The Prestige of Mattering

Ep 148: Dr Koontz and Rev Fisk talk about the life of Theodore Kaczynski, demonic manifestations in a secular world, the longstanding fascination with the power of the US military, and the writings of C. P. Krauth.

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Dr Koontz –  Trinity Lutheran Church
Rev Fisk – St Paul Rockford and Hebron Collegium

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Music thanks to Verny

Transcript

[Speaker 2] (0:06 - 0:13)

Even though we have a backlog of questions on aliens, which is, is just tells you we're hitting the mark. We're on the bullseye right now, right?

[Speaker 1] (0:13 - 0:14) Yeah, that's right. [Speaker 2] (0:15 - 0:31)

My real question for you, first off, is, is this, was Theodore Kaczynski's political philosophy in any way related to his mathematical studies, or was it just crazy? That's my opening question.

[Speaker 1] (0:32 - 5:31)

Theodore Kaczynski, who is generally better known as the Unabomber, best comment on his life is the idea that this shows you the lengths that you have to go to, to be Polish and get your name pronounced correctly. So, right. Yeah.

So let me present my account and, and theory of Kaczynski and of his significance. Cause I think his significance goes beyond whatever he did or didn't do. And the reason he did or didn't do, the reason I say that is because what you're dealing with is a federal agency that decides in the late eighties and early nineties to shift as the cold war is winding down and then ending to shift to a focus similar to the one that we currently have on domestic terrorism.

So you see the Unabomber, you see Waco, you see lots of things, Ruby Ridge is probably the easiest one for people to understand if they've never thought about government agencies as a problem necessarily in any way, or ever having evil intentions or actions is to look into Ruby Ridge first. And then some of what I'm about to say will become a little bit more comprehensible. But what's going on with the Unabomber is that he's apparently in a way, completely out of character for a man who seems to have fled human involvement for most of his life for reasons that will explain is now suddenly mailing bombs to computer repair shops.

So this is a man who having studied at Harvard and taught at Berkeley understands who actually decisions in the specifically technological side of America's military industrial complex. But yet he chooses fairly random targets to send mail order bombs to. So there's something about that, that I'm not going to say, no, he didn't do any of that.

But what I'm saying is like many federal stories, there's also something wildly implausible about it. Okay. Similar to the way that they had to go, search out Randy Weaver in Idaho in order to entrap him and then to harass him on his property and shoot his family.

So I simply don't trust the parties involved is what I'm saying. And so I'm beginning at the end, because I think what I just said makes a lot more sense, still more sense, even if you don't know about Ruby Ridge, if you know about Kaczynski's life, because he grows up, I want to say in Illinois, maybe Chicago or Chicago suburbs, and is extremely bright, especially at math. So this gets him a ride to Harvard.

And at Harvard, he is involved in psychological experimentation on young men that will later be referred to holistically, although some of these programs had subsets and some of these programs had different directors at different times, but psychological experimentation involving drugs, things that are still very much controlled substances, LSD among them, conducted by a combination of our elite universities and the intelligence community, right?

Whoever that is at any given point in time. So this fundamentally wrecks Kaczynski as a person. It does not wreck his career, and it does not wreck his functioning.

He goes on to obtain at a very young age, both his doctorate in pure mathematics and a tenure track position at University of California, Berkeley. And this is all pre the summer of love, which is 67. So Northern California is still, you know, just about paradise to live in for most people.

People are still moving there. And that's where Kaczynski is, and he just leaves it. And his whereabouts after that point are only unknown because it's known that he moves to Montana.

Like many people were doing at the time. I mean, in a way, his impulse is not unusual. It's called the back to land movement.

And I'd be happy to give it its own play at some point, but he's not doing it in order to homestead or to be in a commune or something. He's basically just doing it to build a cabinet and be left alone. And that's what he does.

And from there, as well as after his arrest in the 90s, by virtue of his brother, seeing his manifesto printed in the New York Times and then turning in his own brother to the authorities at his wife's instigation.

[Speaker 2] (5:31 - 5:33)
Gotta say that's the weirdest part of the story to me. But keep going. Keep going. [Speaker 1] (5:34 - 5:34)

Yeah.
[Speaker 2] (5:35 - 5:36) This is weird. This is weird. [Speaker 1] (5:36 - 11:23) Yeah. Yeah. Something is it.

It is weird. And it isn't because the brother had chosen a completely different way of life. And I think way of life is the way to look at it because Kaczynski is like people who resemble him ideologically, but also practically.

And it's kind of a theory practice melding that you often don't find. But the nearest analog to Kaczynski, whose writing is at all available in English, is a man named Pentti Linkola, who has a similar trajectory out of academia into becoming a fisherman in his that's a Finnish name in his native Finland. And writing about ecology.

So what what happens and to answer your direct question is, yes, I don't think that mathematics drove him via subject matter to his conclusions about what industrialization and particularly consumerism had done to Western to had done to the West. Right. I think the method of mathematics drove him there because the logic.

Right. And logic involves acceptance of premises and you can accept them or not accept them. But I'm saying the logic drove so tightly everything that he was saying in his what's called the Unabomber manifesto.

But talk specifically about the Industrial Revolution or any of his other writings, which you can find in various places they've been printed. A lot of it he wrote from jail. And for most of his incarceration, he was at a supermax prison in the central area of Colorado.

So if you get out, you're not really going to go anywhere. You're just going to probably freeze to death. So.

All of all of that is driven by the idea that industrialization has has ultimately been a disaster for the human race because the human race cannot handle it. That's that's the driving idea in his manifesto. There are other things he says.

