I don’t know much about the program, nor do I particularly care. But, ever since the controversy began, I’ve been asking —
What’s the goal and purpose for writing and bashing COTS?
Okay, so you feel it might be a cult. Gotcha. But, why are you suddenly bashing this group? Why are rabbis, rabbonim and mashpiim writing articles and calling meetings to discuss this issue? What difference does it make if mature adults make a decision to attend a weekend retreat?
Is the goal to save souls? Really? Then, I simply ask you, where are these people on the numerous other important and profound social issues going on in Chabad today? Why are there no meetings on sex-abuse by these same people? Why are they not writing articles on the matter and publishing it on all Chabad websites?
Rabbis – you think it’s okay to motzie shem rah on hundreds of fellow Jews? You think its okay to disparage them? You think its okay to call them idol-worshipers (the worst thing that anyone can ever call a yid)?
Clearly, it isn’t about COTS or saving souls. It is clearly about power, control and getting your name in the news. Not one of the so-called experts or opinionates interviewed a single COTS attendee to discover what happens, what affect it had and what “hold” COTS continues to have over the member.
It’s a bloody shame. They want to control our daily actions, our way of thinking and our ability to be independent. These rabbis crave power and control – something they have been losing steadily over the past several years.
Rabbis – if you truly care about the Jewish soul, then show that you truly care and do something about the more pressing and important issues. And then can we address COTS and its effect on several hundred adults.
Luke says: It’s such a shame that rabbis want power, control and influence. Oh wait, all the anti-abuse activists want the same thing. Wait, everybody with an IQ over 100 wants the same thing. Every healthy smart adult with an ego wants power, control, and influence, if only to keep it away from people they hate. Much of the anti-abuse activism is driven by hatred of rabbis (who embody Judaism aka telling you what to do), which is fine with me. Let a thousand arguments bloom. Rabbis have lagged in the fight against abuse and they deserve criticism.
You could make the same argument against the rabbis against COTS by saying, “But what about lashon hara/tv/internet? Why aren’t they speaking out about lashon hara/internet/tv etc” Or any of 100 things that pose a danger to Orthodox Judaism. COTS aka Landmark aka LGAT (Large Group Awareness Therapy) is dangerous. Read Culteducation.com if you want to know more. Rabbis are doing their jobs when they condemn something that is dangerous, even if they don’t simultaneously condemn everything else that is dangerous.
Put “Call of the Shofar” into Google and the first auto prompt is for “cult.” COTS comes from Landmark, which is EST, which was developed by Werner Erhard, the fake name of former used car salesman John Paul Rosenberg, who was heavily influenced by Scientology.So if you love Scientology, you’re going to love COTS, and if you hate Scientology, you’re going to hate COTS (if you think things through and do your research).
Erhard read L. Ron Hubbard extensively, and some Scientology terms overlap with terms from est.[19] Erhard later said, “I have a lot of respect for L. Ron Hubbard and I consider him to be a genius and perhaps less acknowledged than he ought to be.”[17]:383 William Bartley, in his biography of Werner Erhard, recounts that he asked Erhard to describe the differences between est and Scientology; Erhard replied:
The essential difference between est and Scientology is two-fold. The first has to do with Scientology’s emphasis on survival and its idea that the purpose of life is survival. est sees the purpose of life as wholeness or completion – truth – not survival.
The other main difference between est and Scientology lies in the treatment of knowing. Ron Hubbard seems to have no difficulty in codifying the truth and in urging people to believe it. But I suspect all codifications, particularly my own. In presenting my own ideas, I emphasize their epistemological context. I hold them as pointers to the truth, not as the truth itself.
I don’t think anyone ought to believe the ideas that we use in est. The est philosophy is not a belief system and most certainly ought not to be believed. In any case, even the truth, when believed, is a lie. You must experience the truth, not believe it.
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“I was a big talk radio fan during the beginnings of this thing,” Dennis Prager said on his Feb. 1, 2007 show. “I would call in and get on pretty much when I called in. I would be in the upstairs and they’d [Prager’s parents] be down in the basement and I’d scream, ‘I’m going on the radio.’
“I wonder what I talked about? I have no recollection.”
On June 15, 2012, Dennis said: “I was mesmerized. I never thought I’d be one, any more than if I went to the movies, I thought I’d be John Wayne.”
Dennis particularly liked WNBC radio and WOR host Jean Shepherd.
According to a New York Times retrospective on the movie A Christmas Story:
Jean Shepherd narrated ‘A Christmas Story,’ giving voice to the adult Ralphie Parker, which makes sense because he wrote the Christmas adventure based on semi-fictional stories from his own childhood in Hammond, Indiana. Shepherd’s screenplay includes previously released material from several of his books. Also, Shepherd knew his way around a microphone, as he had a very popular three-decade radio career, during which he told stories, read poetry and organized listener stunts.
Listening to Shep, I learned about social observation and human types: how to parse modern rituals (like dating and sports); the omnipresence of hierarchy; joy in struggle; “slobism”; “creeping meatballism”; 19th-century panoramic painting; the primitive, violent nature of man; Nelson Algren, Brecht, Beckett, the fables of George Ade; the nature of the soul; the codes inherent in “trivia,” bliss in art; fishing for crappies; and the transience of desire. He told you what to expect from life (loss and betrayal) and made you feel that you were not alone…
Like a lot of fine-tuned performing artists, Shepherd increasingly exhibited the whole range of symptoms common to the aging diva. He became paranoid and resentful of imagined rivals, whether they were old ones like Mort Sahl or upstarts like Garrison Keillor.
“I went to bed at night with a transistor radio under my pillow and listened to Jean Shepherd. He never took calls. Just talked for three hours.” (Dec. 21, 2010)
“I began calling talk radio in mid-high school. Was I nervous! I remember when the guy would say, ‘Dennis in Brooklyn.’ I was dripping with perspiration.” (Dec. 17, 2010)
Dec. 17, 2013, Dennis said: “Transistor radios. They were all made in Japan… I would go to bed at night and take my transistor radio and put it under my pillow. Until high school, I had a bed-time. It was so strictly enforced. I had to be in pajamas and brush my teeth by that time. I think it is a good idea. I don’t think I had one for my kids quite as much.
“Is that why I stay up late now? That might be the case. I think of it as liberty.”
In his 14th lecture on Deuteronomy (in 2003?), Dennis said: “When I was a kid, I knew I wouldn’t be a doctor. A. My brother was. I knew I wouldn’t do the same thing my brother did just to individuate. B. I hated the site of blood. C. I didn’t find studying the names of nerves interesting.
“So I remember thinking, OK, I’ll be a lawyer. In my eighth grade Yeshiva Rambam graduation booklet, each kid had his picture and he’d tell the editor what phrase he’d like under his picture and mine was, ‘Dennis Prager, D.A.’ He had under his picture six years early, “Kenneth Prager, M.D.’
“Through high school, I just assumed I’d be a lawyer, but then I read a law book. By page 11, I decided I wouldn’t be a lawyer. And I remember thinking, what am I going to do? I’m a Jew.
“I remember saying to my brother, ‘Kenny, I’m not going to be a doctor or a lawyer. I’m going to be something different.’
“I thank God that I followed my gifts.”
Dennis found his life purpose in lecturing about right and wrong and ascribing his values to Judaism. In his 20s, as Dennis found he could both earn a nice living lecturing about morality and simultaneously date many pretty adoring women through this work, he came to the belief that society’s greatest task was moral education. It just so happened to coincide with his chosen profession. He could do good and make good through what came most naturally to him — talking, charming and intimidating — without any one entity having veto power over him.
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Russia remains stalwart in its laws that aim to curb the influence of the West’s gay-friendly culture on Russian youth. Meanwhile, last week, in a stunning turn of events, India’s high court reinstituted a nineteenth-century law against sodomy. On cue, the ligbitist kibitzers are going crazy in such homophile haunts as the New Yorker and the Guardian, expressing total outrage that there should exist, anywhere on the globe, nations that do not think it’s normal or appropriate to subsidize and celebrate men sodomizing boys.
