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With the coyness of someone revealing a bizarre sexual taste, my patients would often say to me, "Doctor, I think I'm suffering from low self-esteem." This, they believed, was at the root of their problem, whatever it was, for there is hardly any undesirable behavior or experience that has not been attributed, in the press and on the air, in books and in private conversations, to low self-esteem, from eating too much to mass murder. Self-esteem is, of course, a term in the modern lexicon of psychobabble, and psychobabble is itself the verbal expression of self-absorption without self-examination. The former...

Readers of National Review need no introduction to Theodore Dalrymple. Under that byline, or his real name of Anthony Daniels, he is a frequent contributor. There's no one quite like him. He's been a doctor and worked in prisons, really coming to grips with the lower depths. Although he reports terrible things, and sometimes has a little gleam of I-told-you-so when reporting something even more terrible than what's gone before, he refuses to abandon his humane instincts and a belief that it's worth fighting for civilization even if the cause looks lost. His very latest book, just published by Encounter...

The latest research from Germany shows that people who are highly indebted are eleven times more likely than others to suffer from low back pain. This is so even when other factors are taken into account and controlled for. Rarely does medical research have such obvious policy implications. As everyone knows, low back pain is enormously damaging to the economy: it has been estimated that it costs the American economy $100 billion per year in lost production. Even in these days when you have to talk in trillions to get anyone’s attention, $100 billion is not trivial: it is, after...

As a doctor and psychiatrist, I spent an awful lot of my professional life trying to change individuals in a direction that I thought appropriate and beneficial for them. I am not under any illusions about how far I succeeded. I think I succeeded very little. At the best, I implanted the seeds of change rather than caused change itself. It was often the case that my patients had adopted grossly self-destructive paths in life, that viewed dispassionately and with a minimum of common sense could lead to nothing but misery, despair and chaos. Indeed, my patients often acknowledged this...

In the last few years, I have had the opportunity to compare the human and veterinary health services of Great Britain, and on the whole it is better to be a dog. As a British dog, you get to choose (through an intermediary, I admit) your veterinarian. If you don’t like him, you can pick up your leash and go elsewhere, that very day if necessary. Any vet will see you straight away, there is no delay in such investigations as you may need, and treatment is immediate. There are no waiting lists for dogs, no operations postponed because something...

Fujimori by Theodore Dalrymple (August 2009) Does the end justify the means? This question, difficult to answer in the abstract with a categorical negative or affirmative, occurred to me when I read that Alberto Fujimori, former president of Peru, had been sentenced to seven and a half years’ imprisonment for corruption, to run concurrently with the twenty-five years he is already serving for abuse of human rights. As it happens, I was in Peru just before, during and after the election that first brought Fujimori to power. His opponent was the world-famous novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, whom I, like many...

A recent Dutch visitor to my house in France was observant enough to notice that I disliked wasting food. He told me that he was very much of the same mind. It occurred to me then to try to find the cause and justification of our dislike of such waste. Where did it, this dislike, come from? What reason could we give for it? (These are not the same questions, of course.) The Dutch are famously parsimonious, but parsimony is neither one of my vices nor one of my virtues – and I leave it to others to decide which...

When prisoners are released from prison, they often say that they have paid their debt to society. This is absurd, of course: crime is not a matter of double-entry bookkeeping. You cannot pay a debt by having caused even greater expense, nor can you pay in advance for a bank robbery by offering to serve a prison sentence before you commit it. Perhaps, metaphorically speaking, the slate is wiped clean once a prisoner is released from prison, but the debt is not paid off... Yet the scale of a man’s evil is not entirely to be measured by its practical...

In 1960, the sociologist Daniel Bell published The End of Ideology, in which he argued that ideology—understood in the sense of a coherent, single-minded philosophical outlook or system of abstractions intended as much as a lever to change society as a description to explain it—was dead, at least in the West, and in the United States in particular. A combination of democracy and mass prosperity had “solved” the political question that had agitated humanity since the time of Plato. There were to be no more grand and transformative, if woefully erroneous, ideas; all that remained was public administration, with, at...

Staying recently in a South Yorkshire town called Rotherham—described in one guidebook as “murky,” an inadequate word for the place—I was interested to read in the local newspaper how the proprietors of some stores are preventing hooligans from gathering outside to intimidate and rob customers. They play Bach over loudspeakers, and this disperses the youths in short order; they flee the way Count Dracula fled before holy water, garlic flowers, and crucifixes. The proprietors had previously tried a high-pitched noise generator whose mosquito-like whine only those younger than 20 could detect. This method, too, proved effective, but the owners abandoned...