One one other reason I think to think about these things is that his experience of life is is in some ways similar to many people today. But it really only had one vector. So what I mean by that is that the flip side of intersectionality is when you are on the wrong side of an intersexual and intersectional coalition.

Right. So you are you are white or you are male or you're Christian or you're conservative or whatever you are. Right.

And so in various ways, you're on the wrong side of power. And at that point, you really incessantly have to make the decision day after day, maybe at work, at school. Am I going to submit to this or am I not?

Right. Is this something that is going to happen to me and I'm going to go along with it or am I not? So you have a constant even just on a spiritual level before you decide, am I going to lose my job or am I going to go to a different school or whatever choices you have before you?

Am I just going to let this happen to me? Right. And so Kaczynski doesn't have those those challenges in the late 50s, early 60s by virtue of being a conservative white male.

Right. He has those challenges by virtue of being a student and a guinea pig. For his professors, for psychologists who will later be and this is another connection to look into the connection between Harvard specifically as well, Timothy Leary within Harvard and the beginning of the hippie movement.

They're experimenting on these guys and these guys are getting experimented on specifically because they're bright, because the experiments that they would do on people of lower measurable IQ were being done usually on army guys and Marine Corps guys that they would bring to part of Fort Detrick in Maryland. So this was a special subset and it was like, hey, you're a bright boy and this is an interesting thing and this is science. And so and this, I think, wrecks Kaczynski.

This is why, I mean, did he commit a crime or not? I mean, I don't know. He could have certainly.

It wrecks him as a person really for the rest of his life. So when something like that happens to you, when you are on the receiving end of biological, technological power, weaponized against your own body, your own mind, your own soul, you have to decide, do I subject myself to this? Do I say this is good?

Do I say that I'm glad it happened to me? So those very clear choices lie in front of you and that's what happened to him. And so you can see that incessant rigor and logic from math applied to this problem of what has happened to the human race as we have accumulated the power to alter people so radically.

And compared to puberty blockers and transitioning, Kaczynski wasn't altered radically, if you want to stop and think about it. And if you want to kind of play a was not altered in his fundamental, you know, biology in the direction of trying to be a different sex, the way that is now commonly done to thousands of children every year. So it's not like his critiques have gone out of fashion or the questions that he's asking are no longer pertinent because if anything, the things that he suffered, the things that he went through have really only been democratized, have become more widespread since the time when they happened to him.

[Speaker 2] (11:23 - 12:47)

This is the difficulty and why I really, you know, ask the question, is his political philosophy an expression of, you know, or I desire to ask the question, an expression of his mathematical theorem, because that would give it, I would say more weight. I think that the argument that industrial or modern society has become increasingly and becomes increasingly complex due to technologies that become difficult to maintain the centralization of power, making it difficult for the average person to have any say specialization of workloads, leading to siloing of information, leading to fragility over time. And all of this resulting in alienation, violence amongst the populace and what he calls depression.

But I would suggest possibly is trauma. I think it's hard to argue against any of that being something we've experienced. What I would love to hear you opine on beyond that would be.

So I asked Bard, which is Google's version of chat GPT, if you're going to join evil, join evil all the way and asked Bard to compare Locke, Machiavelli and Kaczynski political theories. And it gave an interesting kind of seventh grade report answer. But it made this one really interesting connection, which was that Locke and Machiavelli are looking to establish righteous governments.

Kaczynski was looking to destroy an unrighteous one. I thought that was a fascinating thing for for a non person to come up with and suggest as the distinction. But you may have more to add.

[Speaker 1] (12:48 - 17:29)

So Locke and Machiavelli. And, you know, if past service wants to make a note of this and the listeners want to make a note of this, I'm happy to do something just on Locke and Machiavelli, because I agree with James Burnham, whom we've referenced before on the managerial revolution, that the actual defenders of freedom in the Renaissance and early modern West are the Machiavellians, Machiavelli and his intellectual successors. They are not the Lockeans. And that is part of the problem with America's frame of government as constituted in the late 18th century, because our framers were almost to a man Lockeans in their thinking.

But that's kind of for another time. I think the basic point is true, that Locke and Machiavelli presume that government needs to be established. One of the, let's say, wildest things about theorists like Kaczynski or Lincoln law, or in a much more United Nations kosher sort of a way, Arne Ness, who is the father of the term deep ecology, although I think Kaczynski and Lincoln are more thoroughgoing and clear in their articulation of what would it be like if we set ecological well being at the center of everything is, even though I think that's a limited viewpoint, right, I'll just add that caveat, but that that caveat being admitted, what they're trying to do is stop some sort of rampant destruction that they see as at the center of the nature of authority, right? Having been given authority, here's what human beings are actually doing. And Lincoln law, for instance, partakes very much of the the myth of anthropogenic climate change.

Kaczynski really doesn't do that. And that's why I ultimately I think Kaczynski should be read whether you agree with him or not. Whereas I wouldn't say unless you're interested in ecology, except in its own light, you don't need to read Lincoln law.

Because Kaczynski has insights about human nature that other thinkers deeply involved in ecology usually don't. He actually thinks that it's worthy of study. And what he's trying to do, and you can see why biographically you would want to do this, what he's trying to do is protect the human being from violation by power.

Now, unlike a theorist who's very popular on the left that uses some of the same terms, Michel Foucault, about whom we talked years ago now, I don't have an episode reference for you. But unlike Foucault, Kaczynski not only experienced these things himself, but also has an idea that there is a human nature that gets warped and or violated sometimes by its own action. And sometimes by, and this is a feedback loop, it's not just one or the other, sometimes by its own interaction with technology, sometimes by other people's imposition of technology onto that human being.

