The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 53 - It's Not The Government's Job To Be "Compassionate"

Episode Date: June 25, 2018

I have been told that it's not "compassionate" for the government to catch illegal immigrants and deport them. But it's not the government's job to be compassionate. The government's job is to make and enforce laws. Individuals should be compassionate and generous. The Left has been trying for years to relieve the individual from the burden of personal virtue and charity, and that's really what this debate is all about. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You know, I've often been told by viewers and listeners that my show is not as classy and not as professional as the other shows on The Daily Wire because I'm always doing it in my car or like in my house. you know. In fact, I've been told that my show isn't even really a show because I don't have the nice background and the fancy setup with all the nice, whatever, the desk and the lights and all that kind of the makeup artist, okay, special effects. I don't have any of that stuff. I've been listening to those criticisms and I've decided to finally solve that problem. And so what I did is I went out and I got a globe. You see this globe right here. I don't mean to brag. about my globe, but everyone knows that when you add a globe into a setting, it ups the classiness quotient and the professionalism quotient by quite a bit. In fact, there was even a study done recently, I think, that it demonstrated there's a direct correlation between your IQ and how many globes you have in your home. I have three globes just in this room right here. I don't mean to brag about my globes. But, you know, and let me ask you this. Yeah, the other shows on the Daily Wire, they're very professional looking. How many globes do they have? Do they have any globes?

I rest my case. Now, we talked last week about the immigration debate, and I gave my opinion, which is very simply that our laws should be enforced and that the border should be protected. I don't like to see kids separated from their families, and I certainly don't like to see the kind of abuse that has happened in some situations to these kids, starting under the Obama administration. But the law has to be enforced, certainly, which means stopping these families, detaining them, preferably detaining them together, so they're not being separated, and then sending them back to their rightful legal homes. Now, I received an angry email after that show, and it is a show, especially now with the Globe, after that show on Friday, I received

the name. Well, I received several angry emails as per usual. But this one in particular gave voice to a common objection. And this person said that my position and the position of any advocate for immigration enforcement, that position lacks compassion. And we need to have compassion for illegal immigrants. It's important to be compassionate. The government has to be compassionate. We need to to have compassionate laws and to be compassionate to these people. Compassion is, I'm sure you've noticed, one of the most overused, misused, abused words in the English language. So I want to talk about compassion.

And I think we should begin by defining compassion. And so I went to the dictionary to do that. But before we get to the definition, here's my basic position on compassion. I don't want the government to be compassionate towards illegal immigrants. I don't want compassionate laws. I don't want compassionate policies. I don't want a compassionate government doing compassionate things. And the word compassionate in all those previous sentences, just imagine the scare quotes around it.

I think that any law or policy or government action that's justified on the basis of compassion, like say welfare, for instance, is always in the end a bad thing. And it's always in the end something that does more harm than good. So no, I don't want compassion. When someone says, well, don't you want the government to be compassionate towards illegals? No, actually, I don't. I think compassion is great. compassion is not just great it's necessary it is required but i don't want the government to be

compassionate i don't think the government can be compassionate uh so now we'll look at the definition of compassion compassion this is what compassionate means compassionate means sympathetic consciousness of another person's distress together with a desire to alleviate it so when you're compassionate, you're sympathetic, you have a consciousness of their suffering, and you want to alleviate. Now, compassion comes from the Latin. If you follow its etymology, it comes from Latin, and from an etymology perspective, it means co-suffering. Okay? So it's related to empathy. When you have compassion for someone, it means that you're suffering with them, that you're feeling what they feel. You feel as they feel and then if it's real compassion, if it's useful compassion, then you're acting on that feeling.

But you notice something about this definition. It is an intensely personal thing. A person is compassionate towards another person. And what I would submit is that only a person can be compassion towards another person. An institution cannot be compassionate because an institution doesn't feel anything. A law cannot be compassionate because a law does not feel. Compassion is in action, but it's also a feeling. It starts with a or a consciousness, at least. But laws and institutions can't do that. Now, as I said last week, the government should act according to a moral standard, and laws should be written and enforced by a moral standard, because moral is a matter of objective right and wrong. And the government should, emphasis on should, do the right thing.

So when I say the government should act morally, what I'm saying is the government should do the right thing and not the wrong thing, even though a lot of times the government does the wrong thing. And laws, laws should be right in the sense that a law should be written according to this moral standard. And a law should never prohibit anything that's good and laws should only prohibit things that are bad, which isn't to say that the law should prohibit everything that's bad. It's just to say that everything that is prohibited should be bad. But not everything that's bad should be prohibited. So, but none of this, I'm getting off into the weeds now. None of this has anything to do with compassion, which again is personal. Morality is an objective standard against

which all people, laws, institutions can and should be judged. But compassion is a personal feeling, a personal conviction which motivates an individual. But laws and institutions and policies should be concerned with feelings and convictions. They should only be concerned with what's right and wrong. And it is right to have a border, and it is right to have laws concerning citizenship and immigration, not only right but necessary, and because it's necessary, it is then right.

