Social Security Trust Fund has been accurately called “the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the American public.”  Every president and congressman who supported using the Social Security Trust Fund as a “slush fund” is culpable.  Yet, there have been no investigations, no indictments, no arrests.   And don’t hold your breath waiting for that 60 Minutes expose or calls for the appointment of a Special Prosecutor to investigate the looting of the Social Security Trust Fund.  It ain’t gonna happen and the money will never be paid back.

Sources:

“The Future of SSI: Biggest Government Fraud in History, Future Financial Status of Social Security Program,”  Josey Wales, correspondent, Before Its News.

ABCNews.com (for background on Madoff  miniseries)

Wikipedia  (for background on Madoff crimes and adjudication)

 

 

Political Participation and the Sanction of the Victim

Posted on by
1

Source: Political Participation and the Sanction of the Victim

POLITICAL PARTICIPATION  AND THE “SANCTION OF THE VICTIM”

In her 1957 masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand introduced us to a powerful concept which she called “the sanction of the victim.”  This concept is defined as “the willingness of the good to suffer at the hands of the evil, to accept the role of sacrificial victim for the ‘sin‘ of creating values.”  As Rand explains through the character of her hero, John Galt, “Evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us,” and, “I saw that evil was impotent…and the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.”   In Rand’s view, morality requires that we do not sanction our own victimhood.  This concept may be original in the thinking of Ayn Rand and is foundational to her moral theory: she holds that evil is a parasite on the good and can only exist if the good tolerates it.

The sanction of the victim takes many forms, on the individual level in our personal relationships, and in the social or public realm in our relationship with the State.   In Rand’s Atlas Shrugged it primarily takes the form of unearned guilt and the need to acknowledge and show kindness towards our tormentors and those who would exploit us.  Ultimately, the sanction of the victim is used by our exploiters as the weapon of our own destruction.  The victim becomes an accessory to the crime.

On the personal level, among countless situations, the sanction of the victim would apply to the beaten wife, the verbally abused husband, and the parents of mooching offspring that refuse to grow up and leave home (excluding the handicapped and emotionally disabled).  An ever-growing percentage of our youth now choose to remain at home with their parents indefinitely.  The parent-victims have been played like a violin by their offspring, conditioned to believe they are financially and emotionally helpless, incapable of surviving independently.  The parents are terrified of the unbearable guilt they would carry if they were to send them packing.  The parents’ acceptance and acquiescence constitute the sanction of the victim.  Consequently, the parents become the victims of their own cowardice.

The sanction of the victim in the public or political realm expresses itself in two principal forms: participation in popular democratic processes, including elections, and acknowledging, approving, and extending respect and kindness toward our political exploiters (i.e. elected officials, their many toadies, and the supportive media).

Participating in the political process in all its forms constitutes the sanction of the victim. Again, you are an accessory to the crime, a victim of the crimes in which you are an active, but ignorant participant.  You are in effect abating the crimes of the political elite.  All of these things send the wrong message to the criminals and reprobates that comprise the political class.   Voting, attending political rallies, and perhaps worst of all, sending them money, constitute the sanction of the victim.  We are telling the political class, “We approve of your system.  Even though you’re robbing us blind and crushing our Constitutional liberties, we still like you.  Even though you’re corrupt beyond words, you are nevertheless lovable thugs, and we could not begin to fathom or contemplate life without you.

So how do we beat these people?  Democracy and every form of representative government based on popular consent with constitutional constraints is the god that failed.  We are told that political apathy and disengagement is to blame.  I disagree.  Disengagement is the solution, not the problem.  The sanction of the victim only reinforces the problem, whether it’s a bad marriage or a corrupt, tyrannical government.

Here is the Three-Step Program for defanging the snake.

DON’T VOTE.  As political satirist P.J. O’Rourke said, “Don’t vote, it only encourages them.” Elections change nothing systemically.  They only decide who gets to pick your pocket and hold the boot over your neck.  What difference would it have made if slaves had been allowed to elect their plantation overseers?  When you vote you’re doing the same thing.