So all this hopefully makes more sense with the biography in mind. What's happening there is that he's recognizing that we are increasingly getting in the modern West, something that he diagnoses as fundamentally anti-social, and that is the leftist person. So Kaczynski doesn't articulate, by contrast, and this is where he's missing a positive program like a Locke or a Machiavelli would have, he doesn't articulate, here's how a rightist person should be, right?

He doesn't have that. He has really just a negative diagnosis. But it's a very powerful diagnosis because if you read his description of anti-social people who devote their lives to pointless things and are enraged when you don't, and who become increasingly unreal in all of their behaviors because they think of behavior as something that requires the approval of other people rather than I behave in accordance with the situation so I don't scream like a woman when I see the beginning of a Marvel movie, right? I mean, those people are everywhere.

So it's really easy to read him and think, yeah, he's right. I mean, and he knows them, right? But he already knew them sort of in an embryonic form within academia in the 1960s.

[Speaker 2] (17:30 - 17:45)

Yeah. That's what's mind-blowing is he saw that from so far back. Right.

So do you have anything on his mathematical theorem, though? I mean, I read like 10 sentences of it. So I'm lost.

[Speaker 1] (17:45 - 17:52)

No, no, I haven't. I haven't looked into his his work in math. And if I did, I probably would have no idea what I was looking at.

[Speaker 2] (17:52 - 17:57)

I think someone could explain it to me, but it's not what I was going to sit down and give the time to.

[Speaker 1] (17:57 - 18:01)
We have a listener who can look at it and explain it to us.
[Speaker 2] (18:01 - 18:02)
Hey, I'd be really curious.
[Speaker 1] (18:02 - 18:04)
Shout out to you, listener, who's going to do that.
[Speaker 2] (18:05 - 19:31)
Yeah. All right. So we have what the real world wants to hear about.

Although if you did not hear, the Unabomber did die last week in his cell age 81. And so it just it came into the news in that way. And the reason I even found and had could read the first page of his his mathematical treatise is because it was on Twitter.

So, you know, Eric Weinstein, of all people, shared it. So Anonymous writes in based on, I think, some of our more recent conversations. And Dr. Kunz, what do you think of the alien abduction phenomena?

There you go. Before the abduction really hit the mainstream first with the Betty and Bernie Hill event and then Whitley Strieber's book Communion, most visitations by ETs were peacefully, most fully have mostly having a new age kind of message. But now what you hear are reports of the Greys taking you out of your bed at night and performing all sorts of grotesque medical experiments on you to make human alien hybrids.

I have no reason to believe these people are lying about the traumatic experiences they claim to have and cannot prove otherwise. Is modern alien abduction just another mask of the devil and his demons? Just for the record, I don't think alien hybrids are a real thing.

Also, don't believe a thing Richard Doty says. And I'm just going to say, you know, movies and dreams are not disrelated to each other. Dr. Kunz, your thoughts?

[Speaker 1] (19:33 - 24:49)

Movies and dreams are not unrelated. And the way that this works is that you are hijacked by the things, particularly that you see, because our capacity to tell the difference between what we see and what is real is fairly low. And certainly relative to other senses, it's really quite low.

So it's probably easier to tell the difference if you read about it or hear about it. And then if you see it, that's always something to remember about your senses. And something that, once you understand that, you're going to see all over the Bible is that the ear is the organ of faith for a reason, because the sight has so many failings and is so prone to deception.

When you're thinking about aliens and unidentified flying objects, and there's a new government term for that, but on the other hand, who cares for reasons I'll explain, you want to remember that Christians do not believe that either human nature or the creation changes radically. Because those things are created, they're not going to just alter so radically in the past 100 or 120 years that we have a phenomenon that we never before heard of, and it has to be explained. That is one of the delusions that technological progress induces in people is that therefore, because progress is a rule within certain technical parameters, progress is also a rule in human affairs.

And that's just flatly false. If you think of it that way, then the frame that I'm going to give to aliens and UFOs, I think is helpful. And it's one that I've given before in other places.

I do not distinguish between aliens or UFOs or anything, and not only phenomena that appear similar to them from other times that you can see if you look at medieval manuscripts, for example, describing lights in the sky and apparitions. But what you're fundamentally dealing with, particularly with the organ that is most prone to deception, is demonic manifestation. Now, number one, it seems really easy for me to believe that not only our government, but also Hollywood would want to foster that.

So the idea that there's a, you know, that there's some sort of deep relationship between your dreams or your experiences and what you saw in movies, and who advised whom on those movies, all makes sense to me. And that an unending sense of potential and of mystery and of excitement that is always disappointed, would want to be fostered by particularly both our military and our entertainment industries. But that underlying it, and I can go more into particularly that the military-industrial part of this, but underlying that, spiritually speaking, is very simply demonic manifestation, which may change over time because what you're told in an atmospheric way about it changes over time.

So if you are generally scared, then manifestations will come in a way that is reassuring or perhaps to reinforce the terror that you feel. There was a time before powered flight when things that look a lot like UFO sightings and even abductions would occur via airships, which were sort of a halfway house between, although they had a lot more potential, that's a whole aeronautical discussion, they were sort of a halfway house technologically between balloons and powered flight. And so people in the 1880s or 1890s in Kansas might have somebody come down and visit them from an airship, you know, and who are these people and what are they doing and why do they look so strange, but they're strangely fascinating.

So these things have a longer history than usually modern people know, but I don't see that they really have sufficient variety to say like, oh yeah, like probably some of this is totally real. I simply don't see that because the Bible gives the world and humanity a created nature and sets this world, this earth and humanity at the pinnacle of that creation, right? Which is why God's son comes as a man.

