TRANSCRIPT
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The Rabbi Daniel Lapin Podcast
Episode: Controlling the Crowd
Date: 01/17/24 Length: 00:31:52
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Greetings, Happy Warriors. And it was a few years ago that Susan and I decided to do an in depth study of really what I've often thought of, and I still think of as perhaps the most mysterious nine verses in all of the first five books of the Bible. And I'm referring to chapter 11 Genesis, verses one through nine. And that, of course, is the story of the Tower of Babel, so easy to dismiss as yet another story of some anachronistic events, long forgotten peoples, strange, anachronistic mythologies. But it isn't like that at all, occupying such prominence so early in the Bible. It clearly is important. And so that in depth study became an audio program called Tower of Power, Decoding the Secrets of Babel. However, as relevant as it was when we first created it, about 15 years ago, we realized that given the extraordinary events shaping the modern world today, we realized that it really needed another look. It needed an update. It needed a re analysis, in the context of things we see going on around us in the world today, where strange forces are shaping the activities, the lives and the destinies of huge numbers of people, perhaps more so than at any earlier stage in history. And we asked ourselves the question that I'm sure that that you've lost yourself many times, which is going back to the 12th century, there was this guy called Genghis Khan who managed to weld together many disparate tribes and for them all to somehow accept him as universal leader. In fact, that's what Genghis Khan even means, and enabling him to create this vast empire that he did. But wait, one doesn't have to go anywhere nearly as far back as that. We can think of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, who take a strange place called Russia and manage to weld it together into this vast empire, the Soviet Union. Or what about Adolf Hitler, a strange, unsuccessful World War One Corporal who changes his name from schikel Gruber to Hitler and again, almost becomes master of the world, almost becomes the king of Europe and of most of the world. Were it not for a guy called Winston Churchill determined to obstruct his nightmarish dreams? But how did these people do it? How did Marceau, in about 1950 take over in China. China was a lot of separate places, a lot of different languages, even different belief systems, and somehow Lao Tse Tung creates Chinese revolution and builds what we now to denote today as the People's Republic of China. How do all these people do these things? Well, for that reason, we went back and we modernized tower power, and we updated it, first of all, into a video, because we feel that the lessons can be even more compelling in video form. And more importantly, not only, more compelling. La, but more useful to you as tools, as schematics that help you understand how these strategies are being employed around you at the present time, both in your country and in other countries, understanding how these strategies are even used in companies, in organizations, in smaller groups of people, and how you can be aware of what these strategies are, and how you can both deploy them and avoid them, depending on what exactly is going on at the time. And so that is something I would recommend for your attention. We felt that if we presented you in video, yes, pardon me, but I am at the moment on a very large ship for a few days, and it is about to depart and get moving. And so I'm just going to overlook the noise and the racket going on for just a moment, and so I can then proceed with describing what the Tower of Power is. Is this really nothing but a story about a long forgotten giant tower that Peter broyger The elder painted so beautifully in his painting, the Tower of Babel. Is this really nothing more than that? No, if you want to understand how it is that a nefarious organization, an organization with the greatest of vision raised of problems, has turned out to be such a destructive force in the world, and I refer to the United Nations. Of course, if you want to understand the United Nations, then you do need to understand the Tower of Power, and you need to understand how Woodrow wisdom began this concept. And they understood what you will understand at the end of your study of the town, decoding the secrets of them. Yes, not everybody catches on. Not everybody automatically understands how it is that large numbers of people can be welded together into one unified, single minded machine. But those who got it and those who figured it out, used that power to become immensely effective, immensely influential, and went a long way towards self serving their own goals and their own missions as well. And so let's think about how it is that almost everybody, at some point or another, realizes that being part of a large group is beneficial. Almost everybody realizes that loneliness, isolation kills that to be alone makes it very difficult to stand up against the forces of the law. Just think, for instance, imagine that you are parachuted into a unknown jungle with strange and native people who've perhaps never seen anyone like you, and on your way down, as you float beneath the canopy of your parachute watching the roof of the jungle Coming up closer and closer to trees and fields and you think to yourself, how am I going to manage down there? And you realize that your fears are very well founded, because you are going to be one lonely, isolated individual against those on the ground here are already, at the very least, a tribe, maybe more,