I cannot blame Russia, India, or any nation for reacting to what they see in the West with measures that I would ostensibly oppose on principle. Russia’s ban on promoting homosexuality to children does impinge on free speech. India’s ban on sodomy is an intrusion into the sex lives of consenting adults. But we don’t live in an ostensible world.
Walter Jenkins Arrested 1964
Dec. 23, 2013, Dennis Prager said: “Gays should never be harassed. I have always supported that. one of the reasons that I didn’t become a Republican until the Reagan era was what happened. It seared me. When some people in the Goldwater campaign outed a gay advisor to Lyndon Johnson and ruined his life. Some people followed him into a men’s room. I thought that was so despicable that I couldn’t become a Republican, even though I was always anti-left.” According to Wikipedia:
A month before the 1964 presidential election,
on October 7, 1964, District of Columbia Police arrested Jenkins in a YMCA restroom. He and another man were booked on a disorderly conduct charge.[4] an incident described as “perhaps the most famous tearoom arrest in America.”[5] He paid a $50 fine.[6] Rumors of the incident circulated for several days and Republican Party operatives helped to promote it to the press.[7] Some newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the Cincinnati Enquirer, refused to run the story.[8] Journalists quickly learned that Jenkins had been arrested on a similar charge in 1959,[9] which made it much harder to explain away as the result of overwork or, as one journalist wrote, “combat fatigue.”
Finally, on October 14, a Washington Star editor called the White House for Jenkins’ comment on a story it was preparing. Jenkins turned to White House lawyers Abe Fortas, the President’s personal lawyer, and Clark Clifford, who unofficially was filling the role of White House Counsel. They immediately lobbied the editors of Washington’s three newspapers not to run the story, which only confirmed its significance.[11][12] and within hours Clifford detailed the evidence to the President and press secretary George Reedy, “openly weeping,”[13] confirmed the story to reporters. Probably forewarned, Johnson told Fortas that Jenkins needed to resign.
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Lloyd Grove wrote for the March 1995 edition of Vanity Fair:
New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier is the egghead boy toy of such glamorous powers as Barbara Streisand, Shirley MacLaine, and Tipper Gore. But has he abandoned the life of the mind to be the life of the party?
…he once described his job as “policing the culture.”
…Wieseltier squired Tipper Gore in the 1980s to Washington’s 9:30 club, where they danced the night away to heavy-metal bands while Al was apparently up in the Senate, protecting the national interest…
Wieseltier came to this perch of high culture highly recommended by his doting intellectual mentors: critic Lionel Trilling at Columbia, philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin at Oxford…, and historian Yosef Yerushalmi at Harvard… He was, they all agreed, a brilliant young man of breathtaking promise who would one day bring forth works of enduring importance.
His academic articles feature such sentences as, “The undifferentiated, followed by the simultaneity of the undifferentiated with the differentiated, followed by the withdrawal of the undifferentiated and the triumph of the differentiated: this has been the pattern of metaphysical history in the Jewish view…”
According to witnesses, Wieseltier was soon bringing to the office another habit [aside from alcohol] that he also enjoyed outside the workplace: frequent cocaine use. A person familiar with Wieseltier’s indulgence estimates that at one point in 1993 he was snorting — from a petite silver spoon, dangling from a chain attached to a vial, an entire gram a day. To support this expensive pastime — all but impossible on his salary, which is in the high five figures — he regularly loaded dozens of books he received as literary editor into the trunk of his Honda Accord and hauled them to Washington bookstores, selling them to finance purchases of “truth serum.”
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It was a Sabbath afternoon. God, how I hated the Sabbath. We were Seventh-Day Adventists at Avondale College in Cooranbong (comes from the Aboriginal word “Kour-an-bong”, meaning “rocky bottom creek”) and you weren’t allowed to do anything fun on the Sabbath.
I was seven years old. It was late 1973. I hadn’t started school yet but I knew how to read.
So after church, we came home for lunch and my parents’ had guests over, adult guests, and after lunch, there was nothing for me to do and nowhere for me to go. For some reason, I had to stay home and stay in. It was summer. The days were long and the Sabbath wouldn’t end until after sundown, which was ages.
So I sat in the big comfortable chair in the living room as the adults did their thing around me, they were probably cleaning up and heading out for a nature walk, and I gathered myself in the chair, and imagined I was somewhere else, anywhere else, having an adventure. And as I drifted into that scene, something out of Coral Island/Treasure Island/Huck Finn, I imagined that my best friend Wayne and I were provisioning stores at the Sanitarium Health Food Factory for our big rafting trip down Dora Creek.
Then I saw us gathering everything on board the raft and pushing away from the shore, away from the adults, and heading downstream to have adventures with abos.
As I disappeared into my reverie, I found that all of my boredom and unhappiness and lack of ease disappeared and I felt alive and happy and the hero of my own story. My mom was thrilled that I could entertain myself and not be a bother. Such a good boy. And I was off surfing the waves of fantasy, letting go of my problems and getting high on my dreams, transforming my state with a blink of my mind’s eye and elevating to a better world where I was an admirable guy doing great things and operating at the peak of my powers.
Getting lost in my dreams became my favorite hobby. Later, I’d follow sports, chase girls, watch movies, and work and exercise to the extreme — all to ward off the pain of my failure to attach normally. As the years rolled by, my distractions became addictions.
I fell in love with books at age eight. One Saturday, I finished five, my all-time record. I’d experiment with how much I could read in a day and found eight hours was about my limit.
In fifth grade, I began jogging a couple of miles before breakfast. In seventh grade, I got serious with my running, and finished five marathons (26 miles, 385 yards). I thought that was how I would become great. I’d drive myself out of bed every morning and run five miles before breakfast. By sheer force of will, I’d gain distinction and love. Then in eighth grade, I developed sore knees (Osgood-Schlatter disease) and had to quit running. Without it, I would’ve pushed myself to collapse in my drive to achieve.
And the thing is — I had no running talent. I just had a desperate need to escape from reality.
Just before my knee problem became insuperable, I was headed towards my fastest time in the marathon. I was on pace for a 3 hour 30-minute marathon (my previous best time was 4:13) when I dropped out of my last race at the 18 mile mark due to the pain.
Realizing I’d never become great through athletics, and there was never a shred of evidence that I had any athletic talent, I decided in eighth grade to become a journalist. That was my great pursuit through my teens but there was never a way to overdo it to injury. I stayed up most of the night on a couple of occasions covering a story but that wasn’t a big deal to my health.
I only became serious about education at age 20. I took 18-units at Sierra Community College in the fall of 1987 and I got my first straight As report card by rising at 4 am every day to tackle my most difficult subject first — Calculus. I learned that my daily limit for serious study was six hours and if I wanted to write, I needed to do that first. I’d get the flu with everyone else, but by fasting and a massive intake of fluids, I’d usually bounce back within 48 hours.
In the Spring of 1988, I was taking 25 units and working about 25 hours a week, when I felt myself running down. I was bewildered. I had discovered my passion at last — academics — and I was determined to bull through to great achievement. “I’ll break through or break down,” I told myself. “Either way I’ll get love.” Only my destruction would stop my approach. I was an atheist, a communist and a virgin.
One day in February, 1988, I woke up with what became Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and I’d never again be strong.
I fell in love with Judaism in 1989 and became increasingly strict with my observance. This did not cause me any injury, but in 1993, as I brought girls into my life, I decided to temper my religiosity to sate my desires. After enjoying a couple of women, I was never again in danger of religious extremism.
I took up blogging in 1997 and sometimes put in up to 60 hours a week at it, often mixing with dangerous people and putting myself at risk. I never pushed to physical collapse however, I simply flirted with the edge, with insanity, with social ostracism. By 2007, I realized I wasn’t getting the results I sought from blogging and so I started looking for a new approach to life and in late 2008, I embraced the Alexander Technique. There’s no way to Alexander yourself to injury so that never happened to me. I did burn out on trying to establish a practice, giving it my all for four months until deciding to put that on the back burner.