I don't see why we're looking for a tertium quid, a third something that is neither man nor animal and from a completely different galaxy to potentially intervene. I just cannot believe that that's real.

[Speaker 2] (24:50 - 24:51)

You need a higher power, man.

[Speaker 1] (24:53 - 25:15)

Yeah, right. Yeah. And so, right.

On a psychological level, on a spiritual level, it's very easy to understand also why these kinds of apparitions predominate in the most secularized parts of the world. Yeah. Right?

Yeah. These are angelic apparitions for people who don't believe in God or angels or demons.

[Speaker 2] (25:16 - 25:40)

Yeah. And they need a God. They need a place to find mystery and to let the things that they can't explain bump against something that they think they can explain because, of course, these aliens are going to be just like us, sort of, right?

They're never actually angels. So should we go on to the next one or do you want to bounce that one back and forth a little bit more?

[Speaker 1] (25:40 - 33:13)

Yeah. I mean, let me say a little bit more about the military industrial stuff because I think, and we've referenced some of the rather wild speculations of Charles Wing Wexhall on Twitter before. The reason I find him interesting is not because I find everything he's doing terribly convincing, but I do think it is fruitful to think about one's own country's history.

And people are doing this now with the rise and now the definition and the promotion of the various programs that go by Christian nationalism, right? Whatever that might mean with its specifics for any one person, they're trying to say there is a relationship between God and a country or God and in a more specifically biblical sense of the word, a nation, right? And that has to be acknowledged, right?

As we did a long time ago, right? On the flip side of that is also, and this is what we're trying to do with the myth of America history over a very extended period of time, giving also people some time to catch up in reading and listening and thinking about these things, is to relate also the darker side of the spirit and the darker side of life to the nation's history. In the case of the military, what you're dealing with is a military that expands enormously relative to all of its history, really only as a result of first the civil war, but then shrinking really only gets anything like that big again in the first world war.

Very significantly after the second world war, it doesn't shrink nearly so much. Men get demobilized, but the permanent installations, the number of permanent installations, the number of personnel involved, and the continued existence even down to this day of the potential for a draft, all of that radically changes our military's relationship to itself and to the nation that it is supposed to be defending, right? And therefore, I don't think it's an accident that our military becomes involved in investigating things that otherwise in other parts of life, but also including involvement in MKUltra, which is, I think, properly speaking, a CIA program, but the people involved are all interrelated in various ways.

Research into the human being and research into the creation that not only doesn't have a precedent, but also involves in spiritual temptations, especially of maintaining power over other human beings and abusing them that it had never heretofore had. So the fact that you have the Roswell incident, you have what goes on at Area 51 or Groom Lake, all of those things are functions to some degree of deception, to some degree of red herrings. I'm perfectly willing to concede that.

But I think also to some degree that our military, and this is becoming more and more apparent with the raising of pride flags, there's a pride flag here at the Denver Federal Center, which is not just the military, it's not even mostly the military at all, just our federal government, is that our government has begun to march as it were under a different standard. So in the same way that when the Roman Empire becomes permissive and then supportive, if not officially Christian yet in Constantine's lifetime, everything else will be banned later after his life. But when it becomes supportive and puts Christian standards on Rome's battle standards, that's really significant, the standard that you're flying, right?

Now, for a long time, our nation's flag had sort of the same reality that a lot of things in America do, which is because we haven't had the same kind of open public regime change, we didn't change flags. Like if you were born in Prussia in 1880, and you died in 1971 in West Germany, you would have lived under multiple different flags, right, even if you never moved. For Americans, that hasn't been the case, right?

Not since, you know, maybe Texas or California came into the Union, somebody would have grown up in a Mexican country or whatever, right? We've lived under the same flag. Now that flag is being accompanied, and often even supplanted by something else.

I see that process is very much long in the making, in that the devotion to the arcane, the paranormal, the occult, from parts of the military industrial complex is a very long standing thing. And that's part of what I was talking about a while back when we talked about the atomic bomb. I wasn't talking about the calculus of, you know, this is how much Okinawa cost us in terms of men.

So here's what we need to do, right? Because cumulatively, we did equally horrible things without the precisely same kind of technology in Europe to the Germans. And nobody even knows or cares about that.

So it's not the sheer technology, it is the unleashing of power through us, but which we do not control. And that is what is, I think, most spiritually significant about the military industrial complex is that it still has much of that power. Now, that's fading, right?

I mean, we watched the Taliban win in Afghanistan, and now they eradicated poppy cultivation in their country. So it's not that this power is unassailable. I'm not saying that.

But I'm saying that this power has had, for roughly 70 years or more, intimate involvement with things that are very, very, very strange. And they could just be totally lying to me about everything that's ever happened at Area 51. I can believe that too.

But the fact that they are involved and that they're acting like they're holding out this information, and maybe there's going to be more disclosure and stuff like that is not only although it is also a media game, right? Or a distraction. Sure, totally true.

But it is also a it's like a dallying with things that they don't really understand or have control over, but which get released onto the American public through them. Which to kind of bring a full circle is, you know, part of the research in the program that also wrecked Ted Kaczynski's life is research into hallucinogenic drugs, which are now in creating, you know, that's the next frontier and legalization. All of these things come to us through our academic research, military research nexus, right?

So if they are not, you know, if I'm not sitting here waiting for the Air Force to disclose something, I am sitting here waiting for more people to realize that much of the horror that has been unleashed on the world, and specifically on our own American population in the last 70 years, has come through that nexus of academia combined with the military.

