interview

WIE: One of the messages in your book How Could You Do That?! is that we always know what we're doing and therefore always have the freedom to choose our actions. This is an idea that flies in the face of much of contemporary psychological and spiritual thinking.

Dr. Laura Schlessinger: I know, because they say, "it's unconscious."

WIE: This is a very popular view.

LS: It's completely misguided. I have never talked to anybody who didn't really know what they were doing. Never once. And usually—in about eighty-five percent of my calls—I say, "You knew this, right? You knew you were doing this." And they always say, "Yeah, I knew. But I didn't want to admit it. I didn't want to think that I was bad." People don't always want to admit to their thoughts, feelings or motivations.

WIE: So you're saying that the idea of the unconscious is just an excuse?

LS: Yes. If I have a framework of voodoo, and I can sit with you long enough to get you to agree with me that things are caused by evil spirits, then things are caused by evil spirits. If I tell you that things are caused by your subconscious and you respect me, then things are caused by the subconscious.

WIE: In line with this, Sigmund Freud put forth an idea that has now become widely accepted, which is that "everyone is doing the best they can."

LS: That's not necessarily true. A lot of times, we don't put our effort into doing better. We coast. Now, I'm constantly reading Jewish law and Jewish thinking. And every time I read something, I realize, "Yes . . . I've been doing that." I expose myself to scrutiny by studying the scriptures. That means I'm working to be better. That's why I say that I think people who are religious are in general better people than those who are secular, because the religious people are constantly going to church, having somebody nag them. They read the material and they're constantly opening themselves up to the possibility that they could be better. Secular people are often just trying to get the Mercedes or get ahead.

WIE: The subtitle of your book is "The Abdication of Character, Courage, and Conscience."

LS: Yes. Maybe I shouldn't tell you this, but at first the publishers didn't want that there. They said there were too many big words. (Laughs) And I said, "No, no, no." You've got to hit all levels and that's what it means. We've abdicated our character and our conscience and it takes courage to expedite those two.

WIE: Could you speak a bit about what that abdication is?

LS: Well, we've gone back to idol worship, and you know what the idol is? Where's my mirror? Me! That's our new idol worship. Really! We walk around with mirrors. What pleases me? What will make me look good? What will make me feel good? Me. Me! And if you have everybody doing that—if you and I are doing that—then I'm not caring about you and you're not caring about me (except for what we might get from each other) and we'll both be empty and hungry and lonely. The abdication is of values and ideals.

WIE: And so people abdicate their character, courage and conscience in the pursuit of—

LS: In the pursuit of "me."

WIE: What I want.

LS: Yes. Because to do wrong is easy. I liken that to a slide on ice downhill. I don't know why it was planned this way. I certainly would have made it differently, but then I guess you'd have God's kingdom on earth. I have said on the air, "I can tell you how you can very easily know what the right thing to do is. It's too damn hard. It's too damn uncomfortable. It's too damn costly and it's too damn painful." When you can say any one or some combination of those, it's the right thing. The wrong thing is easy, because it satisfies immediately and requires no sacrifice.

WIE: Another thing you state in How Could You Do That?! is: "With an intense emphasis on honor and integrity, many of people's painful situations or problems simply would not exist."

LS: Yes. That means a couple of things. For example, one of my callers might say: "My father abandoned us and it made me feel unloved and lost. So when this man showed attention to me, it just filled my heart with joy . . . of course, he's married with three kids. But it's my heart and my joy." And I began saying to people, "How decent is this, to fill yourself up at the expense of somebody else's pain? To create for somebody else the very problem that caused your original pain? Talk about original sin! This is your original pain that you then create for someone else, and you derive joy from it. Does that sound decent and is that really wonderful?" They'll call me saying, "I'm going with a married man." You've heard talk radio therapists—who I call "shrinklets"—take this kind of call. Typically the shrinklets on the air say, "Oh, you poor thing. He can't be there for holidays. You poor thing. How you're suffering. He's such a bad man!" And I would listen to that year after year thinking, "There's something wrong with this picture." I would sit with this woman and say, "How could you do that? Why does your pain entitle you to do wrong, to do evil, to do damage, to do hurtful things? The reason you're in such pain is that you did not choose to be ethical. If you chose to be ethical, you wouldn't be in this relationship. You'd be sitting with your pain of loss, but finding some constructive way to get by it, to go on and do great things with your life."

WIE: So mistakes people make are—

LS: Based on greedy gratification, and then it compounds because it becomes a bigger mess. So many of the problems we get into come from putting aside ethical behavior for emotional gratification, which is why on my show you'll often hear me say, "Did I ask you about your feelings? I assume you're hurt, you're scared. I go through all that too. But that's not the basis from which we make our decisions." What if I said, "I know you need my help, but I'm having a really bad day, so the hell with you"? According to Jewish law, it doesn't matter what kind of day I'm having. I have to help you. So when your basis for responding is a standard of behavior not related to your feelings, then I guess you leave the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties behind and you enter the Holy Land! And that's what I'm trying to get people to do. Because we've based everything on our feelings. We've taken our feelings to be an omen. We say, "Ah, I'm horny about you, so I guess we have to make it! And it doesn't matter who we would be hurting because I have these feelings." I've actually had people say that! "But he or she turns me on!" Well, you know, Jeff Goldblum in The Fly turned me on too—until he turned into a fly. What's your point? If we all act out on our feelings, as extreme and irrational and fleeting as they are, then we're all terribly unsafe from one another.

