The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 33 - The Cancer In The Bloodstream Of American Culture

Episode Date: May 18, 2018

People think that our society is plagued by "hatred" and "division." They're wrong. Hatred isn't our problem. Our problem is indifference, which is worse than hatred and the true opposite of love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

People will often ask me why I'm so blunt, why I'm so direct in my approach. And oftentimes they'll phrase it in a way that's a little bit less flattering than that, but that's basically the question. You'll attract more flies with honey, Matt. So people always tell me. And yeah, I don't use a lot of honey. I admit that. But first of all, I'm not interested in attracting flies.

Why would I want to attract flies? I've never understood that expression. For the sake of the expression, why would you use the one thing that nobody wants to attract? But second, I don't think the expression holds anyway because it appears to me one of the great problems in American society and really kind of the film, the protective coating, the shell that covers everything in our culture is indifference, apathy, intellectual and moral laziness. is the issue. So if you want to get through to people, if you want to reach them, if you really want to engage them, you got to break through that sometimes. And that means necessarily being a little bit more blunt. And if in the process, they end up feeling attacked and judged and if you hurt their feelings a little bit, well, that's okay. In fact, it could even be good. You got to

make them feel something first. Make them care. Even if that's how they can just, you got to get them there first, where they actually care and they're angry. So, If people get angry, I mean, I can take that. That's fine. But at least they feel something. At least for a moment, they actually care because I think most people don't care about like anything. We're always told that the real problem, the biggest problem for America today is that there's so much division and there's so much partisanship and there's bigotry and people are so firm in their beliefs and they refuse to compromise or to see. from the other perspective. Hate. They're so filled with hate, right?

So we have to fight hate. We have to fight hate speech and hate crimes and hate in every other form. There's just so much hate everywhere, which I think is so clearly not the case. Not the case at all. When I look around America, I don't see people who are so firm and resolute

and dedicated to their beliefs and so just on fire and passionate about life and about what they're believe and you know to a to a dangerous extent where now it's even it's even hateful in fact i'm even told people even worry that we're headed towards a civil war we're going to break out in war again like we did in 1861 i think we flatter ourselves when we start talking like that there's not i hate to tell you this but there's not going to be any civil war it's not going to happen we are far too lazy for that we don't care nearly enough about things for a civil

War. Now, I know the conditions are different in 2018 than they were in 1861, but just consider what these men during the real Civil War, the first Civil War, the only Civil War, the only Civil War, so far, consider what they went through, what they endured, okay? I mean, we're talking about, especially in the South, we're talking about these barely even meant a lot of them, 16, 17, 18, 18 years old in many cases. They didn't have shoes. They didn't have food. You know, they were walking like through the Shenandoah Mountains without shoes on, marching 20 to 25 miles a day, eating salt pork and black coffee that tastes like motor oil made from acorns. Okay. They were charging headlong into cannon fire.

They would stand just yards apart and blow each other to pieces with their rifles. it's not like they really had anesthetic, so if a limb had to be amputated, well, you're going to take a swig of whiskey, and it was going to be cut off. So that's the kind of conviction that these men had in the Civil War. They really believed in something. They really believed in a cause. You could disagree with the cause. We could debate what the cause actually was. You know, that's not the point. The point is they believed in something they believed in a cause on both sides, and they were willing to fight for it. we don't have that kind of conviction, most of us.

We don't have anywhere near that kind of conviction. I'll tell you why a civil war wouldn't happen, because a civil war would almost certainly mean that we're all going to lose, that there's not going to be cable or internet for a while. There's probably not going to be Netflix. There's not going to be time to watch it. The moment we started losing our luxuries,

we live in this country with such insane, indulgent luxury. at the moment we started to lose those things, we would say, oh, never mind, never mind, forget it. Like our electricity goes off and we're out with, we're without air conditioning for two days. That would be enough. All right, forget the whole thing, guys. Let's forget this Civil War thing. What do you think? I mean, I thought we were fighting a Civil War.

I didn't know I'd have to sacrifice my video game time. I mean, nobody told me that was part of the bargain. Now, I don't say this with disappointment, by the way. I don't mean to come across like I'm disappointed like I want a Civil War. Of course, I don't. 600,000 people died in the Civil War. It's a horrible, horrific thing. I'm just trying to make the point that hatred is not the thing destroying our society.

Hatred could destroy society. It's an awful thing. It's destroyed many societies in the past. Division, partisanship, all those things can be, can literally split apart countries as we witnessed ourselves. But our case is different. The cancer in our bloodstream, I really believe, is indifference. It is apathy.

