The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 45 – William Federer

Episode 45: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

In this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show, historian William Federer discusses his providential view of history, focusing on the origins of American self-government and the historical roots of socialism. He details how the model of the ancient “Hebrew Republic,” a nation without a king where citizens were accountable to God, influenced America’s founders. Federer then traces the history of socialism back to Plato’s Republic, contrasting it with the biblical model. He uses the Pilgrims’ failed experiment with a communal, socialist-style system and their subsequent success with private property as a key historical example of the theory’s impracticality.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show. This show’s available on Apple, Google, Spotify, some of our new favorite platforms, Edifi and Liftable, and wherever you get your podcasts. This is the show where I interview major thought leaders from many fields of influence to show how our worldview changes everything.

My guest today is Bill Federer. He is one of my favorite historians. This guy brings history to life. He talks about the role of ancient Israel and socialism and America’s heritage, and every sentence that comes out of his mouth is something fascinating. You can hear his American Minute Radio Show every day, and you can also follow him in the information that we’re going to give you in the outro so you can see more, learn about his books. But please welcome William Federer to the show. Bill Federer, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show.

William Federer (00:56):
Hey, Dr. Jeff. Great to be with you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:59):
I am really looking forward to our conversation. I’ve always loved the way you teach history, the way you bring in so many facts and put it all into the context of helping Christians understand the flow of history. And so this is going to be an especially fun conversation because we’re going to get to talk about the history of socialism and then really land on how we communicate about this with our friends and our family.

Maybe that will happen during the holiday season, we get back together and there are all kinds of times where we’ve got to have these conversations. Class will start back up again in the spring and we know this is going to come up with our friends in the university situation. So thank you for being on the show. I wanted to just let people get to know you a little bit first. How, Bill, did you get to the place where history was something of interest for you?

William Federer (01:54):
Well, my dad was a historian, attorney, and head of several historical societies. And so growing up, we’d stop at every historical marker and French short Spanish for it, Civil War battlefield, Kid Carsons. We’d have the library in our house, but it really wasn’t until I became a real Christian as an adult. And I began to see history from a different perspective and it fascinated me. And I liken it to turning the corner on a cornfield and the rose lineup.

So history from a secular point of view, it’s all out there. It just dates, numbers, facts, and figures, and Samuel Gomper started the union. The pilgrims did this, and it’s like, big deal. But when you see it from a providential point of view, that there is a God’s hand moving in history so that freedom can spread so that people can be all that God created him to be, and so they could have the voluntary choice to love him rather than fearing a government mandate that they could get thrown in jail.

(02:55):
And so you get to see that it becomes more fascinating when you see a storyline in there. But my first book I wrote in 1994, and it sold a half million copies, and that sort of opened the door for me to do about 25 books.

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:13):
Bill, and they’re great. And you’ve written on everything from American history to the history of Islam. And so I know we’re going to put in the show notes how to find those books because I think a lot of people will be really interested. But I appreciate your bringing up the idea of the storyline of all of history because I do remember high school history classes being so boring because I was trying to, the five causes of the Industrial Revolution and the dates and all of these different things that didn’t add up to a total story.

Now you somehow, you’re able to, in your work, bring up all of those interesting facts, but put it into the context of something bigger. So thank you for the way you do history. And I think it’d be a great model for Summit Ministries graduates and people who are following the work that we’re doing here.

William Federer (04:07):
Well, one of my passions was I decided to study every century of recorded human history to see what type of government there was. And so writing was invented around three or four thousand BCs, Sumerian Cuneiform and clay tablets in the Mesopotamian Valley. Today that’s Iraq. And there’s even astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in his cosmos TV series had an episode and he’s over there in the deserts and he goes, “It was here between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers around 3,300 BC that we learned how to write.”

So here it’s a secularly acknowledged fact that around 3,300 BC and we’re around 2080. So that’s a little over 5,000 years of people writing down records. And so if you round it out, because several of the different founders use the number 6,000, if you round it out to 6,000, it’s not that long. I mean, think of it. 6,000 years is just 60 people living 100 years each back to back. Yeah. We’ve all met someone who’s lived a hundred years, maybe a grandmother. We’re talking 60 grandmothers and you’re all the way back to the beginning of recorded human history.