The past six years, I’ve been taking it easy, seeking out my next opportunity for total effort, but now I’m 47 years old and perhaps that kind of exertion is a thing of my past.
What obsession or addiction have you suffered from?
Addiction to sex, love and fantasy. Since the age of seven when I learned I could sit in a chair and drift off into a daydream of doing great things, going on adventures, leading armies into battle, ruling a nation, and this would immediately numb my pain, fill me with excitement and adrenalin, and I’d just get lost in a haze. It was like a drug.
How did you originally get involved?
My parents were busy. They didn’t want me to bother them. I didn’t have friends around. I read a lot of books and it was easy to imagine myself stepping into these stories, such as Treasure Island, Coral Island, etc.
How long have you been doing this?
Since age seven.
Describe the satisfaction or joy that it brings or brought you?
It makes me feel even with life. All of my anger and frustration goes away. My pain is numbed. My frustration is taken away. I’ve had to absorb a lot of punishment and humiliation at the hands of women, particularly my step-mother, and now I get to dish out the pain or at least watch it acted out in porn. Watching a good sex scene is like watching my favorite team score a touchdown. Watching a good bukkake shower is like watching my favorite team score 14 touchdowns in 50 seconds. It’s orgasmic.
I can take all my pain, rage and humiliation at the hands of women, all the hundreds of hot women I’ve known who’ve ignored me or turned me down and refused to fuck me, and I can see women hotter than them get fucked 15 ways to Sunday in the most degrading ways possible, bitches got it coming.
How has it impacted you financially?
I’m not sure exactly. I’ve never made more than $50,000 a year and yet I obviously have a three digit IQ and most people as smart as me make good money. I’ve never been willing to part with much time and money in the pursuit of my addictions. I’ve long used my laziness to keep that in check. As a good friend once wrote of me, “Luke is a lazy womanizer. He can’t be bothered to put much effort into it.”
How has it impacted relationships with friends or family?
My inappropriate comments, tasteless jokes, raunchy behavior, revolting writing, shameful topics of obsession have hacked away at my bonds with others, leaving me isolated and lonely. My bosses and my rabbis say I’m not controllable. I was born to be wild. I live in rebellion to my parents. I’m doing battle with them every day even though they live in Australia and I live in California.
I remember jogging beside a foggy canal in 95658 in December of 1987. Running was rarely fun, particularly not after a long day of study and work. I wondered, where was my reward for my hard work? I figured that good things came to those who sacrificed present pleasure for future reward. I was set to transfer to UCLA in the fall and I would get the goodies there. I’d get love and recognition and friends and success.
And so I ran on through the fog before dinner, the only person on a lonely trail, a couple of miles from a cold home, telling myself that by giving up the present, by building up my strength and vitality and savings and GPA, I was setting a foundation for a magnificent future, blithely unaware that all my plans were about to crash down on my head and that 25 years later, I’d still be unmarried, sitting at home alone listening to the same ’80s pop, dreaming of jogging, blogging about jogging, fantasizing about jogging, visualizing jogging while unable to walk more than a couple of miles without my feet aching.
In July, 2013, I bought a stationary bike and soon worked my way up to ten miles a day until a mammoth CFS collapse in late August presaged three months of exhaustion and social withdrawal.
Oh life, it’s bigger
It’s bigger than you
And you are not me
The lengths that I will go to
The distance in your eyes
Oh no, I’ve said too much
I’ve said enough
That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the spotlight
Losing my religion
Something broke in my system in February of 1988 so that since then, when I exercise much past a mile or two daily, I quickly or slowly get a Chronic Fatigue Syndrome relapse that matches exactly the level of my exertion. For example, sustained exertion over weeks brings a sustained relapse that lasts weeks while a one-time exertion of many miles brings a sudden but short-lived relapse of a few days. Given that I can’t exercise much in real life, I’m experimenting with active visualization of my past experiences with jogging and working out. I find this makes me feel alive and fills me with adrenalin and provokes memories and strong feelings. I don’t want to live passively, so I’m writing everything out.
Remember my jogs through Angwin in 1978, hoping to find a better way to live? I was frustrated with my life. I was disconnected. I was lonely. I was unpopular. I knew what I had wasn’t working. I had to try something new. So off I went on a run. I’d chew up the miles and hope to run into a girl who liked me. I thought that by getting ahead, winning awards, pushing myself forward, securing fame and fortune, I’d get more of what I wanted — connection, friends, family, love.
I was ill at ease, restless, discontented, and I tried to run away from my problem. I’m always trying to run away. Get away. Fix the damn thing! F***! F***! I hate my life. It’s not working. And my attempts to fix things don’t work either but I won’t go down without a fight. Something is so wrong.
I was a 12 year old kid and I was running 40 miles a week. Something is wrong here. What’s wrong with this picture? Why does the kid have so much desperation and unhappiness that he runs marathons at age 12? I found a measure of distinction through my running but that ended in the fall of 1979 when my knees began swelling up, they couldn’t take the pounding, and I had to abandon running for the next five years.
I’ve lived many places aside from Pacific Union College but there was something special about that place and I keep returning to it in my visualizations. I see myself racing up Howell Mountain Road and hear the honk of the horns of friends and see their waves and I wave back and I feel connected. I feel alive.
When my parents were gone in Washington D.C., and I finished up eighth grade at PUC during those first six months of 1980, that was the first time I felt normal. That was my first taste of sustained and deep happiness. Over the next four years, I kept returning to the Adventist college to fill up on this feeling. Those were the best times of my high school years. PUC was my community. People knew me there. Everyone knew my name and they were always glad I came. We were bound by a similar religion and way of life. It’s easier to connect when you’re part of the group. And when those tanks of connection are filled up, it’s easier to face the world and to explore. Without that connection and community and love, I feel weak and fragile, ill at ease, restless, discontented, angry, frustrated, broken.
When I was at PUC, I never saw myself living there. I just wanted to launch myself into the world, knowing that the place would still be there for me forever. I had a home. I had a place for me.
My God, that evening in May of 1980, when I found out we would not be returning to PUC, that we would have to live elsewhere, my heart broke. I was glad to find out four months later that we were going to Auburn, it was less than three hours drive away from PUC.
Auburn was lonely compared to PUC. PUC was lonely for me too but at least there were lots of people there I could potentially connect with, but in Auburn, our religious community was spread out. There was no one to hang out with on most Sabbath afternoons. It was just me and long walks and books and I felt so empty and sad.
Remember all my jogs from 1985 to 1988 through the fog along the canal that flowed a mile below our home at 7955 Bullard Drive? I’d just run mile after mile and there was nobody, nobody I wanted to f***.
I had my moments at Placer High School, a public school. It was an opportunity for me to spread my wings outside of Adventism, outside of Christianity, and to begin to explore the wider world through the tool of journalism. I had success, but it didn’t fill me up the way life at PUC did. There’s something special about belonging to a close-knit religious community with transcendent purpose. Everything becomes more meaningful. Life has more depth and texture and color. There were so many great people at PUC, we shared values and a way at looking at life, it was easier to communicate and to eat together and to do everything together. The outside world is much more complex.
I took that year off after high school and went back to Australia and felt so lonely as my mates back in California moved ahead with their lives. So I came home and I still couldn’t get it together at Sierra Community College. Imagine Desmond Ford’s son taking a semester off — only six unit! — to work as a landscaper. Oy! In that miserably cold winter, I was slogging away in the mud and rain for $4.50 an hour. I was nuts. I made such bad choices.
I was desperate, searching, trying things, shaking up my life, looking for a better way, and I was lonely. I thought my muscles and toughness would help me find a woman, or at least build a foundation upon which I could accomplish great things and then get the woman I deserved and then things like friends and community would fall into place.
These visualization exercises, taking me back to my daily runs of seventh grade, do get my blood pumping. Sometimes, when I remember running along a beautiful trail, I feel strong and I pump with endorphins, even though I’m just lying on the floor listening my favorite pop songs of the era.