[Speaker 2] (33:15 - 35:11)

It helps me to kind of go a little steampunk dark noir and imagine, you know, the military chap, not chaplains, but, you know, officers down in dark catacombs and, you know, and scientists with their lab coats, casting them off and putting on horns and dancing around fires and blah, blah, blah. You know, actually, it really does help me to think, yeah, yeah, there are probably some guys who do that. But there's also, I think, a great amount of the behavior that such so-called modern men exhibit would be worship in any other world, just with different language to describe their actions and behaviors.

So what we've done is we've created a sophistry for believing that you're not worshiping demons while you're worshiping demons, and you can talk yourself through a justification of it that enables you to follow, literally, orders, right? This is where I think some of them actually are, worshiping demons. But, like you said, unleashing ideologies, particular lies directed at particular things with particular powers over time to completely destroy what was a just society, or trying to be one.

You know, it sure looked like it got rid of slavery, right? So, whatever way you want to spin it to see it in the movie in your head, to believe firmly that for 70, 80, 90, 100 years behind, you know, ABC, NBC, CBS is smiling, we're all friends, go watch some football, you have a one-world ambitious government organization pursuing some form of divine status, maybe actually, and if not, accidentally, for sure. And they've unleashed, they've unleashed hell on us.

We're watching it, you know, with what these machines are doing to our kids' minds, turning the young kids into little program machines. Yeah.

[Speaker 1] (35:12 - 36:29)

Yeah. And I mean, what we just said over the past 15 minutes is not really going to be comprehensible to anyone who hasn't had a very horrendous experience with one or more of these things. It's really almost impossible for people to fathom, because there's a certain sweet spot, and this is a generational difference, right?

Is that if you didn't grow up with these things, and therefore it gets worse the younger you are, right? So, a guy who's, I'm going on, I'm going on 37, a guy who's 27, let alone a guy who's 17, grew up with horrors that I didn't have, and I grew up with horrors that a 57-year-old definitely didn't have. Right.

So, they are, you know, if I say, well, sorry, a couple of minutes ago, I forgot to mention that the internet was also invented by, you know, by this nexus, this academic military nexus. They're like, well, that's just a tool, or this phone in my pocket is a great tool, or this other thing is a great tool. They're still looking at these things as if they don't have our way out of, I mean, this is not the same thing as a hammer.

[Speaker 2] (36:29 - 36:43)

Well, let's pull that back to Kaczynski's point, right? Kaczynski's point is not that the hammer would be bad. His point is that the human's too stupid to use the hammer without hitting other people.

And this is kind of true. It's really kind of true.

[Speaker 1] (36:43 - 37:05)

And he's not saying it about hammers because he's saying we actually know what to do there. We can handle that level. And the reason that none of this sounds like a serious consideration to some people is because they have never been overwhelmed by these things, or if they are, they're not even aware of it.

[Speaker 2] (37:05 - 37:12)

You're drunk beyond stupor and numb to the pain is what I think a lot of people are dealing with. And they call it stress or depression, usually.

[Speaker 1] (37:12 - 42:56)

They do. Right. And so what you do instead, and I mean, again, I mean, Kaczynski predicted this, you know, so whatever.

So it's just, I mean, if he's right, then he's right, is that what will be done, because all of this is so unnatural, because this way of living is so unnatural, right? So, you know, you are separated, not just from your loved ones by thousands of miles for your pointless job. You are also separated from even the people you do live with the vast majority of your working life every day for your pointless job.

And you're going to be doing, even in your free time, what are what he calls surrogate activities, meaning I'm going to be, you know, I'm going to play vidya. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that.

And I'm going to do it because I need to feel like there's some purpose. Because my entire life is coping with the fact that my life is so unnatural. And it's not a utopian, I mean, he's not making a utopian assertion, right?

He's not saying like, if we all just did this, this is where he differs from other people that go back to the land in the time that he does, the 60s, the 70s, even the early 80s. He's not saying it's all going to be amazing. But he's saying, I won't have to pretend that the way that I feel generally each day is somehow not a result of the life that I have.

Right? That the life that I have makes me inherently miserable. And, you know, the thing that you definitely wanted, if you don't want people to hear that the thing that you definitely want to do to a guy like that is you say, he's crazy.

You don't say, here's one of the smartest guys anyone who met him ever met. Maybe he has something to say about life. Right?

You would want to deride him as insane, as criminal, as whatever. So, you know, you're going to you're going to pin a lot of somewhat when you actually follow the sequence, somewhat random crimes, random, maybe even nonsensical crimes on him. Something just for comparison purposes that might be helpful here is that at the same time in the early 90s, late 80s, early 90s, you have in, let's say the same quadrant of the country, more Pacific Northwest than inland.

But you have a group of people who call themselves monkey wrenchers. And if you're not familiar with that, you want to look into a writer named Edward Abbey. And Edward Abbey wrote several books.

Some of them were supposedly fiction, but the supposedly fictional ones are the ones from which groups like Earth First and Earth Liberation Front and other splinters out of this wing of the environmental movement take their inspiration and even their tactics. And what they do is that they don't protest, you know, that the northern spotted owl is going to be destroyed by this logging project in Roseburg, Oregon, but that what they're going to do, they're just going to destroy the machinery. So there's a soft version of this where you put yourself in the way, and then you have to be arrested and dragged off, you know, so you kind of put yourself in a tree and you just stay there, or you chain yourself to a bulldozer.

But more seriously was that lots of things would be destroyed. So it would make it prohibitively costly to continue, particularly logging there was their major concern. Although the tactic was taken up by animal rights people who will go into a factory farm and destroy it and try to release the animals.

Significant is that that was also to some degree prosecuted by the federal government at the time. But number one, it was not remembered. And number two, it was not publicly, it did not, it was not turned into a public laughingstock and object of ridicule, like Kaczynski was.