Dr. Jeff Myers (05:17):
Wow. Wow. That really puts it in perspective.

William Federer (05:20):
But now that we have records, let’s look at them. What do they show? They show the most common form of government is kings. Nimrods, Pharaohs, Caesar, Kaiser, Saltons are until the Hangengascan. It’s all top down. And it’s hierarchal. If you’re friends with the king, you’re more equal, you’re not friends with the king, you’re less equal.You’re an enemy of the king, you’re dead or you’re a slave. Wherever you have a king on top, you have slaves on the bottom. It’s sort of a given.

So slavery did not start in 1619. Hamarabi’s code, 1800 BC, he writes about slaves. And so as the centuries go on, these kingdoms get bigger because with military advancements, the king can kill more people. So instead of Cain killing Abel with a rock, they can kill with a bronze weapon or an iron weapon or a big long phalanx spear that the Greeks had or a symmetry sword that the Muslims have or a composite bow that the Mongols had.

(06:09):
The weapon improves, but it’s that same fallen nature. Saint Augustine called it libido dominandi, the lust to dominate. And until ultimately the King of England had the biggest. The sun never sat on the British empire, 13 million square miles, half a billion people, India, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong. He was a globalist. He was a one world government guy with him at the top. And America’s founders didn’t like that. They broke away. They flipped it and made the people the king. So the word citizen is Greek, it means co-king.

And then I go through where the founders got these ideas, little Roman republic, little Athenian democracy, but ultimately ancient Israel. And so to me, this was fascinating. The first 400 years out of Egypt, Israel had no king, which the Book of Judges, it’s a little bit confusing. I mean, they sin, they repent. They have a Samson inject, all these different, but it’s a total anomaly in world history where at a time when you had Indian Maharajas, Chinese emperors, Egyptian Pharaohs, King Agabesha, all these. And here you have a nation with millions of people and no king.

(07:13):
And it worked for 400 years because every single citizen was taught the law and they were personally accountable to God to follow the law. So there’s no police around, but you’re being nice to people because you believe God is watching you. And it worked. And so this period of time is called the Hebrew Republic. And it was studied after the reformation by all these scholars in Europe, so much so that the scholars were called Christian Hebraists. And that’s why they taught Hebrew at Yale and Harvard and stuff like that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (07:49):
I’m fascinated by that because I’ve heard a lot of this before, but hadn’t realized how much the American founders had studied that Hibraic republic model.

William Federer (08:04):
Yeah. One of the famous Christian Hebraists was John Sadler and his sister, Anne, married John Harvard. But you have these different ones where they’re fascinated. There’s a dozen different things I go through. Number one, Israel was the first nation where there was equality because wherever there’s a king, it’s hierarchical. If you’re friends with the king, you’re more equal, you’re not friends with the king, you’re less equal, you’re not going to be the king, you’re dead or a slave.

Israel had no king. And the law specifically said there’s no respect of persons in judgment. This is the beginning of the very concept of equality on planet earth. Israel had tolerance. Here they were worshiping the one true God, and they never felt compelled to force the strangers among them to worship the one true God. Israel was the first nation with private land ownership. Really? Yeah, because wherever there’s a king, you never really own the land.

(08:56):
It’s always conditional of you staying on his nice side. You cross the king, he’ll take away the land and kill you. And if you own land, you can accumulate stuff. The Bible called that being blessed and you can be moved upon to give away some of your stuff. The Bible called that charity. Ancient Israel had no police. Everyone was taught the law. Everyone helped enforce the law. It was like everybody was deputized. And Israel had what? No prisons.

It’s like in Egypt, Joseph was in prison for several years, but in Israel, when a crime was committed, you immediately got the accused and you had the trial at the gate to the city with the city elders. Israel had no standing army. You have a king, he has an army to enforce the king’s will. In Israel, every man was in the militia, armed with a sword upon their thigh and ready at a moment’s notice to defend his family and his community.