Remember how much of the time I was hungry? Eating between meals was a sin. Eating much for dinner was a sin. I was starving, sad, lonely, miserable, disconnected. I wasn’t cared for and I didn’t know how to care for myself. I kept seeking out sustenance and I usually found it through my friendships with the bachelor PE teachers Chuck, David, Duane. I’d hang out in their offices. I could talk to them about everything that interested me. I was closer to them than my classmates most of the time.
What would I say today to my miserable seventh-grade kid? My God, I am today just the type of mentor and friend that I sought out in 1978-1979. So what would I say to my 12-year old self? What kind of conversations would we have? What wisdom would I impart? Let’s imagine that friendship.
He’d come into my office. I’m the school’s Alexander Technique teacher. He’s awkward, scrawny, carelessly dressed, only washes his hair once a week.
Luke Senior: “Son, the quality of your life is the quality of your relationships. Reduce doing the things that separate you from the people you want in your life.”
Luke Junior: “But I feel driven to antagonize people. Driven. It’s in my DNA. It’s beyond my control. I can squash it for a few days but it always roars out. Look at you. You’re constantly antagonizing people, keeping them at arm’s length. You’ve never married. You have no kids. You don’t have so many friends or why else would you be hanging out with me?”
Sr: “You’re right. I’m right. We both need to get help. This is why there are psychologists. Religion and running are not enough. We can’t just distract ourselves from our problems.”
Jr: “If I can only be great, these problems will disappear. If I can win some races, get some fame and fortune, I’ll get more friends, I’ll get a girlfriend, I’ll be honored and people will want to be close to me.”
Sr. “There’s enough to what you say that I can’t dismiss it entirely, but let me ask you, how’s that working out for you? Do you have any talent as a runner?”
Jr. “It’s not working out. I don’t have any talent as a runner beyond an ability to discipline myself to do it.”
Sr. “That’s not going to be enough to get fame and as for fortune, there’s no fortune in being a famous runner. You’re a writer. It’s fine for you to devote all your effort right now into running. It’ll give you insight you can use in your writing, but at core, you’re a runner with no special gift, but when it comes to writing, that’s not just your gift, it’s your mission in life. Channel your frustration into your writing. Write every day. Fill up notebooks and don’t lose them and don’t let your parents read them.”
Jr. “I have no place I can hide them that my mom won’t find them and read them, so it kills all desire I have to pour myself out into a diary. So I pour myself out to you instead.
“I gotta know. Does it get better?”
Sr. “It gets better but there are also necessary losses every step of the way. There are things you have now you’ll never have again. With every year, you’ll gain stuff and lose stuff. In all likelihood, as you age you’ll gain more independence and you’ll be happier. But you gotta get help. You can’t be proud. You’re survival, your happiness, your life is at stake. You can’t just will your way out of the rut you’re in.
“Let’s go for a run.”
OK. We set off.
Jr. “My knees knock when I run.”
Sr. “That’s no good. You’re not exactly poetry in motion.”
Jr. “I know. I run as awkwardly as I talk to girls as I do everything, just ill at ease and constantly banging into myself and going in circles.”
Sr. “You’re heavily armored with unnecessary body tension and this is distorting your gait and making jogging more painful. You’re jolting your connective tissue with every step and straining yourself and putting yourself at risk of injury. You need Alexander Technique.”
Jr. “It’s too expensive. My parents can’t afford it.”
Sr. “There are easier ways to run. There are easier ways to talk to people. There are easier ways to relate to yourself. There are easier ways to go through life. When you tire of the results you’re getting now, you’ll be open to learning new things that will impart more grace into your efforts.”
Remember how miserable I felt running my five marathons at age 12? Remember the misery of the first one, the Hidden Valley marathon, which took me four hours and 43 minutes and I was almost beaten by that 70-plus year old woman, Mavis Lindgren? It was hot and far and the terrain was unfamiliar and I hardly knew anyone and I ended up walking much of the last half of the race.
It was easy to cheat in my training and to tell myself I ran ten miles when really it was only seven, but there was no way to cheat in an official race. The race was laid out. It was just over 13 miles there and just over 13 miles back and that was all there was to it. There was no way to cheat.
Remember the rain, fog and cold of my second marathon, the Avenue of the Giants? We had to drive down there Saturday night, sleep in a strange place, and then race in the morning and make the long drive home.
Remember the killer hills of the San Francisco marathon? One mile, it was about mile 22, was uphill all the way. Remember running across the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge? I’ve never felt so close to suicide. I just wanted to jump into the cold blue waters. Remember how much a kind word meant to me then? And now.
I was miserable because I was doing the thing that I hoped would make me great and it hurt so much and I hated it and I wasn’t particularly good at it, there was no way I was ever going to be great in running, and yet I kept slogging away for the attention. I felt trapped.
How many times in my life have I done this? I’ve sacrificed everything to be great at one thing only to find that I hate it and I’m not particularly good at it. It’s not what I expected. Where’s my runner’s high? Where are the endorphins?
So when did I have a better time running my marathons? I got my best time at the Sri Chinmoy race which I had to enter with another runner’s number because the marathon didn’t allow kids. I finished in four hours and 14 minutes and at the end, Sri Chimnoy was screaming the name of the female runner registered in my name, encouraging me on (he did that for every runner). I liked that they had water stations on every mile and the race was flat and there was lots of encouragement.
My favorite marathon was the Napa Valley marathon, near my home town. Many of my friends turned out to cheer. My classmate Lonnie sherman biked beside me the last eight miles of the race, offering kind words. I finished hard, with a long wild sprint to the line that got captured in a movie about the race.
Osgood-Schlatter’s disease ended my running at age 12. I didn’t pick it up again until 18 and then only periodically. I never particularly liked running but I liked it most when I did it around people I liked, and that was mainly at Pacific Union College (PUC), my home from 1977-1980 as well as the summers of 1982 and 1983. As I ran up and down the hills of PUC, people would call out to me. I liked that. It made me feel connected. Human connection is what life is all about and what I’ve missed most in my first 47 years. My memories of PUC are so filled with emotion. Compared to PUC, my years in Auburn (1980-1993) were dry and barren.
Just take the scenery of PUC compared to Auburn. PUC is much greener and moister. Auburn is hot and dry all summer and the grass dies and my soul withers outside the bosom of the Seventh-Day Adventist church (my family lived in Adventist colleges (Avondale and PUC) until I was 14).
I returned to running in my final year at Sierra Community College. In the fall of 1987, while taking 18-units and getting straight As, I ran a couple of times a week along a dusty trail. Then I’d finish off my work-out with 20 pull-ups and I looked forward to transferring to UCLA, where my life would truly begin. There I would shine and my talents would be recognized. I’d recapture the human connection I had at PUC but it wouldn’t be based on shared religion but on shared academic excellence.
* I have the day off so I’m lying down, listening to my favorite music, and imagining myself going for a long jog, just like I did as a kid, and then writing out what comes up.
There’s definitely a big physiological and emotional reaction going on inside of me when I visualize myself running, doing pull-ups, working out, charging down the streets of my youth. I’m going to put more effort into learning about and using visualization. I can sense its power. Now I have to get disciplined and use it every day towards good ends.
As I moved through my teens, my father foresaw that I had misery headed my way. When I wouldn’t heed his admonitions and insisted on my own way, he said, “Perhaps you’ll only learn through pain for I fear that life has some rude surprises for you.”
What did my father see for me that I didn’t?
My destructive self-absorption.
For most of my life, up until February of 1988, it seemed to me that every year was better than the previous one and that growing opportunity and freedom would bring me happiness. And then I moved through my 20s into my 30s and 40s and now I can look back and puzzle out what my dad was on about. What did he see that I didn’t?
* That pursuing what I wanted against reality would end in disaster. It turns out I’m the type of bloke who needs transcendent purpose in his life or he’ll go off the rails pursuing his lusts. I’m naturally all about me. That hasn’t served me. I’ve made a hash of things. I have to keep coming back to God after totally stepping in it and pledging anew to put Him first.
* That spending my health to get my wealth would result in me spending my wealth to try to get my health.
* I couldn’t talk to women like I talk to men.