When has there ever been an election that gives you the choice of A, B, or none of the above?  Hmmm?  Never.  Wouldn’t it be great to live in a voting district with no legislator, no congressman, no senator, no one to suck up to?  Yes, but you don’t have that option.  But you can refuse to part of the whole scam by not voting.  So don’t vote.  Look, you’re being used like a cheap condom.  Furthermore, the odds of you casting the deciding vote are far less than the odds of your winning the Big Lotto.  In fact, the odds of your being involved in a fatal car accident en route to the polling place are far greater than the odds of casting the deciding vote.  When you vote, you are sanctioning the system, its leaders and their crimes.

Voting is just a bad habit.  Like all bad habits, it is self-defeating.  Moreover, it serves to reinforce the bad habits of your tormentors.  I gave up voting and smoking over 30 years ago.  Both healthy choices, and among the most liberating and empowering I had ever made.

I remember a popular saying when I was young: Imagine if they held a war and nobody showed up.  Well, imagine if they held an election and nobody showed up.  Talking about sending the political class a message !

STOP TREATING POLITICIANS WITH KINDNESS.  What do politicians crave more than power?  Attention.  Attention is their drug of choice.  Indeed, politicians must seek the affirmation and approbation and applause of those whom they would never invite into their homes, have a beer with, or call their friends.  In other words people like you and me.  They have nothing but scorn and contempt for us.  And besides, they’re corrupt beyond words.  So what do we do?  We cram into public auditoriums to catch a glimpse of their faces and suck up their lies like a cat does a saucer of warm milk.  We reach out to grasp their hands as though they were the healing hands of a divine savior.  If you came home from work to find a burglar carrying your possessions out of your house, would you shake his hands and wish him well?  No, you’d call the cops, maybe even beat him up.  Why do we treat politicians any differently when they steal our money every day?  If we started denying politicians the attention and approval they so crave, maybe they’d consider getting an honest living.

A few years ago, on my way to work, our district congressman was shaking hands with us commoners at a Metro station in his district.  Half asleep, I shook his hand and actually wished him well.  Not five seconds later, I realized what a dumb-ass I was—shaking hands with a common criminal, a guttersnipe, a reprobate, a predator, a public parasite.  There I was, extending my best wishes to high-ranking political leader who bore direct responsibility for the mess we found ourselves in.  Would you shake hands with a cat-burglar, a serial rapist, a pedophile?  No, of course not, so why would you shake hands with a politician?

So, take the pledge.  When a politician reaches to shake your hand, act like the person has a communicable disease (what we used to call the “cooties”).  Take your hand back as quickly as possible, and say something pithy like, “No, thank you. When you sleep with dogs, you get fleas.  Don’t ever try to shake my hand again.”  If more of us started treating politicians with the disdain and contempt they deserve, they might begin to consider a more respectable line of work.

3-REFUSE TO PARTICIPATE IN THE PROCESS AT ANY LEVEL.  A good friend of mine is constantly urging me and everyone else he knows to “get involved.  It’s the only way we can fix things.”

As Sherman Potter would say, “Horsehockey !”  What sort of track record does popular participation have compared to apathy and disengagement?  None.  Politicians have always used elections and every form of democratic process to sanction and justify the criminal enterprise we call government.  It just gives them cover.  Government is, and has always been, nothing more than an organized crime syndicate, a protection racket sanctioned by the many forms of popular approval—which Ayn Rand called the sanction of the victim.

So, stay home, focus on your beautiful family, your kids’ Little League and soccer games.  Spend quality time with your friends.  Work at your hobbies, do crossword puzzles, listen to a symphony, read a good book, take your spouse and kids to the movies.  Watch Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune.  Return the ladder you borrowed from your neighbor seven years ago.  Clean out your fridge, there’s probably stuff in there since you were in grammar school.  Take your grandkids to the playground.  Have a glass of champagne with your breakfast cornflakes.  Tell your kid to rake the leaves while you nap in a hammock.  Go to church, bake brownies, take your dog for a walk; mow the lawn; clean out your gutters; weed the garden, shovel the snow in your driveway.  Be at peace with your Maker, whatever you imagine him to be.  But whatever you do, avoid politicians like stray dogs.