In other words, in order to have a country, it's necessary to have these laws. So therefore, it's the government's job to come up with those laws and enforce them. But feelings don't fail. factor in, and they shouldn't, and they can't, because the government doesn't feel. The government is not a feeling institution. It can't. Feelings are not collective things that you do together. There's something that you do individually. And you see, I think this is a big part of the,

of the story of liberalism in modern times. You know, the left, what the left has done is, they've tried to pawn compassion and sympathy and generosity, you know, and charity and all these things. They've tried to take all of that and remove it from the individual and give it to the government. The individual leftist wants to relieve himself of the burden of being compassionate personally and empathetic personally and generous personally and charitable personally. And so he creates, in his mind, this idea of the state as this kind of benevolent organism which can take on the job of being virtuous so that the rest of us don't have to be. So the left sees the state as almost this kind of perverse, backwards Christ figure.

You know, whereas Christ took on the burden of mankind's sin and suffered for our sins so that we don't have to, the state in the mind of the left takes on mankind's virtue and acts virtuously so that we don't have to. And so it's a really weird thing that they've done. And so that means, you know, that explains if you're, you know, if you believe in enforcing immigration law or if you advocate for getting rid of the welfare state or something, a liberal will say to you, well, where is your compassion? Where is your generosity? You don't have any compassion. And the reason why they respond that way is because they see no distinction between the state and the individual. And therefore, they see no distinction between the virtue of the individual and the virtue of the state. And therefore, if we take these virtuous acts away from the state, then in the mind of a leftist, we have taken them away from the individual. It seems like they really don't understand that I could make the case, and I do make the case, for getting rid of entitlements. yet I strongly believe on an individual basis that we as individuals are called to

to help the less fortunate and we should do that. So what I want to do is I want to take that away from the state and give it to the individuals. But the left, if you talk to a leftist, he doesn't think that's possible. The state cannot be virtuous. It can't be empathic.

it can't be compassionate. It can only use those concepts, which are personal concept, and it can only use them as a cover to gain more power and control for itself, which is what the state has done. Which is why I say we need to turn the picture back around and restore things to their proper order. So let the individual be generous. Let the individual be compassionate. the individual be virtuous, absolutely. If you're concerned for the poor and you should be concerned for them, then go and care for them. Go out into the street right now, okay, turn this stupid video off and go out into the street. If you're leaving a comment right now, say, oh, this is wrong, where's your, okay, then turn the video off, shut your computer, go out into the street right now, find a homeless person, find a poor person, take them out to lunch, give them some of your money. Take $40 out of your wallet and just give it to them.

Or go buy them a bag of groceries. I mean, go volunteer to soup kitchen. That's what you should do. That's what we all should do. You can go out and give your own money and your own time and your own resources to the poor. You should do that. That's compassionate. it is your job individually to be and act compassionately.

The government can't do it for you. You have to do it. Stop looking for the state to be compassionate in your place. Go and do it yourself. And if you're concerned for immigrants, and you should be concerned for them, then there are many ways to help them. There are many ways to serve the less fortunate

in foreign countries. You could donate to them. You can find a great charity, give them your money. You can give them your time, your resources. You could even go down to Central America, go to Mexico,

serve the poor there. I mean, you could do all these things and be compassionate towards them. And you should be. But that's your job. It's not the government's job. The government's job is to enforce the law. and to enforce the law justly, and to enforce laws that are moral.

And the law that says, you have to be a citizen to live here, that is a moral law. A moral law in the sense that it is a law that's perfectly in keeping with moral standards. You see, the left really has it backwards in more ways than one, because, you know, A leftist will say that the law and the government should be compassionate and empathetic ascribing these kinds of human qualities to institutions. But then a leftist will also say that we can't legislate morality. And morality is not the government's concern. So what the left has done is they've turned morality into this completely subjective,

personal, emotional thing. and then they've taken compassion and sympathy and turned them into impersonal, objective, bureaucratic things. So once again, they've turned every, they've just, it's completely backwards. The moral law is objective, like gravity is objective. And any human institution is subject to it. But compassionate, compassion can only be practiced by the individual,

not by the government. It's compassion that is a personal thing and emotional thing. It's not for the government. We have to stop looking to the government to operate based on emotional convictions. The government can't do that, and it's a really, really bad idea to ask it to. The government should be concerned with enforcing the law. and then we as individuals, we can come around and be compassion. So another example, somebody breaks, a United States citizen breaks the law, commits a felony,

you know, kills somebody, robs a bank, whatever. And, well, what the government should do, we're not looking for the government or the law to have any feelings towards that person. The government's job is to enforce the law, enforce it fairly, force it justly, which is going to mean putting them in prison, and then we as individuals, we can go visit that. If you're concerned with that person and you want that person to feel compassion, well, then you as an individual, you can go to the prison and visit that person and minister to them and care for their family. And there's so much that you can do for them.

The government did its job putting this person in prison, forcing the law. Now it's up to you to be compassionate and emotional and sympathetic and generous and charitable. That's on you. So I guess the answer to the question, when somebody says, where is your compassion? Well, my compassion is, it's in here. No, it's inside myself. It's not out there. It's not with the government. It's within me. And it's up to me to act on it, not to ask the government to act on it. All right. Yeah, I think the globe really improved that whole discussion, don't you? I feel like it did. Thanks for watching, everybody. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you tomorrow.