* If I treated people carelessly, as means to my ends, they would resent that and hurt me. Nobody likes a know-it-all.
* My indifferent work ethic would not allow me to get ahead. I couldn’t only expend effort when it suited me, when the subject interested me, or I’d get stuck in minimum-wage jobs. Most advancement comes through connection.
* My father taught me that women are not lemons that you can squeeze and throw away. Women are not watermelons that you can drill a hole in to see if they’re sweet. Women are not mangoes that you can eat out and discard. Women are not apples that you can munch and trash. Women are not strawberries that you can cover with whipped cream and eat for dessert. Women are not a box of chocolates where you can take a bite out of each to see if you want more.
* Once a day, I like to lie back, close my eyes, listen to my favorite pop songs, and visualize myself running around Pacific Union College like I did in seventh grade. Back then when I jogged my 40 or so miles a week, I dreamed that one day I’d leave for the big city and my life would really begin. Now I live on my own in the big city and I dream about jogging around my insular Seventh-Day Adventist community of 1978.
I feel so many shades of sad. There’s the glaring exposure of running through sunshine when the whole world sees how alone you are. There’s the brooding darkness and fright of running through deep shade. There’s the bite of running through early morning cold when no one’s around and then there’s the struggle of pounding through the oppressive heat of the Napa Valley summer. And as I run, I think about whether I’m getting closer or further from the girl I like, Denise.
The meaning of every street I run down in my imagination depends on the amount of love in it for me. I’m an emotional vampire, seeking to suck the love out of life. People like me who are needy haven’t yet learned to care for ourselves so we can transcend ourselves in our care for others.
Even in seventh grade, I was aching for a love fix, though that diminished once I connected to the Muths and was made an honorary member of their family. My God, it is such a beautiful warm sunny Christmas day in Los Angeles, and I’m lying back imagining running through seventh grade. Only now I can’t blame anyone. In seventh grade, I could blame my parents, my church, my school, my teachers, my classmates. Now it’s all on me. I wish I could accomplish something magnificent.
My default state of mild depression hasn’t shifted much over my life.
* I was talking to my therapist about how it is easier to feel good about yourself when you get external validation but I’ve learned through therapy I have to build up internal validation, which is hard work. And then I just imitated some of my former therapists and our interactions around trying to build up my sense of self by doing things I enjoy that are good for me such as writing, taking classes, going to writer events, launching into Orthodox Judaism, reading books, and pursuing healthy activities instead of sewer activities. And we both started laughing for about 10 minutes.
The great thing about cults is that they are welcoming. They don’t care about your past as much as they care about what you can contribute in the future to their cause. I’m susceptible to cults because I want to feel part of a family but my stubborn independent streak always dooms me for these insular societies.
* As I go through life, I see people with all sorts of problems that could be solved if they would only listen to me, and yet people don’t listen to me. They look at me and they see little that they want to emulate and so they disregard my good advice.
It’s frustrating. I want to be a leader, I want to be a guru, I want to be a preacher like my dad, and yet I’m terribly unhappy with my life and none of the things that I have embraced with great enthusiasm and expounded on at great length in my blogs, have moved me into the winner’s circle, and so it is probably best that you continue to disregard me.
* Almost all of my buddies are like me in the following ways — depressed, not working in their chosen career, trying to get their lives in gear, in therapy, trying things that don’t seem to shift their lives, single, aging, aching, struggling with their weight and with their place in community. So when we hang out, we may enjoy each other, but we hardly get inspired. I get inspired when I hang out with my married friends who have kids and rewarding work and esteemed positions in the community.
* So I was whining about my sadness to my therapist tonight (this feeling was brought on by an amazing meal I had on Rosh Hashanah and how happy I am with my friend and that made me sad when I thought about the 95% of my life spent without such connection), and she told me to focus instead on the positive actions I could take to improve my life. And I felt, can’t we wallow just a little longer in my desolation? I only enjoy about 1% of the people I meet. The rest? I may try to develop a conversation but I feel myself forcing and working at it and I get tired and I feel sick and I just want to be alone. I dig mismatchers, my personality type, people who look for what doesn’t match. Mismatchers tend to have few friends. Duh.
* In 1998, I met a woman at synagogue. We started talking. I found her attractive, smart and accomplished. She had a PhD. She’d dated this rabbi I admired.
I started going out with this woman. After a few dates, I brought her over to my apartment. It was around September.
I showed her my website on Dennis Prager. As she read it, she started crying. “This is how you write about someone you love?” she said.
I felt strange. I thought my writing was funny.
We lay down. The neighbors were yelling. “You’ve got to get out of here,” said the woman. “You’ve got to move.”
A few days later, we hung out at the pool. It was the first time I saw her legs. They were flabby. There were no muscles. They were a big turn-off to me.
I decided to break up.
Despite my decision, or perhaps because of it, I started questioning her intensely about her life.
She’d set a rule for me, no photographing naked women for my website lukeford.com. No topless shots. No nudity.
So after I decided to break up with her, I went on a set and shot some topless photos and posted them on my website.
She called me that evening. “I guess you’ve made your decision,” she said. I agreed.
She was confused. Why had I questioned her so intensely if I was breaking up with her?
She went on to a long relationship with a friend. He later told me it was the relationship from hell.
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For the past two years, I’ve been looking out my window through a dirty screen. I have a lovely view but it is all smudged by the dirt in my screen.
For the past few weeks, I’ve thought I should ask the cleaning woman how to clean my screen. I couldn’t figure out how to do it without creating a mess in my room. Then yesterday, I looked at the screen and saw some itty bitty handles and remembered that screens are flexible and I decided that this morning, I’d take the screen out and wash it.
So today, I gingerly maneuvered the screen out of the window, took it to the bath and ran the shower and cleaned the screen and then after a struggle of five minutes, popped it back in my window and my view has taken on a whole new degree of clarity. It’s like the view has gone HD.
Through therapy and other forms of knowledge, I’ve gained clarity on life. Knowledge is good. Cant and lies are bad.
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I read three of this guy’s books, including The Making of a Jew and The Making of a Businessman, and they were absolutely worthless. They added nothing. There was no point to publishing them. There were no original insights. There were no great stories. They were just a waste.
So I’m reading all these tributes to Edgar Bronfman Sr. and I’m wondering, where’s the beef? What am I missing? What I do know about the man is that he put his name on a bunch of books he undoubtedly did not write and that did nothing for humanity. It must have given him great ego satisfaction but his books made zero contribution. It’s hard to publish many books and make no contribution but Edgar Bronfman Sr. did that.
This guy had five marriages and yet felt entitled to publish all these books on Judaism and the Jews that were nothing but tired liberal cliches.
My view on obituaries is that they are a wonderful opportunity to tell the truth. I don’t know much about Edgar Bronfman Sr., but what I do know is almost entirely from his own books, and hence my memory of him is so sharply negative.
Edgar Bronfman reminds me of another famous Jew who wrote three useless books prior to moving to Israel — Rabbi Daniel Gordis. Then he hit his stride and did great work.
I wrote about Edgar Bronfman Sr June 19, 2009:
I read his first two. Big mistake. They were dull.
Why does anyone publish this man? He has nothing to say.
Publishers Weekly says: Bronfman, a philanthropist, former World Jewish Congress president and former Seagram CEO, bemoans the dry, joyless Judaism of his youth, which he in turn transmitted to his own children. The Holocaust and fear of anti-Semitism are no longer enough to drive Jewish identity and participation, he argues, along with writer Zasloff; only a more open, more celebratory and hopeful communal life will draw and retain young Jews. This community must be pluralistic, unreservedly welcoming intermarried Jews and their spouses, gay Jews and others outside the traditional Jewish mold. (Among the scores of mostly young leaders the authors quote is the first Asian-American rabbi.). Few of these ideas are new, and, occasionally, Bronfman oversimplifies, as when he reduces the complex issue of intermarriage to the need for an open tent, mirroring the hospitality of the biblical Abraham and Sarah. Still, Bronfman has spoken to and learned from a highly diverse group of American Jewish religious and cultural leaders outside the mainstream to fashion a fairly coherent view of what a more vibrant Jewish future might looks like.
