If criminals got this idea from anyone, it's leftist academics. It's called determinism, or the denial that free will exists. It also denies good and evil, responsibility for actions, and even personal identity.
When it comes, for example, to dealing with drug addicts, there’s no question in my mind that the drug-treating establishment tries to ingratiate itself with the drug takers by seeing everything from their point of view. But I don’t see it from their point of view. I see what they’re doing as wrong. It’s wrong from every point of view and it’s wrong for them personally, and I’m not going to tell them anything else. I refuse to use their argot. I call needles ‘needles’ and syringes ‘syringes’. I absolutely refuse to pretend that I have anything to do with their (I hate to use the word ‘culture’) way of life.
I like the fact that we're getting back to clearly defined morality, not the "shades of gray" subjective reality we've had for the past 30 years. There may be hope for us yet.
I like this guy. We need more folks with the confidence to speak their minds. Then he had to say this:
So what I object to is the cultural liberals view that they are being kind to the poor when actually they are making their lives hell.
Now I really like him and just may order his book.
Let’s try to pin down in a bit more detail what this culture is and what’s bad about it. You’re saying that it’s something that’s developed since the 1960s—it’s come out of the intellectual ferment of that decade, and it’s trickled down, and now we’re living with the consequences of it. So what is this culture?
TD: First of all I think it’s a radical egotism. And self-importance. What one wants oneself becomes all important. At the same time as that egotism, you also have a conception of rights. I suppose you can say it’s the libertarian right admixed with an element from the left of a rights-driven agenda.
/SNIP/
I think it might have in the sense that [they have taught that] nothing is wrong, everything is just a matter of lifestyle, there’s nothing to choose between going out to work and lying around in your own vomit. However, I think there is another point here that perhaps isn’t caused by intellectuals. That is that if you take the group of people who inject—and after all, it is a lower class thing to do—it is difficult to see for an uneducated and perhaps not very intelligent person how that person can have any self-respect. He’s not a provider for anybody. He’s never going to be a provider. If he has children, he has almost certainly abandoned them. So it’s difficult to see what you can offer these people other than this very miserable existence. In places like Zaire, where I’ve worked, there’s a kind of self-respect even amongst the very poor who, for example, although they live in mud and all the rest of it, will turn themselves out on Sunday immaculately. And you can still see that with West Indians in my area in Britain—the older generation on Sunday, they are so beautifully dressed, it’s a delight to see.
/SNIP/
West Africans in Britain, for example, are doing very well, but that never gets published or publicised because of course it automatically destroys the idea that racism is the problem. The whole apparatus of anti-race-discrimination should be dismantled because it’s quite unnecessary. It makes things worse, it makes people paranoid. I believe it to be deeply pernicious—and I don’t even believe that prejudice is necessarily a harmful thing for the person who suffers it (within reason), because it can actually be a spur to achievement—obviously within reason.
Interesting comments..
Well yes, if that freedom is taken to extremes, but there was an inherited understanding that freedom is only of value if people have some kind of virtue. Roger Kimball in one of his books quotes a judge from the last century who said that if people lose their sense of obedience to the unenforceable rules, then civilisation itself is in danger. He said that people should not think that because it is legally permissible to do something that it is permissible in any other sense. Obviously we do not want a law telling us to stand there and not stand there—but we have no internal sense that we don’t actually push in front of one another, or bash people aside, and that our rights have to be tempered by respect for other people’s rights—that is what seems to have changed. In Britain, for example, I speak with people on housing estates and they tell me that one of the worst things imaginable is having a neighbour who insists on playing music at three in the morning extremely loudly. It sounds like a trivial thing, but it isn’t trivial if it goes on night after night and if you know that if you draw attention to it you’re likely to be greeted with an angrily-wielded baseball bat because that person who’s wielding it thinks that you’re infringing his liberties. I think at one time everyone would have understood without it having to be explained that your right to your privacy and pleasures is tempered by my similar rights. But I think we’ve lost that sense.
/SNIP/
I think it’s modern culture. And modern ideas. The idea that human relationships can be freed of all social obligation and contractual obligation and that then the full, beautiful human personality comes out —well, it’s romantic drivel.
This guy has it going ON.
Keep the pings coming. It may be sporadic, but I'll be around.