(09:51):
And Israel had a bureaucracy-free welfare system. So in Egypt, people were selling their souls to the Pharaoh in exchange for a government handout of grain. But in Israel, when you harvested your field, you left the gleanings for the poor people to pick through. Like Ruth, this way, the poor were taken care of on a decentralized scale. And then Israel got to choose their own leaders of their different towns and villages.

And Moses, speaking to the children of Israel, “How can I alone bear your burden? Take you wise men and understanding and known among your tribes and I’ll make them rulers over you.” So this was an elect. He didn’t go out among three million people and say, “You, you, you, you’re the king.” No, it’s like, you know the people in your tribe that hate covetousness and they’re honest. And then one of the big things was Israel was the first nation that could read.

(10:44):
I thought this was fascinating. In Egypt, they had 3,000 hieroglyphic characters and only 1% of Egypt could read. Reading and writing was the scribes’ secret knowledge. They actually kept the hieroglyphs complicated on purpose as job security. And then Sumeria had about 1,500 uniform characters.

China, the yellow emperor around 2,600 BC is credited with starting their first characters and then 10,000 of them, but they were just for court records. Reading and writing was just for the upper class to keep track of everything they owned and all their decrees and common people didn’t read.

And so when Moses comes down the mountain, he doesn’t just have the law. He has a law in a simple 22 character alphabet. First letters, 11th, second letter, Beth, so easy to learn kids could read. Ancient Israel was the first instance in recorded history of a nation that was completely literate.

(11:42):
And so not only did they get rights as an individual from God, they could read the law for themselves and maintain their rights. So it was a bottom up model. And so anyway, that’s one of the topics of a book I wrote called Who Is the King in America.

Dr. Jeff Myers (12:02):
That’s incredible information. And it kind of leads us into the next part of the discussion. By the time of Plato writing the Republic, things began to change and the idea of socialism was introduced there. Can you talk a little bit about the history of socialism? Because I think a lot of people think, “Oh, this started with Bernie Sanders, Field of Burn. And this guy’s great because he’s going to make sure that we get high paying jobs and we don’t have to pay for college.” But you’re saying that socialism has a history that goes back thousands of years.

William Federer (12:38):
Yeah. So Plato’s the first one that talked about everybody owning everything in common, and that’s why we always go back to him. The dilemma is, somebody’s in the government position handing this stuff out and they sort of like their position and they want to slip a little extra to their family and friends and hold back from those they don’t like before it gets discretionary. And then it ends up being the, he who holds the purse strings has the power. Basically, you’re back to a dictator.

But as far as Plato goes, 380BC, he’s an Athens. He writes in passing of Atlantis, this highly structured civilization on an island that sinks in the sea. Whether it existed or not, he thought that it did. There is an island in the Mediterranean called Santorini, and it’s what’s left of a volcano. It’s a tourist place. It’s beautiful. There’s semi-circle cliffs. I’ve been there in college. It’s all white with blue, how those Greeks do all their buildings.

Dr. Jeff Myers (13:35):
I could picture it.

William Federer (13:36):
But when it blew, it would have sent a tsunami destroying lots of civilizations across the Mediterranean world. So anyway, Plato considers Atlantis a perfectly structured society and he considered democracy and unstructured society. Demos means people crossing means rules. So under democracy, the people rule. And the chief characteristic of a democracy is tolerance. Everybody tolerates each other. It’s wonderful. It’s like a bazaar where you can buy any viewpoint. It’s like an embroidery patchwork with lots of colors. It’s great.

And then they begin to tolerate people that are a little bit off. Then they tolerate people that are a lot off. So finally, they’re tolerating lawlessness and random crime and violence. And then everybody begins to say, “Can’t someone come along and fix this mess?” And that’s when some governor comes along and he says, “I can fix it. I just need some emergency powers.” And Plato says that at first, this guy is all smiles.

(14:34):
He says that when the philosopher king is born in a state, that he at first appears above ground as a protector. And then I’m going to take away some of your freedoms, but I’m doing this to protect you. And then finally, after he gathers enough power, he stands up in the charity of the state holding the reins of power and he’s revealed as the tyrant.