Jack Wertheimer wrote in the May 2003 Commentary magazine: “The past president of the World Jewish Congress, Edgar Bronfman, has urged any congregation dissatisfied with its rabbi’s teachings to rise up and “fire the rabbi and get one who will do its bidding.”
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You are what your record says you are and who you are in love and marriage is who you really are because that’s where you are most vulnerable. Love and marriage exposes your weaknesses.
“If you are miserably married, that’s about you,” said therapist Mark E. Smith Dec. 22, 2013. “It’s about who you picked and why you picked them. It’s just your turn to pay the marital piper. You are re-enacting old wounds from your family of origin. So do not make it all about my spouse had an affair, my spouse is an alcoholic, my spouse works too much, my wife won’t clean the house. Your life is about you and this record of marital dysfunction, it’s telling you that you need to address some things within yourself. Don’t be Jerry Jones. Don’t blame everyone else and miss the real problem. The real problem in your life is you and the real problem with the Dallas Cowboys is [the owner] Jerry Jones. If you have burned through three marriages, that is truly all about you. You need to get to work on yourself immediately and you need to completely suspend yourself from all dating and you need to kick yourself off Match.com because you’re dangerous… Your dysfunction is what gives you your record.
“So don’t say it’s bad luck and don’t say you haven’t found the right person. There is no right person out there for you to find that’s going to heal your family of origin stuff without you doing the work. You have got to do the work and the best way to do that is to stay in the marriage you’re in and roll up your sleaves and get to work. If you have an addiction that’s ravaged your life, it’s because there’s a ravenous neediness and pain at the core of your soul and you’re seeking to medicate it. You have a problem. Don’t minimize it.”
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[Dennis] Prager interviewed Michelle Malkin a number of years ago on his radio show about her book, Invasion. At one point, Malkin became so distressed by what she was hearing from him, that she stopped and asked, “Mr. Prager, do you even believe we should have a southern border?”
…Prager seldom, if ever, has anything but gushing praise for immigrants of the Mexican variety. He says he favors a border fence, but… he is one of these people who also supports a huge increase in legal immigration to go along with any reductions a fence might provide in illegal immigration.
On Nov. 12, 2013, Dennis Prager said: “Why is the [American] latino population so left of center? Because they left countries whose culture is big government. We have not taught them. We haven’t taught anglos, or the people who have been here the longest — blacks. We haven’t taught anybody what American values are, so why would we expect a latino to be in favor of a small government United States?
“They have not asked the question — why is America prosperous and Mexico not? And El Salvador not? Guatemala not? Nicaragua not? Colombia not? Why?”
On Nov. 14, 2013, Dennis said: “Importing people, large numbers of whom don’t share your values, is not a good answer for these [European] countries.”
If big government is the problem, how come big government societies like the Scandinavian countries such as Sweden and Norway are so prosperous? And when Scandinavians move to the United States, how come they prosper while fourth–generation Mexican-Americans do not? How come 65% of American Jewish adults over 25 graduate from college and 50% of Asians, 30% of non-Hispanic whites, 18% of blacks and only six percent of fourth-generation Mexican-Americans (with similar statistics for all good things in life like wealth, health, credit worthiness, which fall in accord with IQ scores)? Perhaps big government has less to do with it than human capital.
Dennis spends more time on his radio show talking about adultery than about immigration even though the social capital of a country will have more effect on its welfare than 99% of political legislation. You won’t find many prosperous countries, for instance, where the average IQ is under 90.
On Dec. 2, 2013, Dennis said: “I would like more black African immigration to the United States to bring those family values here.”
What family values? Africa is a disaster with sky-high rates of HIV and violent crime. Africa has 18% of the world’s land, 13% of the world’s population and 1% of the world’s GNP. Who wants to import that low level of accomplishment?
Dennis Prager is all about racial integration. He wrote a July 17, 2002 column entitled, “Why My Son’s Best Friend Is Black.”
…[B]lack Americans have been choosing segregation. You can see it at lunch tables in many schools, in the separate black graduation ceremonies and dorms at colleges, in the proliferating number of race-based professional organizations, and in choosing to live in racially segregated neighborhoods. …I still believe in the racial ideal I was raised with — integration.
…Second, it is most relevant that my son is a religious Jew and that his friend is a religious Christian.
…Steven is a wonderful boy who happens to be black. My son is a wonderful boy who happens to be white. Race is a non-issue to them, as it always should be among good people. For both boys, their religious identity is more important than their racial identity. Because Steven and my son are both religious, they have, often unwittingly to be sure, many values in common. When we explain to Aaron that Steven cannot play on Sunday mornings because he is at church, Aaron entirely understands; he was at synagogue the day before and couldn’t play with Steven at that time. Both boys know the importance of watching their language, making blessings before eating, and much more. Steven and his little brother usually join my family at our Friday night Sabbath dinner, and almost always wear a yarmulke at the table. In fact, Steven expresses more interest in the religious rituals than the average secular Jewish guest — once again illustrating that values, especially transcendent ones, are far more humanly unifying than race or ethnicity. Any member of my family is more likely to bond with an African-American Christian than with an irreligious Jew.
It is difficult to overstate my pleasure at seeing these two boys becoming close friends. All credit must go to Steven’s mother. She has chosen to live among non-blacks and to raise a son with Christian, human and American identities that are at least as strong as his African-American identity (which, for the record, she hardly ignores — Steven speaks fluent French in order to keep alive the language of his Haitian grandparents).
At our Sabbath table I see the real American dream unfold, and only wish more Americans of all colors and ethnicities would share this dream. Why is my son’s best friend black? Because they share values that transcend race, and because they live near each other.
But what will happen as these children grow up? As About.com pointed out: “The older children get, the more likely they are not to socialize closely with peers of a different race.” Aaron is now in his 20s. I suspect his closest friends are not black.
According to Dennis, race should be a non-issue to all good people. Good thing that doctors don’t follow his approach as different medicines often work differently for different races. As Dr. Sally Satel wrote in the New York Times in 2002 (with assistance from Steve Sailer): “In practicing medicine, I am not colorblind. I always take note of my patient’s race. So do many of my colleagues. We do it because certain diseases and treatment responses cluster by ethnicity. Recognizing these patterns can help us diagnose disease more efficiently and prescribe medications more effectively. When it comes to practicing medicine, stereotyping often works.”
Some thinkers such as Sally Satel and Steve Sailer see the world more clearly than does Dennis because they take race seriously. As Sailer wrote in 2007: “We realize that race is an inextricable part of human nature. Why? Because ‘race’ is the inevitable outgrowth of ‘family.’ A racial group is an extremely extended family that is inbred to some degree. When you start from this simple but profound definition, you can begin to answer all those questions that baffle and irritate…about why humans continue to act as if blood relations were important to them. (Quick answer: because they are.)”
Why bother to talk about the realities of race when it will only hurt your career? Sailer answered: “I believe truth is more beneficial to humanity than lies, obfuscation, ignorance, wishful thinking – and even hipness.”
Intelligence
Like all of the Western world’s public intellectuals who are more interested in making money, accumulating prestige, and developing a happy life than in pursuing truth (see Jason Richwine’s 2013 dismissal from the Heritage Foundation for an example of what obvious truths one should not say publicly if you want to get ahead), Dennis Prager says he cares little about IQ. By being deliberately obtuse, he gets to have a nice life, make millions of dollars, enjoy vast popularity and go on television regularly. On the other hand, he sacrifices truth for cant.
Steve Sailer wrote: “Jewish intellectuals have a tendency that on any topic related to Jews, they tend to think baroquely many steps down the line. Thus, the full panoply of the subjects that have been assumed to be bad-for-the-Jews and therefore ruled out of discussion in polite society is breathtakingly broad — for example, IQ has been driven out of the media in large part because it is feared that mentioning that Jews have higher average IQs would lead, many steps down the line, to pogroms.”