And to me, that's very significant, because in a way, they're operating in the same level, right, or sort of the same, same part of the political discussion about technology and nature and what we can go against and what we can and what we can withstand and what we need to stop. But with a group that was explicitly in every other way, very much orthodox left wing, that was prosecuted when there were very clear property crimes involved and even attempted murders. But people don't, number one, remember that.

And number two, don't have an image in their mind of a monkey wrencher. That doesn't have anything like the purchase that Unabomber has. And you can't go to a bookstore and get lots of books about monkey wrenchers or Earth Liberation Front or their history, even though a lot like a lot of the radical movements from the 60s, it's a lot more influential on modern leftist politics than Ted Kaczynski ever was anywhere on anyone's politics, practically.

So the question of what has gotten remembered is always an important one. And what they did was you probably don't know much about Ruby Ridge. You might know something about Waco, but those were religious wackos.

You probably know nothing about Earth Liberation Front and you definitely know the word Unabomber, even if you don't know anything else about the guy, because they don't really want you to know anything else about the guy.

[Speaker 2] (42:57 - 44:20)
Yeah. It's like our own kind of weird addendum Hitler a little bit. Yeah. If I kind of look at it that way. Yep. That's strange.

One more question here. We got new, we got time for a new topic. As a long time listener, thanks to you both for bringing half-banished and half-forgotten truths, well, fully banished and fully forgotten truths back into the thoughtful discourse.

Most recent podcast, 146, Neologistic Parabiotics, was especially meaningful as you brought home into the Lutheran reality that Presidio Covenant discourse. My question is whether you plan to bring the writings of Charles Porterfield Krauth, notably his Conservative Reformation, into the discussion. I'm no expert, but I find certain Presidio Covenant resonances in his fourth chapter on the church.

For example, when Krauth speaks against what he terms high churchism and the intramural church squabbling that tends to happen within church bodies, Krauth, quote, It is not charity to bear with others because the differences between us are so trifling. It is charity to bear with them although the differences are so great. Although Krauth obviously doesn't use the Presidio Covenant language, his use of the Augsburg Confession as a kind of freeing covenant for Lutheran churches to celebrate leads me to ask a larger question.

If this is true of Krauth, and that's still a question I can't answer, what sidelined his cause? Thank you for reading. And that's from Undone Scottis.

[Speaker 1] (44:22 - 44:43)

So just one thing to start with, and that is that the canonical pronunciation in Pennsylvania of the name is Krauth, like broth. So I don't know if that matters enough to anybody because everyone else says Krauth, but we say Krauth, so I'm indigenous.

[Speaker 2] (44:44 - 44:49)

If you have to correct people in your name too much, like you maybe just got to let it go sometimes, you know?

[Speaker 1] (44:49 - 52:11)

No, it just means you don't leave the commonwealth. That's the simple lesson to be learned here. So to kind of help the listener understand what the question is about, and then to answer the question.

To help is to say that Krauth is writing a very, very large poem about Lutheran history, mainly, and trying to distinguish it from the other sorts of Reformation that occurred in the 16th century. Mostly Protestant Reformations, but also including what is sometimes called the Counter-Reformation, or you could call the Catholic Reformation. And the conservatism there is the principle that we maintain traditions except when they directly conflict with Holy Scripture.

That's the idea. That's the principle. It's seen to be more, and I wish they had developed it more in the way that Abraham Kuyper develops Calvinism as a form of thought in his Princeton Stone lectures.

It seems to be more about a way of life, or a way of looking at life. That is, it has much broader implications than just a point about the 16th century Reformations, okay? The answer as to why that goes away is because Krauth doesn't really have heirs, either in an intellectual or in an ideological sense.

And that is because the colonial descended Lutherans in the East, and Krauth is one of the fathers of the General Council, which if you had to take the three big groups in the 19th century, by the, say, after the Civil War, you've got the General Synod, and they're the most Protestantized. You've got the General Council, and they're trying to be Lutheran. And then you've got, of all the Midwestern groups, the biggest conglomeration of that is the Missouri Synod dominated, but not exclusive, Synodical Conference.

And they all have different visions of how being Lutheran relates to maintaining the Lutheran confessions. And the difference between the Synodical Conference and the

General Council of Krauth involves the practice of those things. So the constant, the incessant complaint of the Synodical Conference about Krauth and his ilk was, you guys say you have close community, but you don't practice it.

You say that you don't let members be Masons, but here are some members who are Masons. So two things about that. He doesn't have heirs, partly because the Synodical Conference, such as it was in the 19th century, doesn't exist anymore.

There's a sense in which we're all the General Council now, right? That there's a rather severe divorce between public doctrine and public practice, and at least between public doctrine and private practice for most people. Or that when you're doing exactly what you say you're doing, that directly conflicts with someone else in the same church who is doing and saying something totally different.

So there's a sense in which he doesn't have heirs because his territory got taken over by the people who in his own lifetime were his opponents. But the other reason he doesn't have heirs is really because the institutions tied to that vision of life evaporated with the onset of historical criticism. The reason that an Eastern Orthodox Church or a Roman Catholic Church can begin to believe that the Bible contains errors is because it has a governance structure that is not reliant upon the Bible.

So in a practical sense, I guess that's good. In a theological sense, that's just a different version of horrendous. The reason a Protestant Church cannot survive direct incessant challenge, either to the doctrine of the Bible or to practices that obviously conflict with the doctrine of the Bible.

So as we record this, the Southern Baptist Convention has been debating women's ordination, right? And disfellowshipping churches that are practicing women's ordination, like Saddleback Church in Southern California. The reason Protestants have to be extra vigilant about that is because our practice flows out of our understanding of the Bible.