So the scenario is that democracy where the people don’t have morals and virtue ends in chaos out of which the people want a quick fix and somebody comes along promising to fix it only to use power and make himself a dictator. And it’s interesting, he gets all into it. He goes, “Now, when does the protector turn into the tire?” And he says, when he begins to become unpopular. So in other words, when the poll numbers start showing that he’s becoming unpopular, then he begins to switch from fraud to force.

(15:35):
Those are the two methods at which tyrants control people, fraud and then force. And so they’ll keep up a guise of caring about them. But then Plato says when they cast it in his teeth that it’s getting too powerful, he has a choice. Give up his power, which he’s not inclined to do because Plato described him as a lover of power or get rid of the people confronting him.

So he purchased his military and administration. If anybody that has virtue, all he wants is yes, men. And matter of fact, a little side note, Plato says that democracy’s doomed to fail because it’s based on the people having virtue. And if you give people a choice of giving up their life or giving up their virtue, they’ll always give up their virtue to save their life. So it’s just a matter of time till this democracy thing craters.

(16:24):
Now, ancient Israel’s attempt to rule themselves without a king lasted a little longer because they had a big magnet in the sky called God and you were virtuous because you were accountable to him. Athens did not have that. By Plato’s time, Athens had a bunch of fickle deities that nobody believed in anyway. And so he says, “This being virtuous, you begin to see when people value those and honor those that have money more than those that have virtue, that’s a telltale sign.”

So you’ve got some rapper and he’s rich. Well, how did he get his money? And it’s like, well, you may have done some immoral things, but when he becomes honored because he’s rich rather than having virtue, that’s when you’ve more or less crossed. Another interesting angle, and interrupt me at any time, Dr. Jeff. Another interesting angle is morality. And so Plato says that they tolerate each other, they tolerate people that are a little bit off, a lot off, but they begin to tolerate immorality.

(17:27):
And he says that the manner of life is that of Democrats, because he’s describing a democracy. When your lack of self-control gets into internal morals, that’s when it really begins to crater. And a study was done by a guy named J.D. Unwin. It was 1934, and he wrote a book called Sex and Culture. And in this book, he had studied 80 major civilizations over 5,000 years, and J.D. Unwin had noticed trends. And one of the trends is, sexual immorality always perceives the collapse of a civilization. And he says, civilization goes through four stages.

The first is a period of pain and poverty, like war, famine. And then they come through that and then they work hard and they pitch in and they work together and they become productive and patriotic. And then finally they get prosperous and then they want to enjoy their prosperity and they get pleasure focused and they get weakened and lazy and indulgent and promiscuous and they get, it’s very similar to an athlete.

(18:31):
When he’s young, he’s focused and disciplined and wants to be the champ. And then finally he becomes the champ and he rules for a couple seasons. And then he gets a little lazy, doesn’t exercise as much, maybe eats some fatty food. And in his mind, he still thinks he’s the champ, but he gets challenged into the ring of competition and gets the tar knocked out of him because in reality, he’s now a couch potato.

And so these civilizations, when they’re young, they’re focused and they work hard. And then when they finally achieve prosperity, they get lazy and indulgent and sexually promiscuous. J.D. Unwin even called it a sexual marketplace. He says, when women as a whole say nothing happens unless there’s a commitment, the guys say, “Well, whatever it takes, they make the commitment and then they go out and be productive for their wife.” And then something happens.

(19:20):
Little kids appear and the guy has another emotion being protective and productive. And when all the men in the country are productive and protective, rising water floats all boats, the country becomes productive, protective, innovative, creative, expansionistic, even militaristic.

But when the women as a whole say there does not need to be a commitment, water seeks its own level. And you’ll have a bunch of guys saying, “Pleasure time.” And they end up becoming selfish and less productive and more focused on their own pastimes and pleasures. And there’s fewer kids born to fill the ranks to the military and they end up getting conquered by the next rising civilization. So it’s an interesting trend.

And even John Adams writes to Thomas Jefferson, “Have you ever found in history a single example of a nation that thoroughly corrupted that is afterwards restored to virtue?” And without virtue, there can be no political liberty. He says, “Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy?” I just think it’s interesting that he would make that observation.