 

Winter Storm Jonas

Posted on by
1

All in all, we ended up getting about 20 inches of snow. I’m having the time of my life. I love snow. I’ve spent about 12 hours shoveling snow over the past two days. I think it’s the best workout ever. I feel great. I’ve accomplished more in these two days than in all of my 32 years working for the federal government.

Hillary Indicted?

Posted on by
Reply

There’s lots of talk today about the possibility of Hillary Clinton being indicted.  For the benefit of all 13 of my website followers, here’s my quick take on it:

Indicting Hillary quickly, or otherwise getting her to give up her candidacy, is the only chance the Dims have to win the White House. They have to get her out of the race, and soon, to get a winning ticket, i.e. Biden/Fauxcahontas on the ballot by November.  (Fauxcahontas being Elizabeth Warren, who earned the name by falsely claiming to be of 1/64th or some such fraction Native American.)   If they somehow get Hillary off the ticket and replace her with Biden/Faux, they could win.  The outcome, of course, would depend on the GOP ticket and an array of uncertainties.  But I digress.

The Clintons, as we know, have the goods on Obama/Jarrett, and vice versa.  So the Dims are caught between Iraq and a hard place. Of course, if these people were conservatives/Republicans, the GOP candidate/indictee would be hounded to end his/her candidacy by a groundswell of GOPe suck-ups and the media “in the greater interests of the country.” After a week of phony high drama with a pre-determined outcome, the candidate would withdraw. The GOP would then ask Jeb Bush and John Kasich to come to the rescue, having convinced enough stupid people that a Bush/Kasich ticket would all but guarantee Florida and Ohio going red.  We all know the ending to that story.

But the players in this case being Dims, things play out quite differently, and much more unpredictably and dramatically.  Dims never cave—ever. Well, let’s just say that historically the GOP holds a 100:1 cave ratio over the Dims. My prediction is that they don’t indict Hillary and she gets trounced in November. The Dims would rather lose than air their dirty laundry, which even the New York Slimes would be forced to devote ink and paper.

As usual, a GOP victory would mean nothing. As someone once said, “All political victories are meaningless unless you defeat stupidity along with it.”

The Artful Dilettante

Education Reimagined by Salman Khan

Posted on by
Reply

The following is from “The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined” by Salman Khan, founder of the world famous, online-based Khan Academy, an innovator in childhood and ongoing adult education.

Testing out. What a concept. I’d had no idea that such a thing existed, though even a moment’s notice suggested that it made perfect sense. If a student could demonstrate proficiency with a certain set of ideas and processes, why not let him or her move on to more advanced ones?

Back at my own school, full of enthusiasm, full of hope, I approached the powers that be with the possibility of testing out of my math class. My suggestion was instantly shot down by way of a dreary and all too familiar argument: If we let you do it, we’d have to let everybody do it.

Since I was as self-involved as most people that age, I had no interest in what other kids did or didn’t get to do; I only cared that I myself had been denied, so I sulked and misbehaved (although I did have the therapeutic release of being the lead singer in a heavy metal band). Over time, however, a broader and rather subversive question started scratching at my mind; eventually it became one of my most basic educational beliefs: If kids can advance at their own pace, and if they’d be happier and more productive that way, why not let everybody do it?

Where was the harm? Wouldn’t kids learn more, wouldn’t their curiosity and imagination be better nourished, if they were allowed to follow their instincts and take on new challenges as they were able? If the student graduated early, wouldn’t this free up scarce resources for the students who needed it? True, this approach would call for more flexibility and more close attention to students as individual learners. To be sure, there were technical and logistical hurdles to be cleared; there were long and brittle habits that would need to be altered. But whom was education supposed to serve, after all? Was the main idea to keep school boards and vice principals in their comfort zone, or was the main idea to help students grow as thinking people?

