The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 170. Life at the bottom | Theodore Dalrymple (AKA Anthony Daniels)

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

Dr. Anthony Daniels is a British writer and essayist. He is known for writing such pieces as Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, The Mandarins and the Masses, Not With a Bang With A Whimper, Spoiled rotten: The toxic cult of sentimentality, and The Terror of Existence. His columns in the Times, Spectator, and The Wall Street Journal.Dr. Anthony Daniels and Jordan discussed a variety of topics relating to distinct differences in culture and mindset in the poor “Underclass” in Britain. They examine many stories from Dr. Daniel's time as a consulting physician in a prison and hospital in one of the poorest areas of London and draw conclusions on similarities in violence, domestic abuse, learned helplessness, education, monogamy, the disintegration of the family, and more.Find more Dr. Anthony Daniels writing under his pen name Theodore Dalrymple 

Welcome to the JBP podcast season 4 episode 23 with Dr. Anthony Daniels. Dr. Anthony Daniels is a British writer and essayist better known by his pen name, Theodore Dalrymple. He's known for writing such pieces as Life at the Bottom, the World View that makes the underclass, the Mandarin's in the masses, not with a bang with a whimper, spoiled rotten, the toxic cult of sentimentality, and the terror of existence. He has written calms in the times, the spectator, and the Wall Street Journal. Dr. Anthony Daniels and my dad discussed a variety of topics relating to distinct differences in culture and mindset in the poor underclass in Britain. They examined many stories from Dr. Daniels' time as a consulting physician in a prison and hospital in one of the poorest areas of London, and draw conclusions on similarities in violence, domestic abuse, learned helplessness, education, monogamy, the disintegration of family and more.

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and two free pillows for our listeners at helixleap.com slash Jordan. That's helixleap.com slash Jordan for up to $200 off in two free pillows. Hello, everyone. I'm very pleased to welcome today one of my, one of the writers I admire for the content and for the quality of the prose itself. He's been compared to George Orwell, which is high praise indeed as one of England's, as one of Great Britain's finest essayists, Dr. Anthony Danielis, better known by his pen name, Theodore Del Rimple. He worked as a prison doctor and psychiatrist, retired in 2005, but worked all over the world and traveled. And he's written many books, some of which have had a rather

profound cultural impact, including life at the bottom, the worldview that makes the underclass 2001, where he discusses what you might describe as the philosophy of poverty, our culture, what's left of it, the mandarins and the masses, 2005, not with a bang, but a whimper. The politics and culture of decline, 2008, spoiled rotten, the toxic cult of sentimentality, 2010, and the terror of existence with Catholic theologian Kenneth

Francis in 2018. For the spectator, he wrote a weekly column on his experiences as a prison doctor for 14 years. Those were later collected in various books. He wrote a weekly column for the British Medical Journal, as well, for six years discussing medicine and literature. His essays have appeared in the finest newspapers and magazines in the world, including the times, the spectator and the Wall Street Journal. Welcome and thank you very much for agreeing to talk

with me. Well, thank you for asking me. I'm going to start by telling you how I found out about you. I, when I was working as a clinical psychologist, I had a social worker as a client who, second generation immigrant, female, who had been a rather radically leftist thinker in her youth and then spent 20 years in the social work trenches and was eventually hounded out of her profession, hounded out and bullied out of her profession by the radical leftists themselves.

And she mentioned life at the bottom to me. And so I picked it up and read it. And I thought, I've never heard anyone state this so bluntly. I'm what struck me, I guess, was three things was the, you're, apart from the quality of your writing and the content, the particularities of your experience. You said, for example, that you had dealt with poverty, with people who were in poverty in various places in the world, Africa, for example.

And then in Great Britain, in the inner cities, in what you regard as the underclass, a permanent multi-generational segment of society that are in some sense, they fall out of the bottom of the culture in your view. And what you concentrated, you focused on the difference between that poverty and the poverty of absolute deprivation that you encountered in places like Africa. But then you added another twist to it, which was you made a very, very strong case

that there was a philosophy in some sense, or maybe an anti-philosophy, but it boils down to the same thing, a worldview that constituted the essence of the poverty that you saw in Great Britain, which you also regarded in many ways as that constituted the essence of the poverty that you saw in Great Britain, which you also regarded in many ways as more severe and less addressable than the poverty

that you had seen in other in the developing world, for example. So it was your combination of broad, worldly experience, intense involvement with the underclass that so many people feel morally obliged to save in some sense, but actually never interact with your experiences as a psychiatrist, and then your willingness to put down these very critical and and and certainly politically incorrect by virtually every measure observations, which to me rang true, generally true, which I hadn't encountered with any other thinker. Yes. Well, I didn't really start out with any preconceptions, certainly not any political preconception. I just saw a lot of patients and the penny began to drop about what their lives were like and what they expected from life. Who did you see? Tell everyone about the age of the patient.

I worked in an inner city hospital. The inner city hospital was right next door to the prison and the main difference between these two great institutions was the far more violence in the hospital in the prison. But I would work in the morning in the hospital and then I would go and work in the prison in the afternoon and in the afternoon and often at night and weekends as well. So in the hospital, I saw maybe something in the region of, I didn't count exactly, 10 to 15,000 cases of attempted suicide or at least of suicidal gestures that varied from,

you know, real attempts at suicide, to attempts to bring parents to heal everything in between. But anyway, everyone, I examined them all, when I say examined, I mean, I spoke to them all, and of course they told me about the life around them. So they told me about the about the lives of people around them. And so in the end, I probably heard about the lives of maybe 40, 50,000 people, of course, refracted through these people's lenses, but nevertheless, though it was a selected sample of people, it wasn't a small sample of people.

And so obviously I began to draw some conclusions see some generalizations, which I didn't start with. And so we could talk about the selection for a minute. I mean, because you were working in the hospital and in the prison, you obviously saw people who are hospitalized or who were in prison. And so obviously there's a selection there, but your patients were drawn from lower socioeconomic status. So they were poor and dispossessed, but comparatively speaking. But, and they had got into trouble of one former,

and other that was sufficiently damaging, so that they ended up being brought to the attention of the medical authorities, because of the damage that had been been inflicted on them or prison authorities because of the damage that they inflicted on other people. So that's the selection. It would be poor people, relatively poor people who were also in trouble. And you said you didn't start with political intent while you were a psychiatrist. But, well, walk us through what you saw, if you would, and over and over, and what you started to conclude, and why

you started to communicate it. Well, I'll deal with why I started to communicate it. It was so terrible that it would, that I would have found it very difficult to keep it to myself and remain sane. In fact, my predecessor in the job, I found little bottles of vodka everywhere where he went, because I think he had found it extremely difficult. It was very, very distressing.

Once, for example, I kept a diary of what I saw every day, rather than mold it in a kind of literary fashion for articles, I just wrote down what I saw. And after a very short time, actually, only a few days, I thought, I can wrote down what I saw. And after a very short time, actually, only a few days, I thought, I can't go on with this. First of all, no one would want to read it, it's just too terrible. So actually things were worse than I described in my book. Now, what I saw was a complete social, what seemed to me, a complete social breakdown. I mean, there were almost

no families in the sense of mother, father and children. That was almost unknown in the area, practically unknown. If you asked 16-year-olds who their father is, they replied with things like, do you mean my father at the moment? Or they would say, when I say, who is your father, they just say no. Well, when I went, I was listening to your book this morning, Life at the Bottom, at 2.5 times normal speed, and it was quite the, I mean, I'd read it before, but I had forgotten what the, it's an unending litany of complete calamity across every dimension you can possibly imagine. And then you said you saw like 20,000 of people who were in dire

suicidal straits. In addition, I, I presume that you had patients other than those who were suicidal as well. Yes, well, it made me because I was working in a general hospital, then I would see organic patients with organic problems and a few others. People who'd been beaten by their partners. Oh, I saw that that was standard, of course. I discovered that about 80% of the women 80% of the women who my soul had suffered violence at the hands of their one or more of their sexual partners. We can dig in there. You tell this story that's really quite interesting. So you're, and very, what would you say, uh, libel, any discussion of it is libel to create controversy. uh, libel, any discussion of it is libel to create controversy. So you, you talked about the women that you saw the patients who chronically chose males who you could identify at a glance as

extraordinarily likely to burst into violent jealous rages and become physically violent. And you also point out that the markers for that were not precisely subtle, comparing the men that you were looking at, I believe, to your neighbor's Tom Cat, who had been in enough fight, so his head was a massive shredded ears and scars and missing an eye. And so these were men who had shaved heads, multiple scars from battles, often tattooed, often tattooed on their fists with blatant messages of nihilism or social rejection or anger or threats or curse words or so it wasn't exactly subtle.