The problem is we've misdiagnosed all the symptoms. So, for instance, we see these occasional bursts of violence and chaos in the streets on the part of BLM or Antifa or that one time when it was white nationalists. And we see that and we say, okay, well, that's bigotry, it's hatred. See, we're on the verge of civil war. No, you know what that really was? And is, it's nihilism. There's people, they're just looking for an excuse to throw rocks and to burn cop cars and they found a convenient excuse. But that's really, it's just a destructive impulse.

remember famously the mayor of Baltimore during the riots in Baltimore, she said, well, we have to give them space to destroy, right? It's a great leadership on her part. But that's really what they wanted. It was really they just wanted a space to destroy. Why they were destroying things, you know, didn't really matter. In fact, if you had asked, if you had pulled any one of them out and interviewed them and some people did do this, well, what are you so upset about? But in many cases, they couldn't even tell you what they're upset about. Just not because they're not upset. They just were looking for a reason to do this, and so they did. That was nihilism. The same can be said for many of the recent mass shootings. I make this point every time there's a mass shooting,

because I think it's so important to realize that in most cases, when you hear about these monsters who go in and slaughter innocent people, in most cases, they are not really bigoted. The Charleston church shooting is a different case. Okay, that clearly was bigotry. But most of the time, I think it's not bigotry. It's not even really hatred, even if the person is shooting up a school and he has some grudge against the people in the school. But I think that's not really what's driving it.

And because what do you hear from the survivors of these shootings, the ones who witness this happen and they see the guy in the act? What do they always say? you almost never hear about a guy walking into a building, screaming obscenities, and just there's, you know, his face is red and he's on fire with rage, and he's spraying bullets of these people that he hates. That's kind of the scene you would expect to see, right? But no, what you always hear is that they walk into a building and they have a blank, expression on their face.

And they are practically yawning while they go around killing innocent people. They do it casually. And if you could zoom in and just see their face and see nothing and see in here, nothing else, you would almost think, well, that's the face of a man waiting in line at the post office or at the DMV, you know, that's what you would think because it's just, or that's just the face of a guy sitting in traffic. It's this bored, despondent, empty face. So again, that goes to this emptiness and this indifference.

Every day on the news, you see another example of this kind of thing. Some of the most extreme examples stand out. We remember them. You may remember the case a couple of years ago of the people who kidnapped the disabled man and tortured him and broadcast it live on Facebook. I don't know if you remember that case. But right after it happened, there were people saying, oh, this is a hate crime, it's hateful.

No, because they were laughing while they did it. They didn't hate this guy. It wasn't hate. They didn't have anything against him personally. They were just utterly indifferent to his life. And so they thought they would amuse themselves by torturing him. That's all. They didn't hate him.

what they felt towards him was something even lower than hatred. Another case of teenagers who laughed and made fun of a guy while he drowned in a reservoir. There was a very troubled man who went out and drowned, I guess he was trying to drown himself in a lake or a reservoir. And there were teenagers that happened to be standing on the shore and on the bank. And they saw it happen. They made no attempt to call 911. They made no attempt to save him. And instead, they just laughed and they made fun.

Again, they didn't hate the guy. They didn't know him. As the Krispy Chicken sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper? If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect. Like, I know I'm a handful.

I'm bold. I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me, and baby, I'm a whole meal. And with seven rewards, I'm just $4. Quiet. No, crispy, saucy, and $4? Very. Only at 7-Eleven. Valley through 62326 participating stores only while supplies lastly app for full terms.

They were just completely indifferent to his life. Think again of all the cases of, unfortunately, there are so many cases of people committing suicide and live streaming it. And what do you hear about? Every time one of these things happen, you'll always hear about the people that watch the live stream and they cheer and they encourage the person to kill themselves. Do they hate that person? No, they don't hate the person. They don't know them. They have nothing against them.

They just feel nothing towards them. Less extreme, but still, another example, is most of the vitriol and the vile, putrid filth that you see people spewing at each other online. You look at the comments under a YouTube video or on Twitter or whatever, and people say the most vile, awful things to each other and about other people,

but there's not really hatred in it. It's just complete emptiness. Look, I get a lot of the, I mean, take it from me. I get so much of this myself. And I would even, I'll even, you know, for lack of a better term, I'll call it hate mail, and I get so much of it. And anyone right now, you could look at the comment.

