This English writer, prison doctor and psychiatrist has traveled the world, talked with the ordinary people elites avoid and warns America to stop its intellectual dishonesty to restore a healthy society.
He thinks his own country is incentivizing the decline of its culture with policies and has insightful suggestions for America, if we will only listen.
Anthony Daniels, who uses the pen name, Theodore Dalrymple, says the West is “too weak-willed,” “accepts obvious untruths” and “treats people as objects.” In this 28-minute video interview with The Daily Caller, he says “the intellectual dishonesty of the West is the greatest threat – we can’t say what we really think.” To him, the solution is to speak up and write, as he has with many articles and books, such as his 2007 one, “Our Culture, What’s Left of It.”
Dalrymple, based on his work in British prisons, is a critic of “determinism” — the dominant progressive theory that minimizes personal responsibility and portrays people as forced, by their circumstances, to behave as they do. Speaking here about prisoners who take heroin, he discusses this theory as it relates to what prisoners say about why they started taking heroin.
Last year for the Manhattan Institute, he penned a piece about the same theory as it applies to why people are getting obese. This theory, Dalrymple says, “dehumanizes the population.”
Asked why westerners join ISIS, he says he has been astounded by the “large number of people who enjoy cruelty,” but that he pins the reason on an idealistic “search for meaning and significance in a world [these recruits] don’t feel there is much meaning or significance.”
Asked about symptoms of a culture’s decline, Dalrymple speaks of his own community and says he can tell when the simplest problems, such as public drunkenness, become seemingly unsolvable to the local council. He also discusses family breakdown where serial step-parenting replaces fatherhood, graffiti, and the de-christianizing of a society.
The author sees no easy solutions but warns that waiting for the political “man on the white horse” is unrealistic. Rather, he says, culture is where a country will be saved.
He ends the interview explaining that the road to hell is paved with bad intentions masquerading as good ones.
WATCH:
For more on the prolific Theodore Dalrymple, see here where he contributes to the City Journal as the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and this recent Heritage Foundation lecture when he was in Washington, D.C. recently.
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