Is our society losing its way? An interview with psychiatrist and thinker Dr. Theodore Dalrymple. Bernard Chapin: In your essay, “The Roads to Serfdom,” you refer to a famous quote by George Bernard Shaw, who said, “We are all socialists now.” Are we all on the brink of becoming socialists once again? Why do you think, given the oppressive and pernicious nature of this method of governance, it remains politically viable? Dr. Dalrymple: I think it more likely that there will be an increase in corporatism than in socialism. America will not be socialist, but it might be corporatist (there...

When my mother arrived in England as a refugee from Nazi Germany, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, she found the people admirable, though not without the defects that corresponded to their virtues. By the time she died, two-thirds of a century later, she found them rude, dishonest, and charmless. They did not seem to her, moreover, to have any virtues to compensate for their unpleasant qualities. I occasionally asked her to think of some, but she couldn’t; and neither, frankly, could I. snip What, exactly, were the qualities that my mother had so admired? Above all, there...

Global euphoria is better than the disrepute of the Bush years, but so far our new president’s appeal is entirely symbolic.By Theodore Dalrymple Like it or not, the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States has done an immense amount to restore American prestige in the world. Not since the destruction of the Twin Towers has there been dancing in the streets anywhere on the planet to celebrate events in America. It is to be hoped, of course, that it is not the same people doing the dancing.In Delhi, Indians kissed Obama’s photo. Parties spilled into...

It is one of the evils of evil tyrannies that they seek to implicate everyone in their system, by means of spying, the granting of privileges, etc. But it is not only tyrannies that do this: modern bureaucracies, even in liberal democratic states, do this also. For example, in the British state hospital system (and no modern state does entirely without public hospitals), doctors undergo a compulsory annual appraisal by a colleague, decreed and designed by the administration, without any evidence that it improves performance in any way whatever. Its purpose is not to improve performance; it purpose is to...

Theodore DalrympleChildhood’s End Britain, land of bleak houses and low expectations Growing up in today’s England is far from the idyll depicted in this nineteenth-century lithograph. NB: This is a fairly long article. I have taken the liberty of skipping the first half --except the two opening lines-- as it deals chiefly with horrific examples of modern day British "childhood". I urge the reader not to skip it.--YD] Britain is the worst country in the Western world in which to be a child, according to a recent UNICEF report. Ordinarily, I would not set much store by such a report;...

Oh, to be in England. Theodore Dalrymple: Childhood’s End - Britain, land of bleak houses and low expectations Growing up in today's England is far from the idyll depicted in this nineteenth-century lithograph. kate greenaway/Victoria & Albert Museum, London/Art Resource, NY Growing up in today’s England is far from the idyll depicted in this nineteenth-century lithograph. Britain is the worst country in the Western world in which to be a child, according to a recent UNICEF report. Ordinarily, I would not set much store by such a report; but in this case, I think it must be right—not because I...

For centuries, the great city of Smyrna was a European foothold on the Anatolian coast. The British Levantine Company had had a factory there since 1667, trading in raisins and carpets, and even then the place was renowned for its lively social life. Francesco Lupazzoli, the priapic Venetian consul, lived on a diet of fruit, bread and water and a few slices of unseasoned meat, yet survived until the age of 114, and fathered 126 children on his five wives and innumerable Smyrniot mistresses. By the end of the 19th century, Smyrna had grown into one of the largest, richest...

<p>Acting recently as an expert witness in a murder trial, I became aware of a small legal problem caused by the increasingly multicultural nature of our society. According to English law, a man is guilty of murder if he kills someone with the intention either to kill or to injure seriously. But he is guilty of the lesser crime of manslaughter if he has been sufficiently provoked or if his state of mind at the time was abnormal enough to reduce his responsibility. The legal test here is a comparison with the supposedly ordinary man—the man on the Clapham omnibus, as the legal cliché has it. Would that ordinary person feel provoked under similar circumstances? Was the accused’s state of mind at the time of the killing very different from that of an average man?</p>

Theodore Dalrymple: Delusions of Virtue - We should hope Hillary Clinton’s Bosnia tale was a lie—and not a fantasy. 3 April 2008 Nietzsche, in one of his disconcertingly piercing aperçus, wrote: “‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains adamant. At last—my memory yields.” Hillary Clinton seemed to reverse the Nietzschean order of things when she “misspoke”: “I cannot have done that,” said her memory. “I must have done that,” said her pride, and remained adamant. At last—her memory yielded. Was she lying? A journalist called and asked my opinion as...

Dr. Theodore Dalrymple (aka Anthony Daniels) is a retired English psychiatrist who spent most of his career working on the grounds of an urban prison, an experience that he chronicled in a regular, haunting column for the London Spectator. He recently retired to France but continues to write voluminously for outlets such as the Daily Telegraph, the New Criterion, and the City Journal. He is the Dietrich Weismann fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author, most recently, of the slender, devastatingly argued volume In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas (Encounter Books). BC: Dr. Dalrymple, would you say...