And you said that they invariably wore an expression of malign contempt, something like that. And they were people you would obviously give wide birth to in the street in broad daylight. Yet they were invariably tangled up with a woman or two or three or 10 who they were abusing serially. But, and the women seemed in some sense blind to this, but not only the underclass women that you were serving, but you also mentioned that that was extraordinarily prevalent among

the nursing staff. And so, walk us through that and tell us how you make sense of that. Well, it wasn't, I wouldn't say it was prevalent amongst the nursing staff. It was present in the nursing staff. Well, my interpretation, which would be, of course, regarded as highly reactionary, in the end, this is the conclusion I came to, was that because sexual relations had been freed from all contractual, cultural, economic, restraint and constraint, then what was left was a kind of free for all. And the men wanted exclusive sexual possession of somebody, but at the same time they wanted a complete sexual freedom.

Now these things don't go together very well. I mean, if there's complete sexual freedom, okay, if there's complete sexual freedom, But if at the same time you want possibly for reasons of boosting yourself, image, the exclusive sexual possession of somebody, then everyone around you is the same. Then the men would see other men as threats. So they would become extremely jealous because they would fear any contact between their girlfriend,

another wise girlfriend, with another man would lead to or might lead to a liaison. And after all, since they were sexually predatory in that way, they assumed that everyone around them was of similar ill, and which was often true. And this used to lead to fights, for example, in so-called nightclubs, which, I mean, when I was young, a nightclub was a place where there was a floor show and little tables around but these were great cabins of thousands of people it was assumed to be a challenge by the girlfriend's boyfriend, and so there could be fights and even murder. So I got in trouble with the New York Times because I pointed out at one

point during the discussion with this journalist that societies all around the world, and I thought of this as a universal anthropological truth and something that was well established to the point of being self-evident, but apparently not, that a major problem that every society faces is the control of aggression by young men in particular. And generally, as a consequence of sexual jealousy and striving, and the universal

answer to that in so far as there is one was the development of monogamous norms and social enforcement of those norms. And you know, you you just described it in some sense as inhibition and control, but I think it's also useful and to think about it as integration and into a more sophisticated game, you know, being in a marriage obviously does involve not chasing after other people sexually. But it isn't all inhibitory within the marriage, something sophisticated and hopefully wonderful in the long term is supposed to occur as a preferable substitute. And I mean preferable, if it's done properly, to the short term gratification that might be obtained by serial relationships, say, or sporadic relationships, because

they're actually very difficult, and they also produce these valid outcomes that you described. And I was pelleried for that in quite a remarkable way, claims were made that I was making the claim that governments should hand over unwilling women to undesirable monogamous men or undesirable men just to enforce monogamy. But really what I meant was, well, one of the reasons for marriage, apart from the fact that two parents, two parent families are clearly much better for children with the father there, is that societies that allow unregulated polygamy or degenerate into that are invariably rife with extraordinarily high levels of violence. Yes, well, that's what I saw. Now, of course, the destruction of the idea of

Of course, the destruction of the idea of the family, as we once knew it, has been a long process, I think, by intellectuals, literary intellectuals, and it's perfectly true that a bad marriage from which you can't escape is hell. I mean, it's a kind of concentrated hell. And marriage is not easy. So people thought, well, I think this is my explanation, they thought that there were, if we could get rid of all the inhibitions and restraints and frustrations because there are frustrations, then the full beauty of the human personality would emerge and we would associate with one another just by love and nothing else. And when love was over then you just just by love and nothing else. And when love was over then, you just go onto something else, somebody else.

But this is actually a very shallow view of things, apart from anything else, in a marriage, if a marriage, if there are difficulties in the way of ending a marriage, this gives you actual incentives to make it work. It also tells you that society values what you're doing, which helps you continue to value it, which makes you likely to stick more likely to stick with it during periods of doubt. I mean, obviously life is extraordinarily difficult and just on its own and it's certainly no easier if you're alone, that's for sure. And so life is difficult when you

have a partner. And because of that difficulty, but not because of anything necessarily intrinsic to the state of marriage itself, you need social institutions to buttress the structure so that you need social institutions to buttress the structure so that all of the weight doesn't fall on those individuals alone. I mean, I've had clients in my practice who are living together, and when I ask them why they don't get married, the man often will say, well, we don't need a piece of paper to signify our commitment. And I think, first, I've heard that 20 times times and you might think that's a philosophy, but it's actually a pretty stunningly shallow cliche. And second, we're not talking about a piece of paper here. We're actually talking about something serious.

You stand up in front of your family, your peers, your friends, the people that love you, the people that you want to spend time with, hypothetically, for the rest of your life, that you're going to depend on, that are going to depend on you. And you say, look, this is important. I want you to recognize it. We're now one thing. We're going to give it our best shot. And it would be nice if you support us. And that's not trivial. It's vital. And that's still why I think marriage may be less frequent, especially among the lower classes than it once was, although cohabiting isn't or perhaps it is as well. But romance movies that feature a wedding are certainly not any less popular and marriage is still just as popular among the upper classes, which is something you also discuss in books like the Mandarin's and the Masses, for example. You're not very happy with these philosophical

discussions of freedom conducted by people say like Jean Paul Sartre and the absolutely catastrophic consequences of that unbridled thinking on people who are at the bottom of the hierarchy. of that unbridled thinking on people who were at the bottom of the hierarchy. Yes. With regard to the piece of paper business, I remember I had a vision who had, and she was not a foolish woman, had tried to kill herself, eventually unfortunately did kill herself. She wanted very much a man to marry her. And the man didn't want to marry her, but he wanted to cohabit with her.

And I remember him saying to me, I don't see what she's worried about. It's only a piece of paper. And I said, well, if it's only a piece of paper, why don't you sign it? Because it's only a piece of paper and I said, well, if it's only a piece of paper, why don't you sign it? Because it's only a piece of paper either way. So obviously this revealed that it wasn't only a piece of paper. It was a commitment which he was unwilling for some reason to make he had to, he had personal.

Well, there's also the question of, well, what what is the basis of your relationship? If it isn't actually a formally recognized permanent commitment, say you're cohabiting with someone, think in Canada at six months and it's basically common law marriage. So what is it is we're going to hang around with each other till one of us find someone better, but you'll do for now. Is that the like I don't know what? Well, I think it's I it's particularly with the men, I think they they don't want to close off all possibilities. They think you see they think that having an infinite choice is actually not committing to anything, which of course is a mistake. And what do you think it is committing to? Which the...

The high-perfetical, continual choice. That is just they hope to be able to continue a life of pleasure-romantic idea of love. So do you think that the intellectuals that were actively engaged in the destruction of traditional structures or the criticism of traditional structures were just so well protected by the fact of those structures that they were only able to see the residual problems? I think that was it, yes. And of course, they were also protected economically, because economics does make a big difference here. I mean, I know that in practice, the upper classes, at least they preserve their hypocrisy.

If they break the rules, they at least pretend not to be breaking that will try to pretend not to be breaking the rules on the whole. But they are protected from consequences of breakdown to some extent, not in completely, of course, because it's an emotional aspect. But money does make a big difference

but if you have no money and you have no support or the only support you have is rather miserable support of the state then the consequences are absolutely terrible and I saw hundreds and thousands of cases. So there's increasing support in the EU, for example, for schemes such as a universal basic income. And you know, you just made an argument that at least from one perspective could be viewed as Supportive of a scheme like that given that If you have a dearth of material resources a dearth of money You're much more vulnerable to catastrophe and so you might think well if we grant people a minimum basic income that Eradicates that problem, but you also tie the degeneration that you saw, which I want to talk about more

to the rise of the welfare state. And so, and one of the things that, and I think this is because of my clinical experience, and it isn't clear to me that giving people money actually solves the problem of poverty. It because poverty is very much more complex than the mere lack of money, even though that's certainly a cardinal element of poverty. And that's the other thing, I would say, or another thing that you pushed out constantly

in your writings is that there's an entire world view that is associated with violent and catastrophic poverty, and that's not precisely an economic issue, even though economic issues might exaggerate its danger. So, tell us some stories and tell us what you concluded from what you watched? Well, I concluded that we had created quite a lot of people who had nothing to hope for and nothing to fear. See, of a life different from the life they had, going to work wouldn't make much difference to them economically, as failing to go to work would not make much difference to them. This isn't actually necessary aspect of the welfare state.