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and now you contrast with coming down as, shall we say, part of a military battalion and floating down under their large parachutes. Not only hundreds of your colleagues and associates, but also jeeps and pallets of equipment and fuel and ammunition and material and tents and food and provisions all kinds of things. And you realize, hey, I'm very lucky. I'm part of a big, powerful team, and being part of a team is really, really valuable, provided it is a team that is held together by some common culture and by some common vision, I would put it to you that America today is nowhere near the unified culture that it was, shall we say, in 1950 not even close. It's not even the same culture that it was in 1910 in those days when an American showed up almost anywhere in the world, he was treated with respect, and President Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt made it pretty clear that American citizens better received respect. And again, there was a time where Americans were so grateful to be part of a large and successful team organization. It's not an accident that in 1910 America accounted for nearly 40% of world economic production. England, Germany and Russia each accounted for about another 10% but the majority the United States. Why? Well, the United States was, at that point, 100 million people who all spoke the same language and who all shared the common beliefs, pardon me, the common belief system, and shared a common culture and a common vision. And so, because money is created when human beings collaborate with one another, and when human beings cooperate and connect and communicate. That's how money is created. And so obviously, if people have the means of communication, common culture, plus the goodwill that comes from being part of a similar vision, the capacity for creating economic power is almost limitless. Now, England, in those days, was about 40 million people. Germany was about 60 million people and Russia, Russia was hard to say because there was so many different disparate groups of people, but America really stood unique in about 1910 England, England also, but again, you might only 40 million people. However, on the other hand, England did have its colonies, and so you did have Canada and Australia, New Zealand, and you still had India made up of 10s of millions of Indians who all aspired to the spiritual quality of Englishmen. Status of being English because being English meant something. England expects every man to do his duty that
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can't speak over a ship's form, kind, at any rate, so that that is sort of what things looked like in 1910 not surprisingly. Now think about the value again. Just contemplate for a moment the value of being part of a game. Let's reduce this to the simplicity of boys soccer boys high school soccer teams. Let's say that really superb boys high school soccer talent shows up maybe one, one in 100 boys, you know, and that's probably not far off accurate, right, out of any 100 random boys, a certain number of them are going to be klutzes, and certain number are going to be nerds, and a certain number will be athletic. You. And some will be athletic in some ways, and some in other ways. So maybe a truly high talent soccer player, maybe one in 100 and so if you went and you attended a small private Boys School of shall we say, 400 boys, you'd be lucky to find four really great soccer players nonetheless, your school fields the soccer team, and so it's going to be seven mediocre guys and four really good guys, and you'll do your best, but every now and then, you'll play a match against a large Boys High School, or shall we say, 2000 people. Well, 2000 boys in a high school means, statistically, they've probably got 20 truly top rate soccer players. Out of 20 truly top rate soccer players. You can easily field a soccer team with a few good reserves, and there's no comparison. A small team can possibly compete with you. Now this dynamic is played out again and again and again, and in our program, Tower of Power that has now been redone and updated and modernized and put into video format, we are providing all the tools and the techniques you need to fully understand exactly what these dynamics are that make it possible for human beings to stop being isolated individuals and to become part of powerful teams, powerful groups, powerful organizations, and, yes, powerful nations as well. It's always been a dream of power hungry tyrants to be able to well together groups of people. It's always been a dream because realizing that whether you're trying to put together a soccer team or you're trying to put together a huge nation and an army, you've got to find a way of unifying all those people have to become of one shared vision. And how do we do that? You know, even that poor Russian Jew in the late 19th century who came up with the language Esperanto, right? It's hilarious. It's a joke. There's probably not 1000 people on the planet who are devoted to speaking Esperanto. I doubt there's 1000 people on the planet, probably a lot less than that. But for a while it was sort of a dream, because people realized that if we could be one people, one culture, and remember one people means one language, which is one of the reasons that the undermining of English as the unifying language of the United States of America cost America so dearly during the second half of the 20th century, a shared language that's crucial, and so Adolf Hitler understood that German was going to be the great language, Deutschland, Uber Alice, and he venerated German poets, and he venerated German music, because you have to have a common language. And now you can see why it is that as we reach the climax of the nine verses that make up the tower of Babel, you discover that one of the things that goes is a common language, because that is absolutely essential in order to overcome the curse of loneliness and isolation And to achieve the dream, and sometimes it's a positive dream and sometimes it's a negative dream. I think the founders of the United States of America had a positive dream, but I think that Mao Tse Tung in China had a negative dream. I think that Lenin and Stalin in the early years of Russia in early 20th century, I think they had a nefarious dream, very problematic. But all these dreams based on one single unifying idea, and that is that we have to turn sing. Little individuals into a unified mess. The the seductive power of Facebook for Mark Zuckerberg, I get it to be able to control the thinking of millions of people he probably used to have maybe still does fantasies and illusions about being the Genghis Khan of modern technology. But can technology weld people into that kind of organization? I'm going to wait until you've had a chance to experience Tower of Power and you're able to draw your own conclusions on that. Can it be done with violence and mystique? Well, that's what that's what Hitler did. That's what Mohammed did with the beginning of Islam in the six hundreds, sure, tremendous violence coupled with a sense of destiny and religious mystique that did