Khan wrote his book to improve education for young people, not to make the case for the privatization of schools. Nevertheless, his book accomplishes both goals.

His successful methods for teaching children via a combination of online YouTube videos, self-directed/adult-monitored study and unstructured collaboration with other students in class settings, caught the attention of no less than Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who utilized Khan’s program to supplement education for his own children.

Khan started in a makeshift office closet of his house and became a million-dollar industry thanks to the effectiveness of his teaching techniques combined with the visibility he was able to quickly attain.

The central (and largely implicit) premise of Khan’s methodology is that only individual minds think.

There is no collective brain. As a result, children can only learn on the individual level. All education must respect, honor and adhere to the objective fact that each child’s mind (like each adult’s mind) is individual, with its own pacing, its own set of requirements and particular idiosyncratic needs and styles.

“Progressive” education, the methodology behind most education as we know it today (public or private), holds that children must learn as a group, and may only advance as a class or a grade, not as individuals, once the whole group is ready to advance. While this method might prove acceptable for the average child, it has the effect of creating profound boredom in the exceptional child, while creating extreme anxiety in the below average child.

Mind you, the concepts “exceptional” and “below average” refer to the individual child only in the context of the group. In his book and in his educational efforts, Khan brilliantly exposes the fallacy of this line of thinking. He found out, for example, that students performing below average in the conventional group teaching model ended up, in some cases, actually flourishing and outpacing the average students once they were exposed to his individualized approach to learning.

This finding suggests that in some respects there may be no such thing as “average” or “superior” children, at least not in the sense we have come to understand. While objective standards can demonstrate the superiority of some childrens’ abilities over others, when we remove them from the group context, many of those previously left behind soar as never before, because there’s no remaining sense of being “left behind” or getting “ahead.” There’s only a concern with learning.

Throughout his book, Khan emphasized that he was not looking for a one-size-fits-all approach to education. He wanted an education model that accepts and respects the need for individual autonomy and self-directed pacing. He did not claim that knowledge is subjective, and that all learning therefore would be completely directed by the child. That would be absurd. At the same time, his studies and experiences dramatically showed how children do not benefit from the grade/classroom model we have all come to know and accept as the only possible way to learn.

Grade levels are set arbitrarily by biological age. If you’re six years old, you’re in first grade. If you’re seven years old, it’s time to advance to second grade. What if you’re motivated, ready and able to be in fifth grade by the time you’re seven years old? Or what if you’re seven years old and need another half a year on first-grade material? Why should biological age dictate your pace of learning, against your own nature or actual capacity at a certain point in time? No answer is ever given. It’s shocking and unthinkable even to ask the question. “Why, that’s just how it has always been done.”

But as Khan points out, this whole approach to education did not always exist, not even in America. He entitles his book “The One World Schoolhouse” to advocate for the modern high-tech equivalent of a one room schoolhouse. His purpose is not “back to basics” as much as utilizing the flexibility afforded by modern technology to enable children, even when learning in group settings, to process and conceptualize information and skills on an individualized, while still objective and rational, basis.

Khan stops short of advocating for removing government from the management or funding of education. However, it’s clear his philosophy and model would get nowhere in our current federally run, government monopolized, single-payer system.

As his quote (above) all but says, today’s schools exist as much, if not more, for the benefit of school officials, teachers’ union demands and other requirements as they exist for the actual teaching of students.

When schools continue to underperform, we throw more tax money at them. When they underperform still more, we throw more tax money at them.

We raise property taxes, including on families of school-age children who can now afford private schools even less.

As long as teachers’ unions get what they want, and as long as school officials do not have to innovate – since that’s too much work and risks offending this or that parent or political pressure group – then all is well, as long as we all spend more money.

As Khan demonstrates in his book, his methodology can even help children in third world countries with few or no resources for funding public schools. Ironically, children in such disadvantaged settings are – in some ways – at a greater advantage, because they’re not burdened down with all the false expectations and commands from the federal authorities to match learning to (1) age level and (2) requirements of the school achievement tests, upon which public schools now rely in order to attain more funding.