After all, Britain was far worse in these respects than other countries which have welfare states, in some cases, more generous than the British welfare state. But the British welfare state created people, a class of people who were permanently in this condition and had no real incentive to get out of it. So, this created a kind of, it created sometimes a lassitude, but it was also dishonest. It created a kind of dishonesty because actually the more problems they made for themselves, the more they were rewarded. I remember we had a peculiar demoralization of the world, I don't mean, I mean, actual removal of morality from all human consideration.

I remember once I had a patient with a multiple sclerosis. And her husband worked, but he didn't earn a lot of money. And she had multiple sclerosis, which was clearly not her fault. And they needed some adjustments to their house so that she could get out of the house more easily and so on. And it seemed to me this as far as I'm concerned, that's a perfectly good way to, well this is a place where the where the welfare state could actually help. where the welfare state could actually help. So I phoned a social worker,

and I made a grave mistake. I said, I have a particularly deserving case. Oh, yes. And there was a stony silence on the other end. And then she said that all cases were deserving. In other words, you couldn't distinguish between this case of need, which was just one of those things. It was nobody's fault.

And someone who took drugs, set fire to his house in a state of intoxication. There was no difference. And since, of course, people who behave badly become more needy, they actually gain more attention and more sympathy. That's if you take dessert away, if you remove dessert from all considerations. And this means that actually one source of meaning in life is completely removed. And what we saw with these people who had no religion, that's the case you're making. It's not even just removed. It's actually punished, not actively punished, which is even worse than mere removal.

And you kind of claim, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, that there's a perverse attractiveness of that to the educated helping classes in producing a group of people who are so much beneath them in some sense that normal moral standards don't don't anymore apply. And what that means, I mean, if that's the case, that perverse sense of superiority and the moral gratification that might provide, if that's the case, then people are being actively punished for doing anything that might lift the mode of the circumstances that they find themselves in. Yeah. Well, I think one of the things that is clear about the, shall I say, the intellectual classes is one of their greatest fears is the fear of being considered sensorious. And of course, sensoriousness is not a very attractive quality. So, but the best way to avoid being considered sensorious is to fail to make any judgment, whatever. But this is completely impossible. It's impossible to not to make judgments. Judgment is part of being human.

Well, you can't perceive without judging, because you have to select the thing you should be actively at from everything else you might be looking at. So every act is hierarchical and implies a value structure. And a choice. I mean, choice imposes the necessity to make judgments. Now, if you pretend that you are not making judgments, then you are actually facilitating the worst judgments. So, but as I said, I think the intellectuals, and I mean, I have this fear myself, when I wrote, I thought, is anyone going to think you are an unfeeling, sensorious person? Because you, I mean, after all, I'm comparatively fortunate. Here I am coming into the lives of people who

are unfortunate, many of them are unfortunate. There's no question about that, many of them, you know, they're born in a low social class, they've been given an extremely bad educational lesson, actually quite a costly education, but it's extremely bad, and so on and so forth. And here I am coming in and making, making judgment saying, your behavior is what is causing your unhappiness. Is that the root of your unhappiness? And actually, I tried to demeticalize a lot of their unhappiness because I didn't think their unhappiness was a medical condition. So, well, that is the danger with judgment. I mean, I faced this with my clinical clients constantly, but also in the case of my daughter and in my own life for that matter. If you're dealing with someone who's ill, it's very difficult to encourage and it's very difficult to discipline. And by that, I mean, encourage and instill

discipline, which is something that you want to do if you're a parent, if your child is ill, it's very difficult to tell when the illness is sufficient reason so that something isn't being done. Right? And so when you're dealing with dispossessed people, you have the same problem. Yeah. Well, judgment is always vulnerable. So I would never say that I had never made any mistakes in my judgment.

You know, sometimes I would be too harsh maybe and sometimes I wouldn't be hard enough. But the, I mean, that's just a consequence of not having enough knowledge and so on and so forth. But to pretend you're not making a judgment, is itself a judgment? I mean, you're judging that it's, that you shouldn't make judgments. It's also the abdication of responsibility. I mean, I thought this through with my clinical clients at sort of a technical level too.

I, I learned a lot from reading Karl Rogers. And I would say a certain amount of unthinking sentimentality can be laid at his feet in the clinical and social work world, partly because he proposed that unconditional positive regard for his clients was the appropriate pathway forward. His critics pointed out that if you watched Karl Rogers in action, what he was practicing involved, careful discrimination. But what he meant was something like, except that the person is of fundamental value and has the capacity to move towards the light, let's say, and work in that vein. But what I would tell my clients,

and this was a consequence of my realization that judgment was not only necessary, but crucially important to forward movement, was that I'm not offering you unconditional positive regard. I'm on the side of the part of you that wants things to be better. And I'm going to help you discriminate

between the part of you that doesn't want things to be better, that might even want them to be actively worse for all sorts of reasons that all people are prey to. And the part of you that is striving to make everything better. And we'll discuss what better means and we'll negotiate the strategies. But let's

make it clear, this enterprise is to get rid of what is undesirable and to foster what is desirable and to critically distinguish between those two, which is absolutely vital. You can throw your hands up and say, I'm not going to be judgmental, but all that means you're not distinguishing between what's good and what isn't. Well, I think the, what I was, what I tried to get at was with patients was our, if you like, our existential equality that I made choices, but they made choices to,

I mean, of course there were, there are conditions where that is not so, and you have to make the distinction between those cases where people really do not have any capability. I mean, there are such cases, of course. But in the prison, for example, one thing that made me a little bit optimistic was that I never said anything in my articles that I didn't actually say to the patients. And the patients understood, I mean, there were a few in the prison who I think were not reachable by this kind of argumentation.

But for example, I would not, I, in the prison, I said I would not allow the prisoners to swear in front of me. And I had no means of stopping them, of course, and if they continued, I couldn't refuse to treat them on the grounds that they had sworn in from me. But I did actually stop them. And I mean, why do you think they stopped? Ah, well, I provided an argument. I don't know whether one is allowed to use bad language or new or podcast.

You can anything you have to say that you think is necessary, you're free to say. Okay, well, a patient would come in and say, oh, God, it's fucking headache. So I would say, well, before come in and say, I've got this fucking headache. I would say, well, before we go any further, can you tell me the difference between a headache and a fucking headache? Tell me the difference.

And he would say, well, that's how I speak. And I say, yes, that's what I'm complaining of. And he said, well, why shouldn't I? Why shouldn't I be like this? Because that's me, you know, and I say, well, supposing at the end of this consultation, I say to you, now, I hear some fucking pills, take two of the fuckingers, every four fucking work, fucking come back and I give you some other fuckers. You find this a bit strange, wouldn't you? So you say you said yes. So I said, well, we're equal. I don't talk to you like that. And you don't talk to me like that. And they just stopped. And you meant that. What? You meant that. I meant that, yes.

Yeah, right. Well, that's so, you know, so, and they all just... You're complimenting, you're complimenting, you're client instantly. You're saying, look, you know, we're engaged in a serious enterprise here and I actually care about it.

And maybe we should attend to the words we're using. You too, or we're just playing. And I actually care about you getting better. So how about we watch our language? I'll do it, you do it, and you can do it. And so yes, people are gonna agree to that. Well, I used to have a good laugh sometimes. I remember the law was that every prisoner had to be examined

medically within 24 hours of being received into the prison. And in practice, it was usually within two hours of being received in prison. And I used to do these examinations. One prisoner said he wanted his medicine. And I didn't think he should have what he was, he alleged he was taking I had no idea whether he was taking it or not. And I said I see no medical indication for him. And he started screaming. He said, you murder, I said, you're a murderer, you're

not a doctor, you're a murderer. And of course, this was a Victorian prison with Ahn work and everything. So it was echoing all through this enormous building. And anyway, in the end, I said, well, that's enough. You have to go now. And so he went and screaming still. And all. And then in the next day, I saw saw him and he came up to me and he apologized and and he said I was I was bang out of order that was this expression I was bang

out of order I'm sorry doctor I said oh never mind I said I've been called far worse than that far worse than that. And then I said, and actually you had a wonderful effect on the other prisoners who I whom I was examining because they were like lambs when they get in. And I said, you couldn't come and do it again this evening could you? I said, you couldn't come and do it again this evening could you? Come and call me a murderer. So we had a good laugh. And but on the other hand, of course, what I was saying is that you can control yourself. It's not, well, that's, and that's a compliment. It's compliment.