Dr. Jeff Myers (20:25):
Yeah. Yeah. And I remember, I think it was Margaret Mead, the anthropologist who said that when most men are soft, hard men rule. And I think there’s a tie-in, so many tie-ins to our own time from the things that you’re talking about. But I wanted to ask you just about this idea. A lot of people are very concerned about existential threats to humanity.

And I remember seeing a study out of Oxford University that said that the chance that we would be destroyed by something in nature, by some major natural catastrophe or being hit by an asteroid or whatever is about one in 2000, but the chances of being destroyed by something that humans do is one in six, and that idea of an existential threat. And I was reading this thing about what’s called the world in chains scenario, that if a government comes along that is able to harness technology and use it as a weapon to subjugate their people, that could be the single greatest threat that humanity would face.

(21:25):
And you’ve mentioned that earlier. You talked about the new weapons that people developed that enabled them to be powerful. Well, now technology is the weapon. A government with ill intent using technology could have a greater negative impact on humanity than any government that’s existed to this point. What are your thoughts about that based on your study of history?

William Federer (21:49):
Yeah, you think of it. I mean, here’s Attila the Hun, had an army of a half million people wiping out cities across Europe. If he wouldn’t have died, he’d have been happy to continue conquering. Here’s Genghis Khan, kills 30 million people from Korea to Hungary. If he hadn’t died, he’d be happy continuing conquering. And the Napoleonic war, six million died. If he wouldn’t have been de-throned, he’d have been happy conquering.

And it’s almost like death is a blessing in that the devil has to start from scratch. And you think the devil, yeah, remember when the devil came to Jesus said, “Bow down and worship me and I’ll give you all the kingdoms of the world because they’re mine to give. I can give them to whoever I want.” And you think, well, that’s pretty audacious. The devil thinks the kingdoms are his. When did he get them?

(22:32):
When Adam sinned. Adam was in charge of the garden. We know that because he named everything. Naming means you have authority over. You name your kids, right? But the Bible says to whomever you yield your members servants to obey, to him you are a servant. The moment Adam obeyed Satan, he was posturing himself as the obeyer and the devil as the one being in charge and saying, “You served. And all the kingdoms of the world are ruled through fear.” It’s all top down.

That’s why it’s so much of an anomaly for ancient Israel out of Egypt to not have a king for 400 years. And then of course, Jesus says that the kings of this world are called benefactors and they rule from top down, but he said, “It shall not be so among you.” He says, “The greatest of you will be the servant of all.”

(23:18):
And so he’s highlighting that, no, this is going to be a voluntary bottom up thing. And so that’s why it was studied by these New England pastors, that they basically, a big change happened when the pilgrims were coming across. They were going to go to Virginia and Jamestown, but they ended up in Massachusetts because of a storm and they tried sailing south and they couldn’t because off the coast of Cape Cod, it’s really shallow for a long ways out and the boat almost gets stuck and sinks in a storm.

And so the pilgrims go back to Plymouth Rock and the captain says off the boat. And the pilgrims say, “We have a question. Who’s going to be in charge?” There’s no king appointed person in our little group. The whole world’s ruled by kings and pharaohs and Caesars and Salters and you’re telling us to get off.

(24:04):
Who’s going to be in charge? They do something unique that impacts us today. They gave themselves the authority to start a government. It’s called the Mayflower Compact. We, in the presence of God, covenant ourselves together to form the civil body politic to enact just and equal laws and shall be thought most necessary, under which we promise all due submission. Simple revolutionary. It was a polarity change in the flow of power. Instead of top down, rule by all these dictators and kings and pharaohs and Caesars, it’s real bottom up by we.

In the womb with this little Mayflower is the conception of this form of self-government. And that’s what impacted New England and then ultimately the US Constitution, “We the people.” And then you get into, where did these New England pastors, where the pilgrims get their idea? From their pastors. They were congregationalist pastors, which was a church model where everybody in the congregation was to be involved.

(25:02):
The pastor, whose goal was to get everybody to have their own relationship with God and then coach them and nurture them up, showing how God moved in the past. If he’s going to do anything now, it’s got to line up with it until they become mature Christians. And then the goal is you get involved in doing something. And this thing called the body of Christ grows.