Khan’s methodology frees the student by respecting the individuality and autonomy of the child’s mind. He’s similar to Maria Montessori in this respect. He does not claim to have all the answers, and he does not advocate for a one-size-fits-all approach to education.

But what he does understand is a fact that should have been obvious all along: Children are little adults. They are sovereign individuals with developing personalities. While they must be guided by adults and by objective facts and standards, they likewise must learn in their own way, at their own pace, and for the sake of learning.

Children and their schooling do not exist for the sake of pleasing anxiety-ridden parents; demoralized or lazy teachers unable/unwilling to provide innovation; political officials who care nothing except for power, or teachers’ unions who care for nothing other than early retirement pensions and medical insurance benefits.

It makes no more sense to herd children into age-based collectives, expecting them all to learn in the same way at the same rate, than it would make sense to herd all adults into communes or other collectives where everyone is expected to act, think, develop and perform the same.

In fact, whenever the latter has been attempted with adults (Nazi Germany and Maoist Communist China or Soviet Russia come to mind), they have been spectacular and tragic failures for this reason.

So why on earth do we expect it to turn out any better for children?

Michael J. Hurd, drhurd.com

A Plea for Intolerance

Posted on by
Reply

Many a modern preacher is far less concerned with preaching Christ and Him crucified than he is with his popularity with his congregation.  A want of intellectual backbone makes him straddle the ox of truth and the ass of nonsense…Fulton J. Sheen

America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance.  It is not.  It is suffering from tolerance:  tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos.  Our country is not nearly so much overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broad-minded.  The man who can make up his mind in an orderly way, as a man might make up his bed, is called a bigot; but a man who cannot make up his mind, any more than he can make up for lost time, is called tolerant and broad-minded.

A bigoted man is one who refuses to accept a reason for anything; a broad-minded man is one who will accept anything for a reason—providing it is not a good reason.  It is true that there is a demand for precision, exactness, and definiteness, but it is only for precision in scientific measurement, not in logic. The breakdown that has produced this natural broad-mindedness is mental, not moral.  The evidence for this statement is threefold: the tendency to settle issues not by arguments but by words, the unqualified willingness to accept the authority of anyone on the subject of religion, and lastly the love of novelty.

The science of religion has a right to be heard scientifically through its qualified spokesmen, just as the science of physics or astronomy has a right to be heard through its qualified spokesmen.  Religion is a science despite the fact the some would make it only a sentiment.  Religion has its principles, natural and revealed, which are more exacting in their logic than mathematics.  But the false notion of tolerance has obscured this fact from the eyes of many who are as intolerant about the smallest details of life as they are tolerant about their relations to God.

Another evidence of the breakdown of reason that has produced this weird fungus of broad-mindedness is the passion of novelty, as opposed to the love of truth.  Truth is sacrificed for an epigram, the Divinity of Christ for a headline in the Monday morning newspaper.  Many a modern preacher is far less concerned with preaching Christ and Him crucified than he is with his popularity with his congregation.  A want of intellectual backbone makes him straddle the ox of truth and the ass of nonsense, paying compliments to Catholics because of “their great organization” and to sexologists because of “their honest challenge to the youth of this generation.”   Bending the knee to the mob rather than God would probably make them scruple at ever playing the role of John the Baptist before a modern Herod.  No accusing finger would be leveled at a divorce or one living in adultery; no voice would be thundered in the ears of the rich, saying with something of the intolerance of Divinity: “It is not lawful for thee to live with thy brother’s wife.” Rather would we hear: “Friends, times are changing!”  The acids of modernity are eating away the fossils of orthodoxy.

Belief in the existence of God, in the Divinity of Christ, in the moral law, is considered passing fashions.  The latest thing in this new tolerance is considered the true thing, as if truth were a fashion, like a hat, instead of an institution like a head.