And it might be the first time that some of these people had been complimented in that way. Well, yes, I mean, I unfortunately, I think that services have been set up to make them the victims of their own lives and behavior. So that that's how they presented themselves. And I remember another person who came in and said, now he had been in prison several times for burglary

and such are the British police that really, you have to be want to be caught, to be caught by the British police for burglary. But anyway, he said to me, Dr. Do you think my burgling got anything? Do you think it's my childhood that caused me to burgl? Do you think it's got something to do with my childhood? So I said, absolutely nothing, whatever.

And he said, what? Because he expected me to say, it must be. And then I said, so, so, so, what do I do? because he expected me to say it must be. And then I said, so, so, so, so, why do I do it? I said, well, it's quite simple. You're lazy and stupid, and you're not prepared to work for what it is that you want. And he laughed instead of being very angry, he laughed.

And because he knew that what he was saying was nonsense. And then after that we could talk about his childhood because it was true that his childhood was a bad one. And most of the prisoners have very bad childhood. Many of them had very bad childhood. That was all true. But it's not true that everyone who has a bad childhood is a burglar. Right, just as it's not true that everyone who sexually molested grows up to be a molester, even though many molesters were molested. Yes, yeah, yeah. Right, so there were lots of other cases like that. I remember a chat came to me.

I mean, prisoners were said to be of low intelligence on average, lower than average intelligence. All I can say is that I never found them incapable of understanding what I was saying. Now, maybe what I'm saying isn't very intelligent. So it's easy for all the intelligent people to understand it. But nevertheless, I found that they could actually follow quite complicated arguments.

I'll give you an example. There is also isn't a clear relationship between IQ and anti-social behavior. Partly, it's complicated too, because many prisoners have histories of head trauma, often from violence and from child abuse and damage from alcoholism and so on. But I know the literature on anti-social behavior,

we looked at predictors for years and even neuropsychological tests that assess prefrontal function, for example, which is hypothetically the seat of inhibition or higher order cognition, the predictive power of cognitive ability in relationship to criminality is really quite low. And IQ is completely uncorrelated with conscientiousness, which is a personality factor and with agreeableness. So, yes, well, I, I, I, the criminals are stupid. Yeah, I know I, I never I know I never found that. And for

example, a trap came to me and said, you have to give me something because if you don't give me something, I'm going to go and attack a child sex offender in the prison. They actually, they were generally they were kept apart because they would be immediately, but anyway, he said, I'm going to kill one. If I get hold of one, if you don't do something, I said, well, let's think about this. He said, well, why do you feel like that?

And he said, well, because they interfere with kiddies with children. And so I took a bit of a risk. I said, do you have any children? And he said, yes, three. I said, how many mothers? And he said, well, three. I said, and these And these mothers do they have boyfriends? And they said yes, and I said, one, or perhaps more, I've had more than one, and they say yes, I said, well, is it likely that one or more of these boyfriends

has sexually interfered with one of your children? And he immediately got the point. And I said, do you're not a sexual, you haven't interfered sexually with children yourself, but you've facilitated such, you've created the conditions in which such behavior is likely to occur. Now it's too late, you can't do anything about it. Now it's too late, but you can make sure that you don't do anything to further it in the future. And he went out, there was no more talk

about killing sex abuse. Why do you think you got away with that? Got away with it. Well, you said you said you took a risk, right? Well, I took a risk. I mean, it was a risk that I didn't know that he had children. I didn't know what I mean, I had a fair idea because it was so common amongst prisoners. Sure.

And outside prison. But it's also a risk. I mean, the risk you took, he asked you to do something because he was going to become murderous. And so that's a pretty salient, immediate, and credible threat given that a violent criminal uttered it in a prison. Yes.

And your response wasn't, I better prescribe a miseditive, at least to cover myself up, let's say, if anything does happen. Your response was, well, let's call this guy out for his rather self-evident moral flaws, blind ignorance of which is facilitating an uttering sense of homicidal moral superiority. And let's assume that that's going to be curative. That's a risk. Yeah, it's a risk. And I must say that when I had, and I had lots of quite a few patients who said similar things. And I didn't give in to what was in essence moral blackmail, but of course it did always occur to me that maybe one day one of these people who was threatening something like that might actually commit the actor and then someone might play me. I mean, yes, definitely. That never happened. That never happened. But I was, I'm quite,

I was fairly clear that their responsibility, their responsibility was not to behave like that. And, and he didn't, in my opinion, as far as I could tell, suffer from anything which would have excused him. Right, some organic impulse control disorder,

some prefrontal damage, I mean, those things do occur. A certain percentage of violent criminals have rage that's induced by epilepsy and not to be triggered by drinking. And there are organic syndromes that mimic virtually every moral failing. Yeah, if he had psychosis, for example, I mean, if he had a psychosis, I wouldn't, of course,

I wouldn't have said what I said. My sense in reading your books, so there is this sensoriousness or that's something you could be criticized about for. And I'm sure, and you can tell me about that, I'm sure you have been criticized for that. And you know, you've written provocative tracks like the toxic cult of sentimentality, which is a real dagger in some sense. I mean, because people let's not call it sentimentality for a moment, let's call it empathy or sympathy. And you make a case

that I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, that excessive empathy, unthinking sympathy, is, has, can produce catastrophic consequences because it's not tempered by judgment. And then I look at the personality literature, you know, we have two moral personality traits, roughly speaking. One is agreeableness. And so people who are high in agreeableness are empathetic and sympathetic and self-sacrificing and perhaps resentful because of it. So it's not an untrammeled virtue. Whereas the disagreeable types are more likely to be imprisoned. So that's a predictor of anti-social behavior, but they're implacable and stubborn and hard to push around. And so people vary on that distribution. I think agreeableness is a, the empathy dimension is a trait that's

particularly good for fostering the care of infants because infants, immediate empathy with an infant under six to nine months is almost invariably the right response. If the infant is crying or in distress, your job isn't to question or judge it's to alleviate the source of the trouble. And it's very hard to take care of infants, and it's no wonder that there's a moral virtue that's essentially devoted to the care of true dependence. But we have conscientiousness, too.

And conscientiousness is the best predictor of long-term life success apart from IQ. And conscientiousness is the best predictor of long term life success apart from IQ and conscientious people are good at formulating and keeping contracts long term contracts. It's sort of a cold virtue and they are judgmental. But as far as I'm concerned, we wouldn't have both these personality traits like they're two of five. So it's not like it's a trivial proportion of the variation in personality. We wouldn't have two of our five personality traits aimed at regulating our behavior if empathy alone was sufficient. And so you go after it, the toxic cult of sentimentality. What do you mean by that? Well, I mean, if you like the infantilization of people who are expressing emotion. So we accept now that if someone expresses distress, we don't inquire where that distress comes from. How it arose, we just simply tried to alleviate it.

Oscar Wilde, of course, said that sentimentality is the desire to have the emotion without the cost of the emotion. I suppose sentimentality is to empathy what kitsch is to art. And so what would you regard? OK, so let's... OK, I'll give you an... I mean, I start the book with an example, which I read in my local newspaper, which was of a man who bought a chicken in a supermarket and roasted it or, and then gave it to, you know, they were eating their dinner, and the girl, the little girl, finds that there are chickens feet in it, and screams with horror.

And so the father, the child is so horrified that the father says, I don't know whether this is what he did literally, but I have to throw it out of the window. So he just took the emotion of the child and said, I have to assuage that emotion any way I can and the quickest way is the best because of course she would have less emotion if it's dealt with quickly. So there's no rational, there's no attempt to argue rationally about this, that actually chickens do have feet, that they were live creatures once, and this is something that children have to learn.

It's one of the things that children have to know. And so what's the problem with reflexive empathy exactly? What exactly empathy? I think it's not genuine. Well, then we should define genuine empathy. We should define genuine empathy and distinguish it from counterproductive sentimentality. Yeah, well, it's not, it's not easy. Of course, fair enough, I know I'm putting you on the spot in this. I'm saying that that's

something that could be productively attempted. Yes, I'm not sure I have the complete answer to that. You're hitting at it from all sorts of different directions, though, you know, like one of the things that emerges from your book, and you know, I saw you as someone who wanted genuinely to be of help to the people that you were seeing, and tortured by this constant immersion that you managed, outraged by what you saw, outraged by the thoughtless contribution of skeptical and critical intellectuals to this suffering, which is swept under the table in some sense, or attributed only to the power, hungry depredations of capitalism or something like that. And so you're outraged by that. or something like that. And so you're outraged by that. And you're trying to use your capacity for judgment

to help your clients, your patients, distinguish between those things that they're doing that clearly hurt them and those things that help them. And also to attribute to them the capacity to do that, which like I was talking to my wife today, she, we were talking about a woman she's dealing with, who is having a hard time disciplining here, one and a half year old. And, you know, I mentioned to her that one of the things I've seen among especially my seriously affected clinical clients is that

they actually have no idea that they could change their behavior in a manner that would improve the future. That as a concept, that's not part of the subculture that they're embedded in. And so counterproductive and unhelpful. Just hitting that towel. We also, of course, give them incentives not to think like that. Because if you have a, if in fact you have a situation in which changing their behavior will not improve that certainly their economic situation very much, which is actually the condition,

the situation of many of my patients, that takes away one of the possible incentives for changing behavior. And why is it that finding gainful employment, for example, isn't going to produce a material change in circumstances? How is it that the system at the level of detail? Because you, many people, if they go to work, they lose benefits. They have to start paying for things which were previously paid for them. So they end up

going to work for X number of hours and being very slightly better off in monetary terms, which doesn't seem to them to be worth it, and I can understand that. So you're asking them to do low-level job, get up maybe at six o'clock in the morning and further more of course it's not good for their children because often they are single parents so they've got no support at home other than whatever it is the state provides them and they so they have to manage their children and going to work when it's very difficult for them. Right, for no economic incentive. Well, I mean, they're a little marginally better.