And our understanding of what we're confessing flows out of our understanding of the Bible. So when the Bible begins to be questioned as a source for authority, for legitimacy, for reality in the Eastern Lutheran bodies, which after World War I are together, General Synod, General Council are now together with the United Synod of the South and the United Lutheran Church in America. That's a church my father's baptized into.

Okay. And a lot of the stuff that he learned in confirmation class, even in the late 60s and early 70s, was pretty much exactly what any Missouri Synod Lutheran would have learned at the time. The difference was, you could then be more open about your sense that, yeah, you're supposed to learn this stuff, but it really doesn't matter.

Or here's what I'm telling you about communion. So communion is the body and blood of Christ. But the way of reading the Bible that undergirded that, which was very simple, right, direct, clear, the Bible's clear, that was already gone in that very same pastor's mind.

So he's not questioning maybe communion right now, but he's questioning other things, but he's still teaching the stuff that they always taught. So eventually that just hollows the church out from the inside. When the doctrine and the practice don't go together, it hollows it out.

And when the source of authority evaporates, it hollows it out, right? So that's why the Orthodox fight about bishops and Catholics fight about the Pope and Protestants fight about the Bible. Krauth doesn't have any heirs for that reason.

That doesn't mean he can't in the future have heirs. It just means that he doesn't have the continuous legacy that a Walther would have. The reason that's unfortunate is that Krauth is actually an American.

And so he was thinking long before the Missouri Synod was thinking over much about how a Lutheran church would actually work in an American context. That still has some value. I think it has a little bit less value because I don't think that we're in a situation where we're free, we're a free church, and our major competitor is the Methodist church or the Baptist church or the Catholic church.

We're really in a situation where we have differences with other Christians, but the major challenge, particularly in our people's daily lives, is a state religion symbolized by pride flags. It's not really that the Southern Baptist Convention is like the biggest problem I have in the world, right? So we're in a different situation than Krauth had, but I think it still retains some value because he recognizes something about the essence of Lutheranism as a life view that oftentimes we don't quite get there.

We don't get that profound about it. We just say like, yeah, baptism saves, which is true. But there are ways that we get there that other people don't that would be helpful for other parts of life as well.

And I think he saw that.

[Speaker 2] (52:12 - 53:18)

My experience with him was that he just is a much more organic writer in English, and I think that's because he's a native English speaker in Missouri, so his writing is all from German. And as good as—they're right, but they're not beautiful. And Krauth writes beautifully, to the level of almost melodrama at a certain point, you know?

When Luther discovers the gospel, there's a ray of light coming through the window to hit the page. I'm not kidding. It's kind of nice, though.

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It's kind of nostalgic, like, this is fun. It'd be nice if it were that way. So I think it's an important contribution for a number of reasons, including the ones that you gave.

But like a lot of the other Latter-day Fathers of Christianity, right? So whether that's Walther, whether that's even like a Finney or a Wesley, all of them sort of caught in a game that, as you pointed out a moment ago, just assumed that the rest of history sort of meant figuring out which denomination was right.

[Speaker 1] (53:19 - 53:23) Yeah. Go ahead. I'm sorry. [Speaker 2] (53:23 - 53:24) No, it's good.

[Speaker 1] (53:24 - 54:15)

You're going to build on it. I mean, you can scarcely blame them, because certainly nobody before the First World War. Right.

Now that I said that. But no, I mean, I'll just say it again. Nobody is thinking, this is all going to end.

Right. Yeah. The number could be counted on one hand, and it's not that big.

And certainly an American, even before the Second World War, and maybe for a long time after, it's hard for you to think that way, when things are generally going well. It's just hard to think that way. No one was envisioning in 1878, that we would be talking about child sacrifice and genital mutilation in the United States.

I mean, you couldn't send pornography through the mail. You couldn't send information about contraception through the mail.

[Speaker 2] (54:16 - 54:22)

You wouldn't just disinvite the trans influencer from further White House events. There'd be more repercussions.

[Speaker 1] (54:23 - 55:05) Right. Right. Right.

Right. Exactly. You know, so we're, you know, we're debating things like, you know, the gold standard, you know, bimetallism, paper currency.

It's not that those things aren't related. It's so easy these days to see how those things

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are so related. I mean, our government could never be the size it was with, you know, the gold standard that was, these things are related, but they couldn't see the things that we're seeing.

And that's, that's not a credit to us. So in, you know, in his time and in his place, it does look like the major question is, you know, what, what's the best kind of Christian you should be.

[Speaker 2] (55:05 - 56:49)

Yeah. Right. And what, what then kind of, what blows me away is not only trying to imagine the, the wonderful ease that much of just presented to daily life, just to kind of believe so firmly in the religion as an outside of you experience coming at you.

Right. Like it's just, you can't escape it kind of thing. But then I just try to put this back together again.

Now that this has happened and we can look back and see how really that whole time they should never have assumed everything was going to stay the way it was like, like the Bible teaches you that, right. Like just to read Kings, it should set the pattern for history to you. Like just don't expect it to last unless you're vigilant and pass it on.

And so somehow in the midst of, of the fights over things that do matter, I'm pretty convinced whether or not you can or not baptize an infant is an important biblical truth. I don't know that Baptists aren't saved now because they don't believe it. Right.

I'm pretty confident they are, and they just don't understand what's happening. That that's an important thing. But while we're sitting there, basically learning to hate each other over that disagreement, those who foster hate as their religion have gained ground while our religion, which is supposed to be one of love has strictly speaking, kind of ceased to function as that publicly.