But that’s different from the hierarchal model of church government, which is clergy laity, where the clergy does all the ministry and the laity’s lazy and watches. And the king of England was the head of the clergy. He was the head. And so the pilgrims, breaking away, they basically took their church model of government and they made it their community model of government. Everybody’s in, and their church building was actually called the meeting house. The word synagogue in Hebrew means meeting house.

(25:48):
And that’s where the Levites would teach the law, but that’s where they would elect their city elders. So in New England, they had the old South meeting house in Boston, right? That’s where they’d go for church, but that’s where they were to let their city elders. I mean, why build an entirely separate building just to talk about a different subject? And everybody in the town were Christians. There were no non-Christians to let take over the government so the Christians could sit there and do nothing.

No, everybody in Boston was a member of the Puritans. Everybody in Hartford, Connecticut was a member of Thomas Hooker’s congregation. Everybody in Rhode Island was a Baptist with Roger Williams and John Clark. And so New England was the greenhouse. It was this experiment of taking church government and making it their community government.

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:39):
Bill, I’m thinking of students who are in college right now. And I’m sure listening to this or watching this show right now, they’re thinking, “I wish Professor Federer could come with me to class because all of this needs to be said, but I don’t know what to say or how to say it.” Can you help them a little bit? How would you start? I mean, should you talk about this kind of thing in lectures? And obviously we could get your books and read them and there are a lot of other good resources available, but coach us through that a little bit because there’s so much here where we need to be people who can stand up in this time.

William Federer (27:21):
Well, I like to let history speak for itself. There’s a phrase I use, let history say what you can’t. And because if you’re in a setting where if you share your opinions, “Oh, you’re pushing your Christian faith,” but it’s like, well, back to Plato. So Plato says democracy is doomed to fail and the people are going to want somebody to come along and fix it. And at first he’s all smiles, but then he ends up consolidating power and he becomes a tyrant, and Plato called him.

So Plato said the best you can hope for is a nice tyrant. He’s the philosopher king. He’s the head of gold and his administrators and military are the arms and chest of silver. Together they make up the ruling class and everyone else is the abdomen of iron and bronze. They are the ruled class. So socialism, going back to Plato, is a two-tiered society of a ruling class and a ruled class.

(28:16):
Now, little side note, even if you have a great philosopher king, he does not live forever. And at some point, he’s going to have some son or grandson that does not know how to rule, but likes his job and he’s going to be oppressive. So that’s the dilemma. Joseph in Egypt concentrated power and gave it to the Pharaoh. And what did that Pharaoh do? He fed the children of Israel, gave him the best land of Gotian, but then there was a new Pharaoh that did not know Joseph. And he used all that concentrated power to oppress the children of Israel and enslave them and throw their sons in the Nile River.

So that’s the dilemma. That’s why at the tower of Babel, God scattered the power, but it’s almost like every generation since tries to reconcentrate it. And you always have somebody say, “Well, I want to concentrate because I want to do something good.” The problem is, as good as you are, at some point, that concentrated power is going to be handed on to somebody that’s not good.

(29:06):
And so God’s idea was you just separated and put it into the hands of the people. Well, anyway, back to Plato, he says that this head of gold and his arms and chest of silver are the ruling class and everybody else is the abdomen of iron and bronze. They’re the ruled class. So two tiered society, the ruling class are above the law. They’re politically connected, they’re supported by commoners. And they can do special things like getting their hair styled when nobody else can. Sort of a little jab at Nancy Pelosi there when she was getting her hair styled in California when everything was shut down.

But now the ruled class, this is interesting. In Plato’s scenario here, everybody is provided for, but nobody owns anything. It’s all held in common. It’s the ruling class that decides who gets what. And so it’s the saying, “He holds the purse strings, has the power.” Now there’s no families in Plato’s perfect society.

(30:04):
The government decides who gets to have kids and the government takes the children away from their families before they’ve been affected by the habits of their parents. And they bring them in and he says, the children will be taught lies. Noble lies. Plato said, “We want one single grand lie which will be believed by everybody.”