Well, maybe, maybe they have to buy clothes. It's expensive to work to enter the workforce. It's not trivial. They have to arrange transportation. That's also an expense. And then you said, childcare, that's a devastating expense because most people who would work on the margins don't make enough money to afford childcare at all, let alone child care of any quality. And so, so it also means that this, in this unwillingness to pass judgment, let's say, on the part of helpers also means that we're,

we abdicate our responsibility to design social welfare systems that would reward productive behavior because we don't wanna make the judgments about what behaviors are productive and what aren't, at least partly because we don't wanna make mistakes and throw people out that are deserving, but we can't differentiate. But then because we won't make those judgments, we produce systems that counterproductively reward the kinds of behaviors that produce the problems we want to solve. They treat everybody as helpless and it's a kind of learned helplessness, actually. And if you look at, I mean,

it's very interesting to see the success, the economic success of certain groups of poor immigrants, for example, the Sikhs in Britain. And I'm sure, and certainly in Canada, they may come with nothing, but within a very short time, they've succeeded. They've risen up the social and economic scale. Now, you see that with first-generation Asian immigrants in North America.

So I looked into that in detail because it's a very interesting phenomenon. I was interested in the relationship between IQ and conscientiousness, IQ in personality and predicting long-term life outcomes. And by and large, people with higher IQs do substantially better. So if you had to pick one attribute to ensure your success at birth, it would be high intelligence. It's better to be born three standard deviations

above the mean in IQ than three standard deviations above the mean in IQ than three standard deviations above the mean in wealth in terms of your position at 40, so 40 years later. So IQ is very powerful. Conscientiousness is also powerful, but only about a third as much, but it's still powerful enough so that Asian immigrants, their children, perform on average, as well as native born Caucasians who have a 15 IQ point advantage, which is roughly the difference between a college student and a high school student.

And so there's something in the Asian culture and what it is is quite clear actually. It's incredibly intense work ethic and respect for achievement, disciplined achievement in the economic realm. That's hammered in right from now. That disappears after about two generations. Yes, but presumably also there's the maintenance

of the family structure. So that, I mean, you don't, it's certainly where I was anyway. You didn't get this complete breakdown. I mean, I never met, I never met children of Indian immigrants who didn't know who their father was. Right, right. Well, and that's an interesting phenomenon too. I went to a talk at one point at the university five or six years ago, and a feminist was

speaking, or a former feminist, maybe still maybe a real feminist now. Her name was Janis Fiamengo, and she had been a radical leftist feminist and was in the English literature department, and eventually realized that what she was involved in was a an academic scam fundamentally and turned into quite a vocal critic of that particular perspective postmodern say Neumarksis perspective. She mentioned to the audience that families with intact families with fathers the children and those families do much better on virtually every measure you can possibly imagine. And in my naivety at that point, I thought, well, that's going to be an incontrovertible statement because all you have to do is be remotely familiar with the childhood development literature and you figure that out right away. And yet, it was as if she dropped a life snake into the audience because, and this is that toxic sentimentality that you were talking about, say, well, look,

there are obviously struggling single parents who are struggling for no fault of their own, a perfectly credible job of raising high performing children. And then if you say, well, the two parent family is more desirable by implication, you're denigrating that accomplishment, let's say. And fair enough, there is a real tension there. And there are exceptions to the rule,

but it's still the case that if you were trying to design public policy that was of benefit to children, you would design public policy that would reward people for long-term monogamous relationships where one of the participants was male. Yeah, well that you need to use judgment for that. Yes, but if you look at I, for example, there has been a consistent attack on that view for many, many years going back, for example, the Fabians and so on. and so on. And what happens is that people use marginal cases as being central. So, and as I've already said, it's undoubtedly true that many marriages were oppressive and that being in an unhappy marriage is a horrible experience. It's a terrible experience. It's a long form of torture.

But people then thought that there was a perfect solution to this problem. There's a perfect solution to human relationships. And there is no perfect relationship, perfect solution. There's only better and worse. And whatever, whatever, form of human relationships you're going to have, they are going to be terrible ones. But you, as far as I could see, and I had no real, no real opinion about this until I actually immersed myself in the world in which I did immerse myself. It's

quite clear to me that without, without a formal structure of relationships, things are absolutely terrible for, for very large numbers of people. Now, of course, it's perfectly true that I saw, if you like, only the failed cases, but there may have been... But the question then would be, well, where would you find the successful cases? Because let's think this through, because it's crucial point, you know? Okay, so you have a biased sample and maybe you approach this from an ethically conservative perspective. And so that produces your viewpoint and it bears little relationship to the real world. But let's look for the counter

example. So, well, first of all, you can't look among the high functioning middle to upper classes for counter examples because they're all married. Yeah. Right. So so so then you think, well, is there a subset of people who are poor, who are flourishing in their serial relationships in their fragmented serial relationships? And well, first of all, probably not because they're poor, right? By definition, you've already excluded the middle and upper class.

So I'm kind of curious about, well, I mean, I tried to think, I thought, well, how is someone living in these circumstances supposed to get out of this situation? Right. What would look like a viable, practical alternative that would be better? Yes, but that didn't involve changing the way they

made their relationships or pursued their relationships. So they have to do, we have to keep the relationship, the structure of the relationships the same. What can they, what else can they do that would make their lives better? And I just couldn't see how their lives could get better, while you have this kind of free for all, wasn't really free for all, it was free for some. And so I came to the conclusion that it was a social and cultural disaster. Well, so let's, we could look at the fantasies

of sexual libertism, let's say. And I think a good place to look, and I might be way off base here, but whatever. I'm gonna forge forward. Let's look at Playboy, because Playboy was the first mass market magazine that sort of introduced the idea of sophisticated sexual freedom into the mass audience, right?

And that quickly degenerated into Penthouse and Hussler and then to this bloody online catastrophe where everything goes and it's a cesspit of unimaginable proportion, but in any case, back to playboy. Well, you know, you have two sophisticated people, the woman's in her early 20s. The guys may be five years older than that. They both have a glass of, you know, nicely aged wine. They're sitting in a 50s living room that's sophisticated, discussing literature, and they're both free to make their choices, and so they have sex. And then maybe your life is an unending sequence of those perfect dates. It's like, well, what are the preconditions for that? For that even to be possible? Well, you both have to be young. You both have to be attractive. You both have to be healthy. You both have to be rich. You both have to be educated in all likelihood,

so that you're not rife with psychopathology, so that that can be an enjoyable and civilized evening, let's say. Well, you have to have come from a pretty stable family, probably one with mother and father intact, and certainly not characterized by the constant unwanted serial switching of partners. I mean, it's virtually unattainable except in an unbelievably protected environment. But you're in that environment, you think, well, I could maybe you're an

emergent, you're unhappy, you have all those attributes, you think, well, I could jump out of that into this fantasy. And everyone could share the fantasy, but no, they couldn't. It's not possible. But actually what people are really doing, and one of the most important figures in modern cultural history is Marie Antoinette, who played Sheppardess, who went out and thought it would be nice to be a Sheppardess and went out to be a Sheppardess for the day, but they always return to have Palace. And that this is what these people are doing because probably they give up that life at some point. The people, the rich people you've described and they actually settle down more or less. Well, in very, if they don't, they're not happy about it.