it, no question about it. But what we wanted you to derive from our new program Tower of Power is the realization that the strategies being used are the same. Whether you have a particularly effective and inspiring leader of your company, your organization, maybe it's your parent, Teachers Association, but very often, if not always, the difference between a highly successful organization that grows and has members and people wanting to join because it has a sense of destiny and purpose, very often a leader who understands the principles that you're talking about here today, as well as the ones we teach more entirely and more comprehensively in Tower of Power. And so these strategies and techniques are things that are used always for building organizations, for connecting people together. And you will see in Tower of Power that the stereotype of the Hitlers and the Mao Tse tungs, the stereotype of the lenins and the Stalins, is a man called Nimrod, because it turns out that the two most effective ways of welding people together into a large, powerful organization, two areas are number one God and number two, anti God. Those are the two most powerful. And so it is religious organizations that have been effective, rapid growing and and to this very day in the United States of America, the church is an institution whose power cannot and should not be overestimated. It's an immensely powerful institution, but it is matched by the university, whose central unifying theme is anti god, that's it's as simple as that, people who love God find themselves unified very powerfully. People who hate God find themselves able to bond and connect equally powerfully. And again, if you're puzzled by that parallelism, that strange phenomenon, all you have to do is enjoy Tower of Power decoding the secrets of Babylon, and you will derive intellectual enjoyment from piecing these things together and allowing them to make sense for you as well, and as you think about it, in in your own life, even in your family life, are you not aware of how important it is to bond your spouse, yourself and your children into one unit. And I'm sure if you've been engaged in that challenge, you've probably also become aware of how difficult it is and that you need tools that you need to. Techniques, you need to know how to do these things and whether we're using them for evil or whether we're using them for good. The techniques are very often very similar. It's the idea of fire, what a powerful force of energy, fire can be used for so much good, but it can also be used for so much damage and destruction. As anybody who has been watching the news from Los Angeles during the last week knows fire immensely powerful, immensely destructive. It also exerts a strange fascination we all understand, the powerful word people understanding and people of great inventiveness, realizing that fire is a form of energy that can create motion and remove human drudgery. Fire is so exciting, but it is also starting to come out from Los Angeles that fire exerts a dreadful fascination in the minds of unhealthy people, meth addicts are attracted to fire in a in a notorious way. And now seems quite possible, although we may never know the details, but it certainly seems very likely that some of the fires might well have been set by people with an unhealthy and unwholesome obsession with fire. The tools are very often the same, and so it is the same tools that can be used to unify, a club, an organization, a company, a family, are the same tools that also can be used in reverse form, if you like, to unify forces that can end up being very damaged and very destructive indeed. And so my dear happy warriors, I want to recommend that you go ahead and derive the full benefit from understanding this immensely powerful technology, the technology of unifying people into something that is more powerful than any one person can ever be. And we see how it is that when it's used for good, it makes life better for everybody lucky enough to be part of that organization. When it's used for negative, there is almost no limit to the destructiveness that can ensue. And so the story of the Tower of Babel ends with God saying, in order to enable you all to preserve your best shot of freedom. Now I'm going to now make it a little harder for tyrants to exert control over millions of people. And as it is, we see that as never before in human history, it is indeed possible for tyrants to exert control over unprecedented numbers of people, the technologies, facial recognition, artificial intelligence, the fact that the majority of humans on the planet now have cell phones, and the fact that English is the de facto language of international communication, not just of air traffic control, but of so many different United Nations organizations and others so often using English also making it easier for tyranny to seize control, and we've certainly seen that in China. But wait, we also saw how tyranny seized control during the COVID epidemic in Canada, in Australia and in the United States, in most of Europe, in the United Kingdom. It happened as well, because people had been welded together into a large unified group. It's pretty amazing. And so what does it mean when God finishes off the story by saying, Well, I. I'm taking away the blessing of universal communication. What does that mean people are not going to be able to understand each other? Is there a way in which we are actually watching that happen right now? You are going to love thinking about these questions, and you're going to be launched on this exciting voyage of discovery with Tower of Power decoding the secrets of family until, Oh, I did say that. You know what? I just wanted to make mention. Also, I am going to be doing a special bonus for happy warrior members, and the bonus is going to be on what I call the Great bilge pump problem. I'm fascinated by this, and I think you will be too. And so for those of you who are members of our wonderful happy warrior community, enjoy the bonus the both the great village from problem and for everyone else, consider becoming members. Also, if you haven't yet subscribed to podcast, please do that. And so until next week, I want to wish you a week of deep devotion and commitment to growing your 5s your family, your finances, your faith, your friendship and your fitness. I'm Rabbi. Daniel Lapin, God bless you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