I mean, no matter what I say or do online, the comments section will be filled with people who are just ripping me to shreds, right? But on the rare occasion, when I make the mistake of reading some of that stuff, what I find is it's not, it's like, they don't even really seem angry. They're just, these are just empty, sad people

who are just reacting this way. They're reacting this way because they find some, it amuses them, it's entertainment. And also, for me, personally, the kind of things I talk about where I'm trying to get to, you know, if I'm trying to break people out of that apathy and out of that, out of that indifference, well, they're going to react strongly against that.

Because for them, they cling closely to it. And to be, you know, when you try to separate them from it, they start to feel vulnerable and scared and afraid because this apathy and this indifference is also kind of a defense mechanism. So all of that, it's just indifference. The rising suicide rate itself speaks to this indifference. The drug abuse epidemic, our supposed mental health crisis,

throw in all of our obsessive TV watching, and our addiction to smartphones and the Internet, and the rabid kind of materialism that you see in our culture, the collapse of a family, the decline in religion. All of this goes back to the same thing, emptiness, indifference, apathy. So here's the secret about the nature of the disputes in our country. Most of the combatants screaming and fighting at each other and throwing insults back and forth, most of them don't actually care that much.

They're saying talking points, they're saying what they think they're supposed to say they're repeating their lines that they've been given and the people on the other side are giving their lines but it's all just theater most of these people they don't care they haven't even thought about these issues they've given no thought to them whatsoever i shared this story a couple days ago i was uh just just one example of so many that you see online, but I was scrolling through Facebook a few days ago, and I saw on my news feed, someone had posted something about Trump's Jerusalem policy. And so in the comment section, there were five or six people going back and forth fighting over this. And it was a very

contentious, angry fight, and they were insulting each other. But just reading through it, I got, I got the distinct impression reading through this exchange between these people. I got the distinct impression that, number one, nobody involved in this. discussion knows what they're talking about. It really appears that none of them had even thought about this issue prior to that morning, prior to it being in the news. They had not even thought about it. They'd given it no thought whatsoever. And but now suddenly they're pretending to not only know about it, but to feel passionately. All of a sudden, they're on fire with passion about it. But it's, I find their passion really unconvincing. So you get the impression

number one that they don't know anything about it and number two that they don't really care and if they're having this fight and it's just something to do and then they'll quickly go on to the other thing you can even imagine i mean in your head you can imagine like one of these guys in line at starbucks typing furiously no you're so stupid you're wrong this is blah blah blah oh yeah i'll have a venti mocha with uh yeah extra whip yeah but you're so stupid i can't believe yeah i mean it's just it's nothing it's just something it's just something for him to do while he's doing other things. And that's how most of our discussions go. We're not really a hateful people. I think we are callous, but we're not hateful. I think it's indifference that informs every aspect

of American life. And hollow, indifferent, callous people, they don't fight civil wars. They just kind of float softly into oblivion. And I think that's going to be our fate if we don't stay on our current trajectory, if we do stay on our current trajectory. The country is not going to break apart. We're going to remain stuck together, but our unity is not any kind of, it's not due to any kind of common understanding or shared understanding. It's just sort of this paralysis. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that we're together because what else are we supposed to do? Indifference is far worse than hatred, far worse. We worry so much about hatred. Hatred really isn't, hatred isn't such a terrible thing. I mean, it's not good, but you can work with hatred. When somebody's hateful,

you know, like if somebody really hates you, really hates you, well, it's not good. It's not, you know, you'd prefer if they didn't. But that means that they, there's something, they feel something towards you. They care about you. They care about you in a negative way, but they do care about you. So there's a real feeling there. There's a, there's a caring, there's a, there's a passion directed at you. And so it's not that difficult. You know, you've got the raw material to work with. Hatred is just love turned upside down. So all you got to do is just turn it right side up. It's not that hard to turn a hateful person into a loving person. Because you've already got that fire and that passion there. All you've got to do is just, you've just got to make things right.

just got to put them in their proper place and context. But indifference is nothing. There's no raw material. There's nothing to work with. Indifference is just a blank space. And if somebody's indifferent to you, well, then that's the worst thing because there's nothing there to work with. And I think that's what we struggle with in our society.

I certainly don't know how to solve that. I mean, we can't. On our own, you can't take an indifferent person and make them not that. anymore. So we have to rely on prayer and rely on God. But in the meantime, I really think that if there is any antidote, aside from prayer to indifference, it is real passion and conviction. And so I try to bring that to a discussion, because, as I said, I think that's the only way to break through that. If there's any way to break through that indifference and get to the core of a person and make them care, I think that's the way to do it. All right, thank you for

caring enough to watch this whole ramble, and I will have a great weekend. I'll talk to you on Monday. Godspeed.