Right. If they don't, it's because they failed to get what they're actually aiming. One interesting thing was that I would talk to mothers, single mothers, about what they wanted for their daughters, and what they wanted for their daughters was for them to find a nice man who would have a good job and would treat them decently, and they'd buy a house, and so on and so forth. So, but they had no idea how to encourage them. Right, they have no idea what the microelements are. No, not whatsoever. You see this in the literate families too,

is that if you ask them, do you want your children to be educated? They say yes, but if, but there's no books in the house, and they don't know where to buy a book and they're intimidated by books, and if they have a book, they don't know how to buy a book and they're intimidated by books. And if they have a book, they don't know how to read it to their child. You know, and you get these huge differences. At by the age of three between children and literate and non literate households, the

three year olds in literate households might have been exposed to, you know, a thousand hours worth of books by the time they're three. They can already sit in a child in a house like that. You give them a book. They know what it is. They'll sit there and mime the action of reading. They go through the pages. They point at the pictures. They have all these pre literate behaviors built in that that's the necessary scaffold for the development of literacy. And there's micro habitsits that are invisible if you're in that culture, they're invisible because they're just part of how you live, like the fact that you have a bookshelf,

like the fact that you're relatives by your children books. And if you don't know how to do that, at all, the barriers to entry are unbelievably unforgiving. Yes, but probably also nobody tries to make up for it on the behalf of the parents. So I mean, the schools are themselves now doubt the value of literacy, some of them. The teachers don't know what they're supposed to be teaching or at least alternatively, a lot of them are more interested in the ideological correctness of the children than they

are in their ability to read. Well, it's actually quite difficult to teach children to read. You have to pay attention to each child when they radically differ in their intellectual ability, and then you actually have to know how to teach someone to each child, when they radically differ in their intellectual ability, and then you actually have to know how to teach someone to read. And that's actually complicated. You start with the letters, you get the letters pronounced, you get two letter combinations and three letter combinations.

You automatize that. It's effortful, ideological indoctrination. That's relatively straightforward. Yeah, well, I mean, I can't really speak about this because I never tried to teach anybody to read. I had an interesting experience. Well, the data on that, the data on that are pretty clear. If you teach children to read using phonetics,

which breaks it, you know, we have a phonetic alphabet because that makes things easier. You don't have to remember 26 characters and variance on them instead of 10,000 say. You teach the phonemes and you get them to aggregate them and once they get to the point where they can read phrases, they start to read on their own account because it becomes rewarding. If you use other methods, they don't learn as well. Well, one thing that I saw with my patient, I was interested in their level of education, which was catastrophically low. I think it was unbelievably low, and I would give them something to read.

And they would, you could see that they had difficulty doing it, and I asked them to read it out loud. And then when they came to a long word, they would say, I don't know that word. I don't know that one, as if English were written in Etude Girls. In Chinese, yes. In Chinese. In Mandarin, yeah, definitely. They come teachers teaching in Etude Girls' method of verbal apprehension, which is absolutely counterproductive. That's how experts read, but that's not how you learn to read. Yes.

No, and then I would say, when they got through it, I would ask them, what did it mean? And they would say, I don't know, I was only reading it. As you can't, unless you can read phrases at a glance, you spend so much intellectual energy decoding the phonemes and the letters that you can't read for meaning. And that's why it's not rewarding to begin with, right? You have to go through that slog of automatizing the subroutines and that happens much more, more at a much earlier age in literate households. Yeah, well I just I thought what I found very strange was that there was no

sense of outrage that we spend on average $100,000 probably more on each pupil's education. And about 20% of them come out functionally literate or barely literate. The kind of people that I'm talking about who couldn't read a phrase or who had difficulty sounding it out, and then at the end of it, didn't know what it meant. Now how is it possible to spend so much money and have these results? And this has a catastrophic effect on their lives. It's obvious that it must, in any modern society, it must have a catastrophic effect on their lives. But nobody seemed to be interested, or saw it as a disaster. You'd think the faculties of education would be interested, and you'd think that by now

they would have, as I'll say, assessed an immense variety of methods to teach children how to read, let's say, because I think pretty much everybody could agree that that would be good. You know, that they would have tried out 200 different educational techniques, subjected them to stringent analysis, and that we would see an increase in the efficiency of teaching children to read,

that would be in keeping with the increase in technological power that we've seen over the last 20 years. We should be teaching kids to read at a rate that's just beyond comprehension, if the faculty's of education were doing their jobs, which they're not. Quite the contrary. So, yes, that's a good, and I was thinking too, you know, this, one of the things I found really interesting working with people who are dispossessed was, you know, you might think, well, you don't want to impose these external norms on them. There's a form of colonialism that would be associated with that or or classism or something like that. And I suppose that's part of the non-judgmental stance, but you can always just ask the people themselves. And what you find right away is they they want for themselves pretty much what the middle class person or

the upper class person has. And I don't just mean material resources. They'd rather be educated, than not educated, or at least they'd want that for their children. They'd rather have a relationship if they could figure out how to conceive of it that was stable and loving. All of these things that you know, you could regard as arbitrary, A child would rather have a father and a mother that were around. So there, we could derive norms for the direction of our social policies that could be derived from the populations that were hypothetically trying to serve, but we don't seem to do that either. We can't even agree that all things considered, it would be better to serve, but we don't seem to do that either. We can't even agree that all things considered, it would be better to foster, to reward the presence of two parent families.

Yeah. Yes, well, I mean, all that I said in my book, I thought was common sense, actually. Everything was more or less gone, so it it wasn't, it wasn't work of great reflection or anything like that. It just seemed to me everything was obvious. And yet, and maybe it takes exposure to 20,000 cataclysmic failures to make what's obvious salient. You know, because the problem with what's obvious is that it's invisible. You know, I found this out many times. So if I'm called on an interview, for example, to defend marriage, I think, well, I don't actually know how to defend something that until 10 years ago was taken as a self-evident good. It's not like I have, or any of us, for that matter, have a massive array of arguments at hand

to justify cultural norms. The fact that their norms means you don't have the arguments at hand, they're so self-evident that they're not buttressed by a differentiated description. self-evident that they're not buttressed by a differentiated description. Yeah, well, you see, I once, I used to write for a left-wing magazine as well as the spectator, which is conservative, called a new statesman. I mean, it's not far left. It's moderately left. And I used to go for lunch there. Sometimes, and we would have a discussion. And I met a very distinguished BBC broadcaster in the days when the BBC actually was not terrible. And he said he'd read me. And then he said, I wanted to meet you because I wanted to ask you. He said, do you make it up?

Do you make it up? Yeah, I make it up. So I said, well, I'm very flattered that you think I could make it up. But I don't make it up on the contrary. I tone it down, and of course I do disguise it for, you know, so that people are not recognizable, but in essence, everything is true, and actually things are much worse than I describe. Well, the thing is, things in a bad situation, things are so bad that it's both inconceivable and incomunicable to the people that it's happening

to and to anyone else. Like I've been in families that were dysfunctional for multiple generations. And what I found was that in some situations, you dig and you get to a lie and you think, God, I finally got to the fundamental lie. And then you'd find that there to a lie and you think, God, I finally got to the fundamental lie. And then you'd find that there was a lie underneath that that was even bigger. And then if you dug through that, you'd find another catastrophe that was even more

Catholic, Clismic. And it just never came to an end. You can't communicate. What did you say in one of your books? I think it was you quoted Tolstoy. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Right. So there's this specificity of misery that's complex beyond belief and densely layered. And so I know that reading your accounts, which are, you know, hair raising and heart rending, that's nowhere near as bad as the actual situation. Yes, well I used to go to the hospital thinking I'd heard everything, I've heard everything, they can't surprise me, but they always could surprise me.

There was a kind of creativity about the miseries that people inflicted on each other without, I mean, what was distressing to me about the misery that I saw is that it was not actually, well, there wasn't a government inflicting it, not certainly not directly. It was not like the misery of, shall we say, mass deportation or civil war or anything like that. But in a way that made it because I used to have, not exactly a hobby, but I used to have a taste for going to dangerous countries and places where there was civil war, where everything had broken down. And in a way I found it less distressing than the kind of breakdown that I was seeing around me in England, because it was in a way it was enforced.

Right. Well, let me ask you about that then for a sec. Come. I mean, you're making two arguments. You were making two arguments just then. And I think you just happens regularly is that. There is an underclass. So three arguments.