So here, this philosopher king is going to take the kids away from the parents and he’s going to indoctrinate them with these lies. And the lies support him being in power, but that’s okay because he’s the head of gold and we tried the democracy thing didn’t work, so this is the best you can hope for. That’s Plato’s scenario. Now, Plato inspired somebody about 2,000 years later named Sir Thomas Moore. He wrote a book called Island of Utopia. In the year 1516, Utopia means nowhere. It’s a fictitious island off the coast of South America.

(30:54):
And it’s written as a Greek dialogue with a traveler named Hai Flodeas, which means peddler of nonsense. So here we have the island of nowhere, Utopia, told by the peddler of nonsense. And on this island, it’s a perfectly structured society with the ruling class and the commoners. There’s free healthcare. There’s free identical clothing. Everyone receives free welfare. There’s free meals in monastic communal style dining halls. Everyone lives in free identical three-story public housing.

There’s no locks on any doors. There’s no private property. All the property and goods are stored in a communal warehouse, which the ruling class decides who gets what. There are no taverns, no ale houses, no coffee houses, no places for private gatherings on Utopia. There’s no privacy. Everyone is tracked everywhere you go with an internal passport. If you’re caught without it, it’s a lifetime of slavery. The government decides everyone’s careers.

(31:58):
There are no families on this Utopia. The government regulates childbearing. Very similar to China’s one child policy or Margaret Sanger who said, “No woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit.” And so that inspired Sir Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis written in 1626, which is a fictitious island in the South Pacific. Again, highly structured, little more scientific careers.

And somebody wrote a satire on that, and you’ve read it. It’s Jonathan Switz, Gulliver’s Travels. Here’s Gulliver washed up on an island and finds out it’s highly structured with this ruling class and they’re ridiculous in controlling everybody’s lives. And then the ruled class where they just have to work their jobs and it makes fun of it all. Why is this significant? It was around this time that the pilgrims came to America. And the pilgrims didn’t have money for a boat ride.

(32:52):
So they approached different investors who pooled money into a company called the London Company and it had bylaws. And so you got these rich guys sitting around a table and they’re like, okay, let’s have everything owned in common. And sure enough, the bylaws for the pilgrims say all profits and benefits that are got by trade, traffic, trucking, working, fishing, or any other means shall remain in ye common stock. And all are to have their meat drink and apparel and all provision out of ye common stock.

William Bradford said they tried it and almost starved to death. Bradford said the failure of that experiment of communal service, which was tried for several years by good and honest men, proves the emptiness of the theory of Plato and other ancients applauded by some of latter times. I just think this is amazing. The pilgrims, William Bradford, in his history of the Plymouth Colony, cites Plato.

(33:46):
In other words, Claytos or Thomas Morris or Francis Baker, it’s all theoretical. A bunch of guys sitting around, the pilgrims actually tried to live this theoretical thing out and they knew they were trying to live out this theoretical thing. And here’s William Bradford saying, “This proves the emptiness of the theory of Plato, that the taking away a private property and possession in a community would make a state happy as if they were wiser than God.”

For in this instance, community of property was found to breed much confusion and discontent. The young men who were most able and fit for service objected to being forced to spend their time and strength in working for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. The strong man or the resourceful man had no more share of food, clothes, et cetera, than the weak man who was not able to do a quarter of what the other could.

(34:36):
This was thought injustice. The aged engraver men who were ranked and equalized in labor, food, clothes, et cetera, with the humbler and younger ones thought it’s some indignity and disrespect to them. As for men’s wives who were obliged to do service for other men, such as cooking, washing their clothes, et cetera, they considered it a kind of slavery and many husbands would not brook it. You’re not going to wash that guy’s clothes.

He says, “Let not argue that this is due to human failing rather than to this communistic plant of life in itself.” He says, “God saw that there was a fitter plan for them, and so they considered how to raise more corn.” It was finally, each man was allowed to plant corn for his own household. Well, what a novel idea. You plant corn for Europe. So every family was assigned a parcel of land.

(35:25):
This was very successful. It made all hands more industrious, much more corn was planted. The women now went willingly into the field and took their little ones with them to plant corn. Well, before they would allege weakness and inability and to have compelled them would have been thought great oppression. So what they did is they switched from company to covenant. They switched from involuntary to voluntary.