Experts in IQ such as Richwine note: “IQ scores can be thought of as individual probabilities that aggregate into certainties in large groups.” In the words of NYU’s Steven Goldberg, IQ is to achievement in people what weight is to achievement in offensive tackles in the NFL.
“IQ is a raw material to which you add all sorts of other things [such as ethics and industriousness] which we don’t know how to measure well,” said Charles Murray.
“Half of the children are below average, which by the way, I have gotten hissed for saying on college campuses… The limits on the ability to learn are quite strict… There are sharp constraints on what anybody who is average to below can learn.”
Dennis refuses to read the 1994 book by Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein, The Bell Curve. It could lead him to inadvertently say something that hurts his career. Best not to know.
Dennis has math skills below that of the average crack dealer. In that respect, he’s the opposite of Charles Murray, who has an MIT PhD in quantitative analysis.
In a 2009 interview at the International Society for Intelligence Research, Dr. Murray, who’s more interested in truth than in his social status, said: “Intelligence is absolutely essential in economics and political science except it is always called ‘educational attainment.’ It is the construct that dare not speak its name because people will not confront that educational attainment is statistically highly correlated with cognitive ability and it just might be the cognitive ability that is responsible for social outcomes.”
“People who deal with public policy on the right are every bit as scared of IQ as people on the left. I keep thinking this is bound to end real soon, within the next decade, as neuro-scientists and geneticists unravel this story.”
“The ability of social scientists to not look at things they don’t want to look at is stunning.”
“You do not have to make a choice between writing about these topics and sacrificing your devotion to the truth. You can write about almost anything as long you write it obscurely enough. The great example of that was David C. Rowe. He wrote a piece for one of the major psychological magazines about the architecture of the black-white difference and it was an incredibly powerful argument that what you were looking at was not the result of environmental differences. It was an elegant piece of work but it was also very difficult. David did not go out of his way to make it obvious what he was saying and it got no flack.”
“If you decide you are going to write for a general audience and you are on some of these taboo topics, you better be the right personality type. Arthur Jensen has such great equanimity that it never touched him. Phil Rushton just has a great time with the whole thing and thoroughly enjoys the fight. I was clinically depressed for about six months after The Bell Curve came out. I hated it. It was no fun.”
“I’ve got a book in the works, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. I have now figured out a way to avoid being called a racist. I’m just going to talk about non-Hispanic whites… It just makes the whole interpretative process easier.”
“If you want to compare the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa with Singapore, Japan and China, I think the differences in IQ explain a significant part of that difference. If you want to compare Italy and Germany and Sweden, I don’t think that’s going to buy you a lot. IQ is a fairly blunt instrument.”
If IQ shapes how people turn out more than preaching does, than Dennis Prager is less important, but if what America most needs is moral instruction, then Prager is the man.
Dennis said on his radio show (circa 1995) that anyone who believes that blacks have on average a lower intelligence is a racist. He was embarrassed to have had a guest on his show (Charles Murray? circa 1994) who said that different races have different statistical IQ (accepted by virtually all psychometricians).
On Oct. 23, 2013, Dennis said to his guest, John Alford, associate professor of political science at Rice University, is one of three authors of this new book, Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences: “Isn’t that a risky thing that you undertook to argue that there biological bases for political positions?”
Because Dennis refuses to learn about IQ, much of reality befuddles him. For instance, he doesn’t know why many employers require a college degree as a substitute for banned IQ testing of potential workers.
On Oct. 31, 2013, a caller asked: “Why I agree with everything you said about the educational system in the United States and how you could much more wisely spend $50,000 a year on education, the bottom line still in this country is that you cannot get a substantial job in this country without a degree. How do you get around that?”
Dennis: “There is an answer — social pressure on companies to drop that awful that awful policy that you have to have a college degree when it is irrelevant to 99% of the jobs that people do with a college degree. I would like to know why you need a college degree for almost any job in this country?”
As James Taranto doesn’t stick his head in the sand on this issue, he can describe in the Wall Street Journal “the historic origins of the higher-ed industry’s credential cartel. As we’ve explained before, it goes back to Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that companies could not administer IQ tests because they had a racially “disparate impact”–that is, it discriminates against blacks because they score more poorly on average than whites do.
“The disparate-impact test in Griggs, written into law in the Civil Rights Act of 1991, applies only to employers. Educational institutions are free to administer IQ tests, which is essentially what the SAT and other entrance exams are. To assure that their degrees pass muster as a condition of employment, colleges and universities go to extreme lengths to ensure a “diverse” student body, including discriminating in favor of blacks (and selected other minorities) in admissions.”
Prager’s reaction to IQ and race mirrors that of Oxford economist Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion and Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places, who had the following interaction on the Freakanomics blog:
Q. What do you think of Richard Lynn’s findings about race differences in intelligence and their relatedness to Africa’s continuing state of underdevelopment? In his work, Mr. Lynn compiled the results of numerous studies which appear to show fairly unambiguously that average I.Q.’s in sub-Saharan Africa are below 70. Studies furthermore show that this disadvantage is almost certainly inherited genetically. — Denis Bider
A. I don’t know this stuff and don’t want to. But I am just about prepared to believe that the average Chinese person is smarter than the average Englishman. Despite this, the average Englishman is more than 10 times richer than the average Chinese person — so intelligence is manifestly not closely related to the performance of an economy.
As journalist Steve Sailer commented: “In other words, ‘Please don’t Watson me! I’ll be however stupid I have to be in order to keep my nice job at Oxford.'”
On Dec. 2, 2013, Dennis said: “We have in the United States a certain percentage of conscienceless people. When I think about this knockout game and the laughter that accompanies it, we have a certain percentage of young people, disproportionately among blacks, that are conscienceless. At some point are we going to drop this notion that racism causes this and just confront this terrible fact?”
IQ, a construct that psychologists use to estimate general intelligence, has been separately linked to elements of social capital, such as sophisticated ethical thinking, altruism, planning for the future, political awareness, adherence to informal community standards of behavior, and cooperation for the greater good.
The social attitudes of citizens are the building blocks of social capital, and IQ plays a role in shaping many of them. For example, psychologists have developed measures of moral reasoning that overlap substantially with IQ. When confronted with a moral dilemma, a person operating at the lowest level of moral reasoning would consider only his own self-interest. As moral reasoning becomes more sophisticated, people tend to give more consideration to community welfare, and to apply abstract principles to resolve moral dilemmas. Because of the cognitive demands of such reasoning, smarter people are much more likely to transcend simple self-interest in their ethical thinking. People who do so are likely to be better neighbors and better citizens.
Intelligent people are also likely to be more altruistic, which could help form tighter bonds within communities…
It makes intuitive sense that smarter people should be able to internalize future rewards more easily. They are probably more future-oriented because they can better manipulate their surroundings, whereas incompetent people exert less control on their future, making it murky and unknown. Whatever the cause, the impulsivity of low-IQ people has serious implications for social capital. People in less intelligent populations will be less willing to set up networks for potential long-term payoffs, make personal investments in the community, and follow basic norms of behavior with the expectation of future reciprocity.
Because Prager refuses to learn about the implications of IQ, he’s mystified by much of reality. It would be easy to become clear about the world around him, but that would be dangerous to his career.
On Dec. 6, 2013, Dennis said: “In the car crash of the Fast & Furious star [Paul Walker], there were kids who went by and stole from the crash afterward and I always think this, what happens to the conscience in such persons? You’re a living vulture? There’s a car crash and two dead people and you go and steal from it? I admit this is silly, but it is always my initial reaction that I want to interview them.”
An interview with such criminals would likely show they have an IQ in the retarded category and don’t think about consequences.
“I think America is deterioriating… When there are bunches of kids walking around playing the knockout game…and then videoing it and putting it on the Youtube… The number of children born from mothers who are not married.”
Where are these problems at their worst in America? In black and latino life. As America allows in more immigrants with low IQs, the country gets more problems as it heads towards Idiocracy.