There is an underclass that has a multi generational component. Things are really, really bad in that class for all sorts of complex side reasons, many of which are philosophical, let's say, or ethical or moral. And it's worse than it was. And I guess of the three of those, the one I find least convincing, let's say, or I'm able to accept with less certainty, is the idea that things are actually worse. I mean, people, you know, if you go back to 1820s, and this is maybe where your experience in poor places in developing worlds might be useful. If you go back to 1840, or thereabouts, the typical person in the Western world lived on about a buck 90 a day in today's dollars. So below the UN poverty level, life was bloody brutal for people. And, you know, so maybe things are worse now in the lower

class with regards to familial structure than they were for a brief period after the Second World War. But it isn't obvious to me that they're necessarily worse by historical stuff. Yeah, it's always a question of when you say something is worse, there's always a question of what you're comparing it to. Well, yes. So I mean, we could compare it with 3000 BC or 1100 or whatever. The things that it's incontestable that we are vastly better off physically than that's

incontestable. And, I mean, when my father was born in the East End of London, and in his borrow, when he was born, which was 1910 nine, the infant mortality rate was, if I remember right, yeah, 124,000, which means that an eighth of children died before the first birthday. And in 18th century London, 50% of children died before they were five.

And there was poverty and there was you know poverty and filth and epidemic disease and every kind of so but I don't think that that's the kind of standard of comparison we should use and if we take something like crime, violent crime, I think the evidence is that it has increased enormously in a country like Britain, since 1900. When, of course, real, there was absolutely terrible poverty by our standards today, the kind of poverty that nobody suffers today in any Western society. And I was very struck by the story of Jack the Rippling. There are very instructive things

which some people haven't noticed, which was that in White Chapel, which was regarded as the worst part of London in the 1880s. And I mean the prophecy was just again inconceivable to us now. When a body was found people ran off to find a policeman and they found a policeman and the policeman was armed with a bull's eye lamp. He had a truncine which he was supposed to draw only an extremist and he had a whistle. And that was how he was armed. And he went around Whitechapel, one by one, not in pairs or not in groups, but with one. So in Whitechapel today, you wouldn't get a policeman doing that. So I am confused about that to some degree because, you know, they're Stephen Pinker, for example.

I mean, he makes a pretty strong case that overall your probability of being murdered, for example, against a timeframe issue is declining. Well, it depends what you're starting with. So I think the more powerful argument is not necessarily so much that things have, tell me what you think about this. I think it could easily be that there's a degeneration of moral standards, let's say, that leads to a higher probability of dispossession. And that you see that in the class that's dropped out of society. And that is a consequence of what would you say? A failure to abide by the same standards

that might motivate middle class prosperity. And maybe the expectations for that class have transformed themselves over a 20 year period, but it isn't obvious to me necessarily that that's associated with an increase in criminality overall. Well, I, again, I think that we're certainly in Britain, it's perfectly clear that things like burglary and assault have increased enormously. I mean, they're not increasing further and they might now be decreasing, but they've increased enormously by comparison with the fairly recent past.

I'm not talking about 18th century London when you couldn't go anywhere without meeting a foot pad or anything like that. If I'm, I mean, this is slightly altering the subject a little. I personally, I'm not terribly keen on the idea of the underclass because I don't, I, this suggests that it's a bit like Marx's lump and proletariat, if you like. This is 5% of the population or whatever percentage

of the population that is very separate from the rest of the population. Unfortunately, as this was one of the points in my, some of my books anyway, the cultural influence is going from the bottom now upwards rather than what used to be the case, from the middle classes or upper classes and middle classes downwards so that aspiration was to move upwards, but now there a desire for cultural decline or dissent. It seems to me. Yeah, you make that case with an upper class mimicry of lower class, let's say lower economic class styles and that sort of thing. Which is a form of marionne-to- toiletism, because of course they hang on to their economic advantages. Right, right, right.

Well, then they get the advantages of being dispossessed and the advantages of being rich. Let me ask you, we're going to have to draw to a close here relatively quickly, unfortunately. What? Are there other people writing in the same vein as you? And that's one question. The other question is, what has been the consequence for you of your writing and your popularization of these ideas?

I'd also like to know what sort of audience you're reaching. You're your most successful book, let's say, if you consider success popularity was life at the bottom, correct? That's 2001. And that one, I think it's fair to say that that one brought you to wide public attention by writer standards. Yeah. By nonfiction writer standards, let's say. What's been the consequence? What kind of criticisms have you faced? And how have you responded to him?

What's been the consequence of that for you as well? Yeah, well, the first thing is I don't think many people are writing in my vein. There was a journalist, a left-wing journalist called Nick Davis who read about this, and he admitted the phenomena. So he didn't deny the phenomena, his analysis of the causes of it was different. But Nick Davis? Nick Davis, yes. What did he write? I've forgotten the time. Okay, I'll look it up. I'll look it up. I mean, interesting. And I didn't, of course I didn't agree with his analysis of the causes, but he did admit

that the phenomena were there, which, and we are very reluctant to admit that the phenomena are there. And if they are admitted, they're regarded as amusing. There was a very interesting video made about the toki, it was called the toki family in Holland. And this was a sort of underclass family, which was drinking and taking drugs, and it was making the lives of the neighbours terrible, and they were, I mean, I don't like to use the word degenerates, but that's the word that comes to mind. And finally, they managed something which is very difficult

in Holland. They were evicted from where they were living. And this is almost an impossible achievement in Holland. But anyway, they went off in their white van and their consequence was they were going on holiday to their punishment for their behavior was going on holiday to Spain in a white van. And some producer made a little video of them singing that they were going on holiday to Spain and you see them drinking and you know, just as they were just like my patients. And what it was quite clear to me was that they were being exhibited as amusing to the middle classes of Holland. It was just a joke,

but these people were not a joke. They were, they've been very violent to their neighbors, they've made their lives of their neighbor's hell. And what we saw was the metropolitan middle classes just turning them into a joke as if their lives and the lives of the people around them were not to be taken seriously. So that I think is, I mean, that I think is the attitude of the kind of people who have no contact with this world.

As I would have had no contact with the world with this world, if I hadn't done the work I did. As to consequences for me, well, I haven't really been any, I haven't been viciously attacked. Why not? I think, well, first of all, it helps to be a doctor. Secondly, Right, well, first of all, it helps to be a doctor, secondly.

Right. Well, you have some credibility, too, because you're, you know, you're actually working directly. Well, that was that I think was it. So this was not, this was, this was my ideas were just born out of some kind of theoretical superstructure. So for all your flaws, you're genuinely in the trenches. And that comes across immediately, just the sheer number of people that, I mean, you saw how many people who had tried to commit suicide. Well, but I think it was 10,000. 10 and 15,000.

Right. So that's such an inconceivable number that it sort of, I would imagine imagine it would sort of leave critics a Gas it's like well, I've never talked to three people like that and you've talked to 15,000. That's that's actually quite a difference So the best way of dealing with that is to ignore it So I mean you say I'm well known. I don't think I'm well known. I mean It's true that my book is I don't know how many, I know how many my book is sold.

I was very surprised to discover that it sold 13,000 in the Netherlands, and I was surprised because actually what I was describing was England. And I couldn't see how that could interest a Dutch audience. But many people have said, well, I have observed this. Many people who are in the trenches, as it were. And one of the things that really pleased me, I mean, this was possibly the most pleasing thing to me,

was that I oddly enough, the books have sold quite well in Brazil of all countries. I mean, it never occurred to me that they might sell in Brazil. And I gave a lecture in Sao Paulo, and people came up afterwards, they wanted to book sign. And there were a couple among them who said, we were born in the favelas of Sao Paulo, which actually are not the worst in Brazil, but still pretty bad. And it said, we recognized all that you said. All that you said about England, we saw in the favelas. and we saw in the favelas.

And I know. So let's let's go through what what you saw and and then maybe we could talk about what you've seen. And what you think might be effective amelioration. So you see. Um. Fragmented intimate relationships. Is that is that the most salient feature? Is the impermanence of intimate relationships? I, you know, yes, I would say so, because I think without, without better relationships, it's very difficult to see how large numbers of people

can escape this world. Okay, and so out of that, because the relationships, the sexual relationships aren't bound by mutual long-term support, love, contractual obligations and all of that, that spins into higher levels of male violence and also to predation on vulnerable females by psychopathic and aggressive males. Yes, although I wouldn't say that the women are just passive victims, they're not just passive victims. I mean, they are victims, but they're not passive victims. I mean, I guess I was sorry, I was thinking that they're easier prey with multiple children. They're not, they're easier pickings. That's that's what I mean And that's that's right. Yes, that right so the fragmentation So if you have a fragmented couple of relationships and and you're a woman you end up with children

You're no longer 20 and single you're 28 or 35 you have two children You're the array of high quality men that you have to choose from is going to decrease substantially. Yes, it was never very great to be. Right, right, right. Okay, so then we add to that, I studied alcohol for years and its effects on violence. And you can basically say that if people didn't get drunk half the violence in the world would instantly disappear. You can basically say that if people didn't get drunk half the violence in the world would

instantly disappear. So rape, murder, familial abuse, the contribution of alcoholism is stunningly high, stunningly high. So maybe that's the third factor that plays in it. Was that reasonable? Well, it certainly is unmistakably possible. It's, yeah, say 50% of murderers are drunk when they kill and 50% of victims are intoxicated when they die.

