Autonomy

The Conning Tower ^ | Jan. 6, 2003 | Trentino

[Davis]

In a brilliant and troubling essay in Spectator, Theodore Dalrymple, chronicler of Life at the Bottom, a fine study of the underclass in England, kicks off an excursion into the deepest reaches of moral and political economy with this stunning first paragraph.

If freedom entails responsibility, a fair proportion of mankind would prefer servitude; for it is far, far better to receive three meals a day and be told what to do than to take the consequences of one's own self-destructive choices. It is, moreover, a truth universally unacknowledged that freedom without understanding of what to do with it is a complete nightmare.

Dalrymple, whom I've praised in this space before, doesn't rhapsodize over the benefits of prisons and madhouses. He does observe and describe from his experience as prison doctor the flight-into-captivity phenomenon, prison-inmates preferring prison certainties, its structured routines, its dependability, to freedom's hurly-burly and its consequential difficulties.

Dalrymple notes that the demand over the last twenty years or so to de-institutionalize people incapable of caring for themselves because of lack of mental capacity or mental illness has created enormous problems--cruelties, actually--both for the former inmates and for the rest of the population...more

[headsonpikes]

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a good read.

[hrhdave]

Yes, Dalrymple is simply outstanding, tying together theory and reality, exposing rotten ideas, and offfering good ones in their place.

Trentino's essay is tops, too.

[headsonpikes]

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