WIE: What does that say to the therapists who have spent all these years trying to help people get in touch with their innermost feelings as a way to wholeness?

LS: They've made a mistake. It's been a terrible mistake. It's been a tragic mistake. On some level, being honest about your emotions is good. For instance, I'll say to somebody on the air, "Don't give me that. You really want to stick it up their nose." And they'll say, "Oh, no!" and I'll say, "Don't give me that good person thing. You really want to stick it up their nose." At some point they'll admit it, and then I'll say, "Okay, that's fair. It's fair to feel that way. But it's not fair to act from that feeling." I think that if you're clear about your evil and positive feelings, then at least you have some basis for honesty with yourself. But that's not the place out of which you make decisions. I'll be somewhere, someplace, going through something and I'll turn to my husband and I'll say, "You know what I really want to do?" (Grits teeth) But I can't, because I want to be a good Jew. I can't do that. That doesn't mean at that moment I feel this wonderful, spiritual experience. Most of the time, I have to walk around for a day feeling irritated. Ultimately though, all those moments add up to me feeling like a better person and having more self-respect. That's ultimately where self-esteem and self-respect come from.

WIE: So if we're not basing our decisions on how we feel—which is a radical shift in orientation for most of us—what do you see as the criteria, in a universal sense, for how to act? You seem to be saying there is some kind of barometer other than how we feel, that we can count on.

LS: Yes, God's law.

WIE: As the written word?

LS: Written and interpreted. There was a time when a group of rabbinic scholars sat down and decided, "Well, just because your child badmouths you, you shouldn't really have to stone him. Maybe God meant that philosophically. (Laughs) Maybe you give them time out!" Of course there's interpretation, because God didn't e-mail the word. If he e-mailed at Sinai, everybody would have been confused and wondered, "What's that?" I've spoken with my son different ways at different ages. I try to explain things within his context so he can understand. So here's God at Sinai talking to all of these people who had just spent a couple of hundred years being slaves. How was he going to explain what was now expected? It had to be done in a context that could be understood then and there by those people with their level of comprehension. It is our understanding that the law was given in a context that could be understood then. To some extent it has to be updated. But basically it's biblical religious understanding. The Christian rules of behavior and the Islamic rules of behavior and the Jewish rules of behavior are actually not all that different.

WIE: Do you feel there's anything inherent in us that has an awareness of right and wrong, that there's some kind of moral sense? Do you think a person who didn't have the written word could look into life for themselves and discover a natural basis for morality?

LS: It would have to be based upon something personal. For instance, someone might say, "I know somebody said it wasn't okay to have sex outside of marriage, but nobody's ever going to know and he's awfully cute and it feels right. So, why not? And that's now my moral sense." It becomes subjective. It becomes convenient. It becomes circumstantial. Without God, goodness becomes defined individually and the two of us would have very different ideas.

So the answer is, no, ultimately I don't think so. When there have been cultures without a fundamental belief in God, like Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia, we've all seen the results. I don't like 'without God.' That doesn't mean we all do it right. There was an Inquisition. So it doesn't mean that because we use God as a format that we do it right. We are still quite fallible. Ultimately evil is here because either we are evil—or we stand by and let it happen. And part of perfecting the world is to stand between the innocent and the evil. That's where you have to make value judgments because if you're not making the judgment that this or that behavior is evil, then it's, "Go ahead, rape her. Go for it. Can I sell tickets?"

WIE: It's interesting to hear you speak about value judgments, because in the contemporary psychological/spiritual mindset there seems to be a sort of commandment that states: "Thou shalt not judge."

LS: Well, that's not biblical. That's a real distortion. As a matter of fact, all the way through Leviticus and into Proverbs, it discusses making judgments. You're supposed to help your neighbor stay on the right track. That doesn't mean you burn them at the stake. That means you help them, you tell them, "Excuse me, that's wrong." But in Proverbs, it also has this one point: If you tell the wise man that he's doing something wrong, he will bless you. If you tell the fool, he's just going to hate you. So you can sort of tell who's a fool and who's a wise man if you point them toward the right track and one gets angry. Then you know you have a fool. And you're not supposed to persist with a fool. Interesting. So again, in Judaism, judgment is okay. There are criteria. It says very clearly in Leviticus when it goes into making judgments that you're supposed to give the benefit of the doubt, you're supposed to make sure, to make everything really clear first. It's not that you don't judge. It's how you do it that makes the difference.

WIE: Another idea that is very common these days, and which is often emphasized in modern spiritual circles, is the notion that every person is unique. This is also given a great deal of emphasis in psychology.

LS: Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood!

WIE: The view is that we are each a unique individual, and because of this, we can never truly understand or appreciate the experience of another.

LS: Okay. Let me go over that. Of course I have never seen anybody that looks like you or me. There's no question about it. We are unique. We are unique combinations. But we are all made in the image of God. I don't care what your experiences were, you don't have the right to hurt anybody. I don't have to walk in your shoes and feel your pain to know that that doesn't give you an entitlement program to do damage. We are the same in that we are all obligated to behave justly, ethically, morally and with compassion regardless of how we feel or what we've gone through. Period.

One of the best testimonies to that is Victor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning. He spent too much time in concentration camps. Twenty microseconds is too much time. He was at Auschwitz. And he said there was nothing that anybody could do to demolish the person until the person decided to give up their own humanity. When one person would steal food from another, that's when they died. I have been so affected by that. Because, you know, it's so easy to have a bad day and come home and bitch at your kids. I am so aware that nothing entitles me to act any other way than justly and compassionately and ethically and morally.