The American Psychological Association (APA) tried to set the record straight in 1996 with a report written by a committee of experts. Among the specific conclusions drawn by the APA were that IQ tests reliably measure a real human trait, that ethnic differences in average IQ exist, that good tests of IQ are not culturally biased against minority groups, and that IQ is a product of both genetic inheritance and early childhood environment. Another report signed by 52 experts, entitled “Mainstream Science on Intelligence,” stated similar facts and was printed in the Wall Street Journal.
So when Larry Summers, then the president of Harvard University, speculated in 2005 that women might be naturally less gifted in math and science, the intense backlash contributed to his ouster.
Two years later, when famed scientist James Watson noted the low average IQ scores of sub-Saharan Africans, he was forced to resign from his lab, taking his Nobel Prize with him.
When a Harvard law student was discovered in 2010 to have suggested in a private email that the black-white IQ gap might have a genetic component, the dean publicly condemned her amid a campus-wide outcry. Only profuse apologies seem to have saved her career.
In none of these cases did an appeal to science tamp down the controversy or help to prevent future ones. My own time in the media crosshairs would be no different.
So what did I write that created such a fuss? In brief, my dissertation shows that recent immigrants score lower than U.S.-born whites on a variety of cognitive tests. Using statistical analysis, it suggests that the test-score differential is due primarily to a real cognitive deficit rather than to culture or language bias. It analyzes how that deficit could affect socioeconomic assimilation, and concludes by exploring how IQ selection might be incorporated, as one factor among many, into immigration policy.
Because a large number of recent immigrants are from Latin America, I reviewed the literature showing that Hispanic IQ scores fall between white and black scores in the United States. This fact isn’t controversial among experts, but citing it seems to have fueled much of the media backlash.
Dennis Prager is squarely among those denouncing the above experts in IQ while freely admitting he knows nothing about IQ. He showed his obliviousness in this June 7, 2011 column:
While dining out last week, I periodically looked up at one of the television monitors to see the score of the first game of the NBA finals. As there was no sound on to interrupt diners’ conversations, the monitor was in caption mode: One could read rather than hear the words spoken. At the conclusion of the game, an announcer was interviewing a member of the victorious Miami Heat players. I saw from the captions the player saying the words “they isn’t.”
Closed captions display the words spoken. They don’t correct for poor grammar.
All I could think was: How can a grown man in America today say “they isn’t” rather than “they aren’t”?
First, how is it possible for anyone to graduate an American elementary school, not to mention a high school or, most incredibly, attend college, and leave with an inability to conjugate the verb “to be”?
Second, has anyone — a parent or another relative, a teacher, a friend, a coach — in that player’s life ever corrected his grammar?
I assume that the answer to the second question is “No.”
And I assume that the answers to both questions are related: The left, which dominates our culture and educational institutions, has too often lowered standards for black Americans. Even worse, it has declared that if you are black, “they isn’t” is not only not to be corrected, but many in academia have declared it an acceptable form of English, i.e., Ebonics, or Black English.
It doesn’t end. I saw “they isn’t” the same week the Democrats and others on the left virtually unanimously condemned all Republican attempts in state legislatures to pass legislation requiring voters to show a photo ID. The Democrats labeled it a means of “disenfranchising” blacks. Many Democrats compared it to Jim Crow laws.
“Jim Crow, move over — the Wisconsin Republicans have taken your place,” charged Wisconsin Democratic State Sen. Bob Jauch, referring to his state’s new voter ID law.
It is hard to imagine a more demeaning statement about black America than labeling demands that all voters show a photo ID anti-black.
Reality reveals, however, that neither leftism nor America’s education system is failing blacks (or whites or Asians or Latinos), because, according to the 2013 PISA test results (with life results to match), “Asian Americans outscored all large Asian countries (with the exception of three rich cities); white Americans outperformed most, but not all, traditionally white countries; and Latino Americans did better than all Latin American countries. African Americans almost certainly scored higher than any black majority country would have performed.”
People with low IQs of any race are going to have more difficulty with grammar and getting photo identification and other tasks of life, whatever the education and political system.
Fifty two of the leading thinkers on intelligence published this essay in the Wall Street Journal Dec. 13, 1994 in support of The Bell Curve:
Intelligence tests are not culturally biased against American blacks or other native-born, English-speaking peoples in the U.S.. Rather, IQ scores predict equally accurately for all such Americans, regardless of race and social class. Individuals who do not understand English well can be given either a nonverbal test or one in their native language…
The bell curves for some groups (Jews and East Asians) are centered somewhat higher than for whites in general. Other groups (blacks and Hispanics) are centered somewhat lower than non-Hispanic whites…
The bell curve for whites is centered roughly around IQ 100; the bell curve for American blacks roughly around 85; and those for different subgroups of Hispanics roughly midway between those for whites and blacks…
IQ is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic, and social outcomes. Its relation to the welfare and performance of individuals is very strong in some arenas in life (education, military training), moderate but robust in others (social competence), and modest but consistent in others (law-abidingness). Whatever IQ tests measure, it is of great practical and social importance.
A high IQ is an advantage in life because virtually all activities require some reareasoning and decision-making. Conversely, a low IQ is often a disadvantage, especially in disorganized environments. Of course, a high IQ no more guarantees success than a low IQ guarantees failure in life. There are many exceptions, but the odds for success in our society greatly favor individuals with higher IQs.
The practical advantages of having a higher IQ increase as life settings become more complex (novel, ambiguous, changing, unpredictable, or multifaceted). For example, a high IQ is generally necessary to perform well in highly complex or fluid jobs (the professions, management); it is a considerable advantage in moderately complex jobs (crafts, clerical and police work); but it provides less advantage in settings that require only routine decision making or simple problem solving (unskilled work).
There is no persuasive evidence that the IQ bell curves for different racial-ethnic groups are converging.
In the Jul-Sept 1990 edition of Ultimate Issues, in the aftermath of Iraq’s conquest of Kuwait, Dennis Prager wrote an essay entitled, “And now…the Arab Threat.”
The parallels between Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler are as true as they are often made…
Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait is the test of the post Cold War era just as Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia and Hitler’s of Czechoslovakia were the tests of the pre-World War II era…
Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, like the invasions of the 1930s, will determine our future.
Given that the average Iraqi IQ is 87 and the average German IQ is 102 (and was higher before WWII when it had millions of Jews, also Germany had the second biggest economy in the world prior to WWII while Iraq had only the 40th largest economy when it annexed Kuwait), it is impossible for Iraq and its ilk to pose a threat to the world in anything like the way Germany did, but Dennis Prager, being deliberately obtuse, does not believe that IQ measures anything important and so he refuses to see reality.
Iraqis and Iranians (only in the last 30 years have a majority of their populations become literate) have lower average IQs than Mexicans and who worries about Mexico posing an existential threat to anyone? The Soviet Union developed a nuclear weapon just four years after America, while Iran started its nuclear program in the 1950s and has yet to produce a bomb. Perhaps it has something to do with Russia’s average IQ being 13 points higher than Iran’s? As Steve Sailer points out, “Muslims, for all their obnoxiousness, are simply too incompetent to be an existential threat to America.” Yet, on Dec. 18, 2013, Deliberately Obtuse Dennis said, “You can’t write on a more important subject in international affairs today than Iran.” Huh? Iran in 2014 has the world’s 32nd largest GNP and the 31st biggest military budget and it has no nuclear weapons. What about China? It only has an average IQ of 100, the world’s biggest population, second biggest economy and second biggest military.
Physicist Gregory Cochran does believe IQ measures something important, which enables him, in some ways, to see the world more clearly than Dennis does. In a Sept. 9, 2007 interview, Dr. Cochran, who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, said:
I think that most people writing about international politics don’t have much useable history. They keep making the same two analogies (everything is either Munich or Vietnam)…
I also think that they have zero quantitative knowledge. Comparisons of Saddam’s Iraq and Hitler’s Germany used to bug me, since Germany had the second largest economy in the world and was a real contender, while Iraq had the fortieth largest GNP and didn’t have a pot to piss in.
…In the same way, people who equate the dangers of jihadism with that of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union really don’t know big from small, don’t know anything about the roots of national power.
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
