RUSH: Tim in Johnson City, Tennessee, welcome. I’m glad you waited, sir.
CALLER: Thanks, Rush. It’s an honor to be on your show.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I wanted to comment on something you were talking about yesterday on the show about not basing your worth on the opinions of others.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: I listen to you all the time and agree with virtually everything you have to say, but this one really got me excited because I’m a youth minister in northeast Tennessee, and just maybe a couple months ago directed a weekend for teens based on this very idea. We took an idea based off of Robert McGee’s book, The Search for Significance, something he calls ‘the performance trap,’ and what he says is that most people in the world base their self-worth on the opinions of others, plus their own performance. Just like you were saying yesterday, this is such a bogus way of thinking and justifying your self-worth. Because, first of all, you can’t always please everyone. There are going to be people in the world that don’t like you no matter how good of a job you’re doing — and then, on top of that, sometimes you just can’t perform. Sometimes you’re going to get beaten. You’re not always going to be the best, and there’s always going to be someone better.
RUSH: Well, maybe.
CALLER: Not you, Rush.
RUSH: May be true for some.
CALLER: Yeah, obviously not you. But for most people, for us mere mortals, there’s always going to be someone that has been better than us. So here’s the idea that we were trying to get across to the young people, and that is: Base your self-worth on what God thinks of you. Base your self-worth on: if you’re doing the right thing. We gave them the scripture that says, ‘For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?’ Some people are so interested on gaining the whole world and being the most popular and the best, when those things aren’t what really matters at all. We told them that a good life is not based on the absence of problems, but a good life is how you deal with those problems that you’re faced with.
RUSH: Well, that’s a mouthful. One of the most important things you said I have a different way of expressing. The desire for acceptance from others is a natural human characteristic, and we’re all raised that way. We want feedback from our parents, ‘Good boy, Rusty!’ We want to hear all of this. We want to hear how we’re good, and we’re raised to make people love us and like us. We’re raised to not offend people so that we don’t embarrass the family or whatever. We’re all raised this way. It leads to a dependency on this kind of thing, and some people are able to escape it on their own and other people aren’t and they become ruled and governed by it. You said, ‘a life lived doing the right thing.’ See, you’re immediately in a problem right there, especially because you’re a youth minister, because the liberals in this audience hearing you say that are saying, ‘What right do you have to lay claim to what’s right? Who are you to tell us what the right thing to do is?’
We have a whole political movement in this country that’s based on getting rid of all judgments on all behavior and replacing judgment with ‘tolerance’ and ‘understanding.’ However, there will be no tolerance of ministers. There will be no tolerance for the pope. There will be no tolerance for conservatives. But there will be tolerance for all the depravity and all the debauchery that a society engages in. That will be defined as ‘enlightenment.’ Each of us has — and you’ll know this when I say it — I don’t care whether you’re a hardened criminal or whether you are as clean and pure as the wind-driven snow, we all have an inner voice that before we do something, tells us, ‘Don’t do it,’ or, ‘It’s okay to do it.’ Well, maybe some of us don’t have the inner voice. I contend that the vast majority of people do, that when you’re about to do something you know you shouldn’t do, you know you shouldn’t do it because there’s an inner voice telling you you shouldn’t do it, but we do it anyway because we think it will be fun. It’s a risk. We’ll get away with it, or what have you.
If people will just listen to that inner voice, if they’d just listen to it, they might be disappointed on the fun factor now and then, but their life would be far more fulfilled and worthwhile. We’re all born with it, folks. We are all born with the inner voice. ‘Don’t do it’ or ‘Do it.’ It’s wrong. It’s right. That inner voice is the target of much of our depraved left in this country, to eliminate that voice and to make people forget it by saying, ‘That’s just guilt, and you cannot be governed by guilt. Love free! Be free! Do whatever you want to do,’ blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I do think this whole business of allowing people to affect how are you doing you feel about yourself is the biggest trap on the face of the earth.