Posted on 07/01/2014 7:22:00 AM PDT by Jack Hydrazine
The usual brilliance.
Some key excerpts from the article:
“By a mixture of ideology and fiscal and social policies, the family has been systematically fractured and destroyed in England, at least in the lowest part of the society that, unfortunately, needs family solidarity the most.
“Certainly the notions of dependence and independence have changed. I remember a population that was terrified of falling into dependence on the state, because such dependence, apart from being unpleasant in itself, signified personal failure and humiliation. But there has been an astonishing gestalt switch in my lifetime. Independence has now come to mean independence of the people to whom one is related and dependence on the state...by which they meant independent of the fathers of their children...The state would provide. In the new dispensation the state, as well as television, is father to the child.
“When I started out as a doctor in the mid-1970s, those who received state benefits would say, “I receive my check on Friday.” Now people who receive such benefits say, “I get paid on Friday.” [T]o say that they get paid on Friday is to imply that they are receiving money in return for something.
“[A]bout the intellectual and moral corruption wrought by the state in recent years—[t]he governments of Britain, of both political parties, managed to lessen the official rate of unemployment by the simple expedient of shifting people from the ranks of the unemployed to the ranks of the sick. [B]y 2006—a year of economic boom, remember—the British welfare state had achieved the remarkable feat of producing more invalids than the First World War. This feat, then, could have been achieved only by the willing corruption of the unemployed themselves—[a]nd the government was only too happy, for propaganda purposes, to connive at such large-scale fraud.
“[W]e [have] destroyed all economic incentive for [unemployed people] to work.”
The rich have essentially rendered the poor into animals.
Thanks for posting!
It IS an excellent article and has been downloaded, saved and passed along.
Thanks for making us aware of this. I’ve enjoyed reading articles by “Theodore Dalrymple” but was unaware of his background.
I also like his quote from Kipling: ‘ “What should they know of England who only England know?” Indeed, what should anyone know of anywhere, who only that place knows? ‘
Like Dr. Daniels, Mrs. BN & I have also spent a great deal of time in rural Africa. Whenever some politician, celebrity or news commentator starts blathering about “Poverty in America”, she usually looks at me and says, “They really don’t have a clue as to what real poverty is, do they?”
I would change that to say, The SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT has essentially rendered the poor into animals. That is the ideological and historical legacy of socialism.
Several years ago, Dr Daniels published a book called “Life at the Bottom” under the pen name Theodore Dalrymple. It addresses the same subject as this article, but in more depth. It is a profound book.
And who is the biggest promoter of collectivism which turns human beings into domesticated animals (the allusion for George Orwell’s,”Animal Farm”)?
The one percenters!
It all started with British industrialist, Robert Owen, who was of the opinion that collectivism would solve man’s social ills. He even came to America and started the first commune in 1826 in New Harmony, Indiana.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Owen
And what kind of people did it attract?
(from the same wiki entry)
‘...their members were very motley, mixing many worthy people of the highest aims with vagrants, adventurers, and crotchety, wrongheaded enthusiasts, or in the words of Owen’s son “a heterogeneous collection of radicals, enthusiastic devotees to principle, honest latitudinarians, and lazy theorists, with a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in.”’
A bunch of radical, lazy, stinky hippies!
You have to remember that collectivism (and all its forms) is a process, not a goal, and both parties, Pubbies and Dems, are happy to take us for the ride!
The only people who benefit from collectivism are the rich and the poor until the middle class runs out of money. Ever heard the old phrase, “playing both ends against the middle”?
If you’re running a ping list for AD/TD, I’d like to be on it, please.
BFL. I adore Dalrymple’s stuff.
But historically government IS the per se oppressor of the the poor.
I’m not talking about the Founding Fathers. It started in the UK with a one percenter, Robert Owen, there and then he spread that idea to the one percenters here.
Nah, I just pinged a few FRiends. Someone with the time should do it, though -- good call!
And who has historically run those governments of the past and present that have oppressed its citizenry or subjects?
Again, it is the one percenters.
Collectivism, at its best, oppresses in a subtle and indirect way. For the one percenters collectivism is a legitimate-appearing way of doing so under the guise of best intentions.
And why do they do so?
Because they don’t want any competition from the rabble.
Yes, I believe this lecture stems from that material. Concur completely - it was a brilliant set of essays.
The biggest differences between the African poor that Dalrymple (I might as well continue using his pen name) worked with and the urban underclass that he dealt with in Great Britain mirror the differences between rural and urban poor in the United States: greater family solidarity in the rural areas, more prevalent secularization of the urban. These are similarities, not rock-solid identities, but it seems persuasive to me that in both cases the state has made considerable effort to suppress that family solidarity, either deliberately or through social programs "whose intentions are good," i.e. whose promoters figure replace the authority and disciplinary figure that is the father with something "better" of their own: the paternal state as well as the maternal one.
In practice the state has not the means to effect that sort of day-to-day supervision outside of a barracks arrangement such as that of ancient Sparta. The substitute is, as Dalrymple points out, easy and to hand:
By the time they are 15 or 16, twice as many children in Britain have a television as have a biological father living at home. The child may be father to the man, but the television is father to the child.
And the state is father to the television, and to that other quotidian manifestation of state presence, public education. Common to these is control, a control that the state finds more difficult to effect with a father as an intermediary. There is still, of course, the mother as the intermediary, control of whom may be effected through an environmental dosage of television. We see this expressed through celebrity worship, rabid consumer materialism, and an overall culture that emphasizes ubiquity over depth.
And just as the authority of father and mother threatens this sort of control, so does the authority of the church, any church. The state may partner with the church, or rather the mosque, or the state may attempt to supplant it altogether. Easy coexistence such as the one once present in the United States had to be established in the founding documents and furiously defended. That is why it is now such a cultural battleground in this country, and why Constitutional barriers are so important to keep inviolate. Or, depending on just how much state control you're after, to breach.
He’s generally published as Theodore Dalrymple at “City Journal.”
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