Right. Publicly, we are brands arguing for marketplace share. Right. [Speaker 1] (56:50 - 56:50)
Right.
[Speaker 2] (56:50 - 57:53)

Yeah. And then so losing the spirit of love, you know, I'm not talking John Lennon at all. Right.

I'm talking the cross. I'm talking self-sacrifice. I'm talking mortification of the flesh. I'm talking charity. I'm talking repentance. Right.

I'm talking seeing everyone else outside of you as more important than you, because you have a master who's got you covered. And that spirit just over the course of every other psyop they threw at us from TV to radio to blah, blah, blah. You know, it's just led all of us as Christians in a terribly, terribly unfaithful predicament.

And the wake up is to some extent to realize, oh, man, we should have always been arguing about all these things, but not like we were. And certainly not with the political capacity that led us to basically go to swords market market. But it's like a sort and compete with each other for this thing while really competing for for world share, for worldliness, who can prove to the world where the Christians.

Right. Which is a whole nother kind of conversation.

[Speaker 1] (57:54 - 1:02:19)

Yeah. There's a there's a time in any given denomination, and it's it's later for cross successors than it is for the Presbyterian Church. And it's later for the Presbyterians than it was for the Northern Baptists.

And it's been different from the Southern Baptists or the Missouri Synod Lutherans than it was for the Northern Baptists or the Eastern Lutherans. But what happens in every case is that at least regionally, if not nationally, in the case of some denominations like the Roman Catholics or the Presbyterians that have sufficiently large groups or the Southern Baptists, for that matter, is that there's a time when they are large enough to get incessant press coverage of their deliberations. And the Southern Baptist Convention is still there.

But what were the Northern Presbyterians and are now more or less nationwide in the P.C. USA. A hundred years ago, every major newspaper in the United States would go to a Presbyterian General Assembly. That doesn't happen anymore.

And it doesn't happen because they don't matter. But there's a tipping point where the prospect of mattering in a world that obviously despises the gospel is still so tempting that they will usually set aside or even flatly reject truth. But it's much more common that church people are cowardly than that they are actually openly heretical.

So it's usually more that we set aside truth. And one of the truths that we set aside because of our comfort and because of the temptation of sounding nicer or better, or the word that's always used is winsome, is that if we just emphasize our distinctives, that will matter to a world that is neutral or even favorable but doesn't like when we fight. But the common denominator in all of these various histories with all their different permutations and conventions that they had and bishops' conferences and stuff is the desire to be approved of.

Now, I have my own take on how the Synodical Conference people should have handled Krauth and his belligerents, but they weren't wrong that there was an incapacity to follow through that would eventually rip them apart, right? So you say you're going to do this, well, you need to go and actually do it. And it's that capacity to value what is done on the basis of what you think rather than just thinking, which can always be tweaked by a committee and then represented and then most people don't know what's going on anyway, not saying anything particularly about the upcoming Synod Convention for the Missouri Synod, but most people have no idea what's happening in such a room and so they just vote for it anyway, it sounds fine. All of that is really to be seen. And I think that if we didn't have, if Christians had not had the same kind, if they hadn't had sufficient prestige to get that much press, they would not be nearly so worried about the way that they appear to the world, because that's simply not a biblical criterion.

Being above reproach doesn't mean that the world likes everything that you do. That's not what that means. It means that they can't, nobody can justifiably charge you with, you know, having, you know, looted a target recently.

That's what that means. It doesn't mean that the world is going to look at you and think, wow, Pastor Fisk is such a nice guy, I'll join his church. I don't go to church, my son is turning into a girl, but he's so nice, I'm going to go to his church.

That's not how it works. The spirit comes for conviction of sin, not because Pastor Fisk or anybody else is so nice. And I think there was just such a confusion between the desire for prestige, which is one thing, and something that's very different, which is the love of Christ.

And we forsook the love of Christ, and we maintain the desire for prestige. And that really hasn't gone away. I mean, we're always worried about what the media is going to say about us.

[Speaker 2] (1:02:19 - 1:03:26)

I just want to mail that nice and the love of Christ are just not the same thing, right? And so, you know, charity, the love of Christ, which, when you are given the chance to have charity for another person, you don't just pity them. It's not pity.

It's more than pity. You love them. You are truly and deeply concerned for that human, forever, actually.

And that unique spirit that Christianity gives in great measure, so I ask for it, for everybody in the whole world, once it starts overflowing, is a profound thing that goes far beyond winsomeness. I mean, winsomeness is like a game, right? This is like, I actually care about that.

Whoever's walked in the door, we all care about you now, no matter what. You're here, right? That's a very unique thing, especially if you're talking about, you know, anti-social

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cultures being developed by blah, blah, blah. So, one more thought, then we're out of time. [Speaker 1] (1:03:27 - 1:04:10)

The idea that you need to measure truth by what you were old to think is cancer for your mind. And as soon as you learn that truth has its own reality because he is himself truth and exists of himself, is the moment that you begin to be able to recognize truth, not because somebody told you it was true, but because you actually know it to be true. And that's the prison that so many of us have through very violent confrontations with lies and demons.

That's the prison that so many of us have escaped from.

[Speaker 2] (1:04:11 - 1:04:45)

Boundary functions and sets of curvilinear convergence for continuous functions by T.J. Kaczynski. Let D be the open unit disk in the complex plane and let C be its boundary, the unit circle. If X, E, C, then by an arc of X, we mean a simple arc, gamma, with one end point at X, such that gamma minus X, and a symbol, I honestly don't know, D.

There's still another sentence in the paragraph, you're listening to a brief history of power. You know where to find us, or you wouldn't be here. The Hebron Collegium is a gap year Bible school for men in Rockford, Illinois.

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[Speaker 1] (1:04:46 - 1:08:02)

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