The final argument for modern broad-mindedness is that truth is novelty and hence “truth” changes with the passing fancies of the moment.  Like the chameleon that changes his colors to suit the vesture on which he is placed, so truth is supposed to change to fit the foibles and obliquities of the age.  The nature of certain things is fixed, and none more so than the nature of truth.  Truth may be contradicted a thousand times, but that only proves that it is strong enough to survive a thousand assaults.  But for any one to say, “Some say this, some say that, therefore, there is no truth,” is about as logical as it would have been for Columbus who heard some say, “The earth is round”, and others say “The earth is flat” to conclude: “Therefore, there is no earth.” Like a carpenter who might throw away his rule and use each beam as a measuring rod, so, too, those who have thrown away the standard of objective truth have nothing left with which to measure but the mental fashion of the moment.

The giggling giddiness of novelty, the sentimental restlessness of a mind unhinged, and the unnatural fear of a good dose of hard thinking, all conjoin to produce a group of sophomoric latitudinarians who think there is no difference between God as Cause and God as a “mental projection”; who equate Christ and Buddha, and then enlarge their broad-mindedness into a sweeping synthesis that says not only that one Christian sect is as good as another, but even that one world-religion is just as good as another.  The great god “Progress” is then enthroned on the altars of fashion, and as the hectic worshippers are asked, “Progress toward what?” the tolerant comes back with “More progress.”  All the while sane men are wondering how there can be progress without direction and how there can be direction without a fixed point.  And because they speak of a “fixed point”, they are said to be behind the times, when really they arebeyond the times  mentally and spiritually.

In the face of this false broadmindedness, what the world needs is intolerance.  The world seems to have lost entirely the faculty of distinguishing between good and bad, the right and the wrong.  There are some minds that believe that intolerance is always wrong, because they make “intolerance” mean hate, narrow-mindedness, and bigotry.  These same minds believe that tolerance is always right because, for them, it means charity, broadmindedness, and American good nature.

What is tolerance?  Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience toward evil and a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment.  But what is more important than the definition is the field of its application. The important point here is this:  Tolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth.  Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.  Tolerance applies to the erring; intolerance to the error.

America is suffering not so much from intolerance, which is bigotry, as it is from tolerance, which is indifference to truth and error, and a philosophical nonchalance that has been interpreted as broad-mindedness.  Greater tolerance, of course, is desirable, for there can never be too much charity shown to persons who differ with us.  Our Blessed Lord Himself asked that we “love those who calumniate us, for they are always persons,” but He never told us to love the calumny.

In keeping with the Spirit of Christ, the Church encourages prayers for all those who are outside the pale of the Church and asks that the greatest charity be shown towards them.  Charity, then, must be shown to persons and particularly those outside the fold, who by charity must be led back, that there may be one fold and one Shepherd.  Shall God, Who refuses to look with an equally tolerant eye on all religions, be denied the name of “Wisdom” and be called an “Intolerant” God?

The Church is identified with Christ in both time and principle; She began thinking on His first principles and the harder She thought, the more dogmas She developed.  She never forgot those dogmas; She remembered them and Her memory is Tradition.  The dogmas of the Church are like bricks, solid things with which a man can build, not like straw, which is “religious experience” fit only for burning.  The Church has been and will always be intolerant so far as the rights of God are concerned, for heresy, error, and untruth affect not personal matters on which She may yield, but a Divine Right in which there is no yielding.  The truth is divine; the heretic is human.  Due reparation made, the Church will admit the heretic back into the treasury of Her souls, but never the heresy into the treasure of Her Wisdom.  Right is right even if nobody is right; and wrong is wrong if everybody is wrong. 

The attitude of the Church in relation to the modern world on this important question may be brought home by the story of the two women in the courtroom of Solomon.  Both of them claimed a child.  The lawful mother insisted on having the whole child or nothing, for a child is like truth—it cannot be divided without ruin.  The unlawful mother, on the contrary, agreed to compromise.  She was willing to divide the babe, and the babe would have died of broad-mindedness.

BISHOP FULTON J. SHEEN