Yeah. So it's, it's a major and it's the only drug. It's the only drug that has that magnitude of an effect on violent behavior. So, um, then low, low educational attainment. Yes, that's obviously very important. And and interestingly, the state does very little to try to address it. We'll try to to make things better. Okay. And then believe and then beliefs, what, what do you think are the key beliefs that characterize the phenomenon that you saw?

Well, there is now certainly a sense of entitlement, the sense of it's wrong for anyone to judge. People have internalized that, so not only do they not judge others, but they don't judge themselves, and it's not right for anybody to judge them. So that's an abandonment of judgment or even a demonisation of it when it's a crucial thing that you need to separate your own. Well, at the same time, because it's existentially impossible not to make judgments. They are making judgments, but they don't...

They are not... They don't accept that they're making judgments, that they are making judgments. Attitude towards the future? What's the attitude? I think, shall we say, it's not thought about very deeply. Right? Okay. So that's the first thing is that it doesn't come up much. Yes.

And what I've noticed is that there is no implicit sense that the future is something that to be altered for the, for the better by changes of behavior currently. Yes. Yeah, which is, there's an element of truth in that, in the economic aspect, because they're not going to get good job, even if they behave responsibly and so on, they're not going to get good job. However, their lives will be better if they behave responsibly. But another thing that I would I mean this is very speculative, but I thought that

lots of people have become stars in their own soap opera and they prefer a dramatic life, a life full of incident, to a life that would be actually very flat. If they did the kind of things that you and I would suggest, their lives might be very flat because they would not be well off. They would still be struggling economically and so on. And their lives would be very, very dull. Well, that's Dusty F.C.'s famous criticism of socialist utopia, right?

People are fundamentally unable to deal with satiated dullness. They'll break it. They'll fragment it just so that something dramatic and exciting happens. And there's definitely, at truth. And then I think that's a testament to some degree to the adventurousness of the human spirit, even though it's something that can well manifested in the ways that you described. Yeah, well, I think I mean, I'm not boring. Yeah, well, I mean, I've fled. I mean, I can't say that I haven't, I haven't like chasing sensation myself because I, when I was younger, I used to like danger of a certain kind. I used to like going to countries which were dangerous.

I crossed Africa by public transport in days when it was impossible to communicate with anyone, never know mobile phones or anything. So I was in Communicardo for months at the time. You did work in prisons, as a psychiatrist? Yeah, well, I never felt really that was very dangerous. But I, you know, countries where there's a civil war and so on are dangerous and I liked it. But I always felt, I suppose, maybe falsely that there was some higher purpose. It wasn't just the liking for danger. There was some kind of purpose behind it all. Well, there is some mutility is some utility in seeking out adventure and

and and strife. If that's integrated into a functional and productive, generous, honest life, that's better. It's better. So obviously, in and of itself, it can become a problem. But that can become a problem. But so how did you handle this emotionally? Which, well, the endless onslaught of misery amongst your clientele. I mean, one way of dealing with it, of course, was writing about it. Because what I found is that when you write about an experience, even an unpleasant experience, it distances you from that experience.

So you're not only having the experience, you're observing having the experience. I was once arrested in Albania and mildly, say mildly beaten with a truncheon by a policeman. And actually, as he was hitting me, I wasn't thinking this is painful. I was thinking, how am I going to describe this subsequently? So that being able to describe it, or having the intention of describing it, actually distances yourself in a

good way, I think, from your experience. Well, you draw the conclusions that way. And I mean, the purpose of your memory, in some sense, is to draw the appropriate conclusions from your experience, to guide you into the future. And so I have a series of writing exercises online at a place called self-authoring.com that steps people through writing a biography. And it highlights experiences that were emotionally extreme. And because there is plenty of evidence that writing them out, they have to be somewhat distant from you, you know. You should come to it the next day.

Yes, exactly. because you're just retraumatizing yourself in some sense, but the evidence is quite strong, I would say, that doing that, well, you're transforming the emotion into words and replacing, in some sense, the emotion, by the words, you're making sense of it. There was a very interesting experience, I had an interesting experience with that in that regard, in the prison. We had a writer who would come in and teach writing creative writing, if you like, to interested prisoners. And the writer told me he came to me because of course the there wasn't really any evidence that he was doing any good

Because of course that such evidence would be almost impossible to gather right But and so of course the the prison authorities are constantly trying to cut down costs so they weren't getting rid of them So he wanted me to write in his favour, which I did, which of course sealed his fate. But anyway, he told me something very interesting, all the people who wrote, wrote autobiographically, as you would expect. And they would come to a point in their lives when they had to stop, when they found it extremely difficult to go on, because actually what it did, this was the first time in their lives, they'd really ever thought biographically.

Or perhaps even thought. Well, I mean, it really mean that. It's like, you know, that people think they think, but what happens is thoughts appear in their head. That's way different than sitting down programmatically and voluntarily going over your life and trying to make sense. Anyway, they came to a point where they couldn't go on at least for quite a long time. And that point was when they realized that all that they'd been telling themselves about their own behavior was actually false. And so I came to the conclusion that this actually, now whether it changed their

behavior subsequently, I can't tell you, I don't know. And anyway, you know, you probably need to marry that with a plan. You know, like the problem is, is that if you, if you realize that what you're doing is wrong, but it's habitual and you don't know what else to do, you're going to do what you know, because what else are you going to do? You don't know it? Yeah, I mean one thing about the statistics in an enumerating Britain are quite clear that people stop coming into prison on new offenses. I mean overwhelmingly not not absolutely 100% but overwhelmingly for offenses like burglary and violence, they stop after the age of 39. like Bergerian violence, they stop after the age of 39 and their rate of conviction goes down in the 30s, so there is a kind of spontaneous change. Now whether this would accelerate, I mean, what you would want to do is accelerate that change so that they didn't have to reach the age of 39 before they stopped committing those crimes. And my guess was that this did actually have an effect, but I have no proof of that. I have no proof that this... No, yeah, I don't know of any studies that look at autobiographical

writing and recidivism. Well, it will be very difficult because it will be very difficult. Very. Yeah, you I mean, it would be difficult to find the control group, and so on. So, but I mean, instinctively, I felt that this was a good thing to be doing. Well, in so far as thought is useful and verbal thought is high quality thought. You'd hope that it would be helpful. Okay, so how did your conclusions change your clinical practice for the better, let's say, in your opinion? What about social policy suggestions?

Well, the first of those clinical practice, it made me very wary of medicalisation of misery. And that's the first thing, so that I spent far more time persuading people not to take medication and to take it. In fact, there's a kind of law in prison if people want medicine, they don't need it, and if they won't take it, they do need it. But as far as social policies, concern, I'm very, very wary of making, perhaps this is very cowardly of me, very wary of making any is very cowardly of me, very wary of making any suggestions because if anyone were to take me seriously and the results would work catastrophic, I feel very bad. Well, it's an unfactually, I think also that actually what we need is a cultural change and I'm not sure how much government can bring about a cultural change. So I was trying to

in my way, trying to persuade people, particularly the maybe this is grandiose, but I was trying to persuade intellectuals that a lot of their world outlook was bad and was doing harm rather than good. And to be cognizant of that. To be in the fact that radicalism translated down the socio-economic hierarchy is often devastating. Yes, so that the destruction of the family, which rich people perhaps can survive, is devastating for people who need solidarity, social solidarity more than anybody else, and that the social solidarity,

which now runs entirely through the state, is a very cold form of solidarity that is very unpleasant. That's a good place to stop. Thank you very much for your conversation. I appreciate it for talking with me today. I hope everyone finds this useful. Yeah, I hope so. I don't know whether how many people, how many people watch or see it? A million. A million.

Yeah, and do you get abuse? That's a long story. I mean, I know you have a, no, I mean abuse from this kind of thing, the from a podcast. No, not at the moment and likely not from this one. Yes. So, yeah, good. Well, yeah, I mean, I must say, I haven't really had any abuse, but then, of course, I don't, I don't, I don't look to see my people are abusing me.

So what the heart doesn't see, what the eye doesn't see, the heart can't grieve over. Much appreciated. OK. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. you