And so instead of the bylaws, the government’s saying that everything’s taken away owned in common and then the ruling class distributed. No, you get your own stuff and you get to be moved upon in your heart to voluntarily give away some of your stuff to care for your neighbor. And it’s called charity. And the thought is, well, wasn’t the early church socialist? No, the early church was the early church. Socialism is counterfeit early church and the differences between the words voluntary and involuntary and church and government.

(36:20):
So the early believers voluntarily sold their land and placed it at the feet of the apostles for the church to distribute. They didn’t have the government take their land away and they were forced to put the money at the feet of Pilate for the Roman government to redistribute. And so one of the things, when the children of Israel went into the promised land, every family was given land.

They call it the promised land because every family got land. And if you own land, you can accumulate stuff. The Bible called that being blessed and you can be moved upon to give away some of your stuff. The Bible called it charity. Lenin said socialism is a transition phase between capitalism and communism. And Karl Mark says, communism can be summed up in one sentence, abolition of private property. So if you do not own any property, how can you be charitable?

(37:12):
How can you give away what you don’t have? What are you going to steal from somebody else and now you’re a thief? No, God entrusts you with stuff and you have the opportunity to manifest in this physical world what spiritually is in your heart.

Dr. Jeff Myers (37:27):
Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Man, there’s so much here, Bill. I think I’m going to need to watch this show again and just get a sense of all of the tie-ins. Tell us the name of the book again, because I know we’ve got to wrap up our show, but I want to be sure that everybody who’s watching this or listening to this can learn more and be prepared to articulate the very things that you’ve talked about.

William Federer (37:57):
So the title of the book is Socialism: The Real History From Plato to the Present. And the subtitle is How The Deep State Capitalizes on Crises to Consolidate Control. Wow. Now I do have my website, Americanminute.com, but if I could throw in one last thing on the French Revolution. Do I have a minute?

Dr. Jeff Myers (38:15):
Yes.

William Federer (38:16):
So we have our evolution. France has a revolution. They actually helped us in ours, and what they got in return was nothing but debt, lots of it. Then their crops failed. And the people thought if they could just chop off their king and queen’s head, their problems will be solved and it doesn’t help.

So they chop off the heads of the royalty, doesn’t help. Then they chop off the heads of the wealthy. You’ve got money, we don’t, you’re selfish. Then they chop off the heads of the business owners and farmers. You’ve got food and supplies. We don’t, you’re selfish. Then they chopped off the heads of the hoarders. You’ve got extra food. We don’t have enough. You’re selfish. Anyway, 30,000 people had their heads chopped off. But the motto of the French Revolution was liberty, equality, fraternity. Sounds nice, but they’re mutually exclusive. What do I mean?

(38:57):
Liberty is experienced individually, but fraternity is their word for socialism. It’s the fraternity, the collective, the group, the social contract, the state, the mob. And equality can be understood two ways. In America, it was equal treatment before the law. In France, it was everyone having an equal amount of stuff. And if the fraternity, the group, the collective, thinks you have too much stuff, it can trample on your individual liberty, confiscate all your stuff, redistribute it, and kill you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (39:30):
Yeah. Yeah.

William Federer (39:32):
And so every socialist revolution looks back to the French Revolution as the model.

Dr. Jeff Myers (39:38):
Wow. Well, to him who has ears, let him hear. Thanks, Bill, for your time. And this has been really amazing. I’m grateful.

William Federer (39:46):
Thank you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (39:48):
I don’t know about you. My brain is completely full. Listening to Bill Federer is like drinking out of a fire hydrant. I wouldn’t blame you if you want to listen to this show again. But I’d also encourage you to discover what Bill Federer is doing. Follow some of his work. You can just go to americanminute.com. He’ll send it to you by email. You can hear it on the radio, but this is fascinating stuff that you can use to share with friends about America’s amazing heritage and how to follow God. Proverbs says that righteousness exalts a nation. When we follow Jesus faithfully, we make every place we live a better place to be. Looking forward to seeing you next week.

(40:33):
Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show. It’s a podcast from Summit Ministries, summit.org. Summit is a nonprofit ministry that exists to equip and support the rising generation to embrace God’s truth and champion a biblical worldview.

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(41:37):
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