Life at the Bottom | Theodore Dalrymple (AKA Anthony Daniels) | EP 170

[Music] Hello everyone. I'm very pleased to welcome today 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 Great Britain's finest essayists, Dr. Anthony Daniels, better known by his pen name, Theodore Dalrymple.

He worked as a prison doctor and psychiatrist, retiring in 2005, but worked all over the world and traveled. He has written many books, some of which have had a rather profound cultural impact, including "Life at the Bottom: The World View That Makes the Underclass" (2001), where he discusses what you might describe as the philosophy of poverty; "Our Culture: What's Left of It" (2005); "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.

Theodore Dalrymple: Well, thank you for asking me. I'm going to start by telling you how I found out about you. When I was working as a clinical psychologist, I had a social worker as a client, an immigrant, 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, pounded out and bullied out of her profession by the radical leftists themselves.

She mentioned "Life at the Bottom" to me, and so I picked it up and read it. I thought, I've never heard anyone state this so bluntly. What struck me, I guess, were three things: 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 and 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, in some sense, they've fallen out of the bottom of the culture in your view.

But what you focused on was the difference between that poverty and the poverty of absolute deprivation that you encountered in places like Africa. 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 more severe and less addressable than the poverty that you had seen 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 experience as a psychiatrist, and then your willingness to put down these very critical and certainly politically incorrect observations, which to me rang true, generally true, and which I hadn't encountered with any other thinker.

Theodore Dalrymple: Yes, well, I didn't really start out with any preconception, 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.

Interviewer: And who did you see? Tell everyone about the world.

Theodore Dalrymple: 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 that there was far more violence in the hospital than in the prison. I would work in the morning in the hospital and then go and work in our prison in the afternoon, and often at night and weekends as well.

In the hospital, I saw maybe something in the region of—I didn't count exactly—10 to 15 thousand cases of attempted suicide or at least of suicidal gestures that varied from real attempts at suicide to attempts to bring parents to heal and everything in between. I examined them all or when I say examined, I mean I spoke to them all, and of course, they told me about the life around them.

In the end, I probably heard about the lives of maybe 40, 50 thousand people, of course refracted through these people's lenses. Nevertheless, it was a selected sample of people; it wasn't a small sample of people. Obviously, I began to draw some conclusions, see some generalizations, which I didn't start with.

Interviewer: 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 were hospitalized or who were in prison, and so obviously there's a selection there. But your patients were drawn from lower socioeconomic strata, so they were poor and dispossessed comparatively speaking, and they had got into trouble of one form or another that was sufficiently damaging so that they ended up being brought to the attention of the medical authorities because of their own damage that had 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.

Theodore Dalrymple: Yes, and you said you didn't start with political intent while you were a psychiatrist. But walk us through what you saw and what you started to conclude and why you started to communicate it.

Theodore Dalrymple: Well, I'll deal with why I started to communicate it. It was that it was so terrible 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'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 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, "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 had read it before, but I had forgotten. It's an unending litany of complete calamity across every dimension you can possibly imagine.

Then you said you saw like 20,000 people who were in dire suicidal straits. In addition, I presumed that you had patients other than those who were suicidal as well.

Theodore Dalrymple: Yes, well, mainly because I was working in a general hospital. Then I would see organic patients with organic problems and a few others—people who had been beaten by their partners; I saw that; that was standard, of course. I discovered that about 80 percent of the women whom I saw had suffered violence at the hands of their one or more of their sexual partners.

Interviewer: Well, we could dig in there. You tell this story; that's really quite interesting. So you're—and very—what would you say—libel? Any discussion of it is liable to create controversy. So 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.

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 tomcat who had been in enough fights that his head was a mass of shredded ears and scars and missing an eye. 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. So it wasn't exactly subtle.

You said that they invariably wore an expression of contempt, something like that, and they were people you would obviously give wide berth to in the street in broad daylight. Yet they were invariably tangled up with a woman or two or three or ten who they were abusing serially. But the women seemed, in some sense, blind to this—not only the underclass women that you were serving, but you also mentioned that that was extraordinarily prevalent among the nursing staff. So walk us through that and tell us how you make sense of that.

Theodore Dalrymple: Well, it wasn't, I wouldn't say it was prevalent among the nursing staff; it was present among the nursing staff. 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.

The men wanted exclusive sexual possession of somebody, but at the same time, they wanted complete sexual freedom. Now, these things don’t go together very well. I mean, if there's complete sexual freedom, okay, it has complete sexual freedom. But if at the same time you want, possibly for reasons of boosting your self-image, the exclusive sexual possession of somebody, then, and everyone around you is the same, then the men would see other men as threats. They would become extremely jealous because they would fear any contact between their girlfriend—they would never call her girlfriend, with another man would lead to or might lead to a liaison.

After all, since they were sexually predatory in that way, they assumed that everyone around them was of similar ilk, 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 where, if one man looked at a girlfriend, it was assumed to be a challenge by the girlfriend's boyfriend.

And so there could be fights and even murder. 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.

The universal answer to that, insofar as there is one, was the development of monogamous norms and social enforcement of those norms. And you know, you just described it in some sense as inhibition and control, but I think it’s also useful to think about it as integration 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—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 violent outcomes that you described.

And I was pilloried 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, part of the reasons for marriage, apart from the fact that two-parent families are clearly much better for children when the father there is, is that societies that allow unregulated polygamy or that degenerate into that are invariably rife with extraordinarily high levels of violence.

Theodore Dalrymple: Yes, well, that's what I saw now. Of course, the destruction of the idea of the family as we once knew it has been a long process started, 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.

People thought—well, I think this is my explanation—they thought that 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 go on to something else, somebody else.

But this is actually a very shallow view of things. Apart from anything else, in 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. Yeah, 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 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—not because of anything necessarily intrinsic to the state of marriage itself—you need social institutions to buttress the structure so that all of the weight doesn’t fall on those individuals alone.

You know, I mean, I’ve had clients in my practice who are living together, and you know, 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, and you might think that’s a philosophy, but it’s actually a pretty stunningly shallow cliché. 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 Mandarins 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.

Theodore Dalrymple: Yes, with regard to the piece of paper business, I remember I had a patient 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. 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 either way.”

So obviously this revealed that it wasn’t only a piece of paper; it was a commitment which he was unwilling—or for some reason—to make.

Interviewer: There’s also the question of, well, what is the basis of your relationship if it isn’t actually a formally recognized permanent commitment? Say you’re cohabiting with someone— I think in Canada, it's six months and it’s basically common law marriage. So what is it? Are we going to hang around with each other until one of us finds someone better? But you’ll do for now? Is that the—

Theodore Dalrymple: Well, I think yes. I think it’s particularly with the men. I think 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.

Interviewer: And what do you think it is committing to?

Theodore Dalrymple: Which, the continual, the hypothetical continual choice? That’s just—they hope to be able to continue a life of pleasure and sensation, I think that’s about it. They have a kind of anti-romantic idea of love.

Interviewer: So do you think that the intellectuals that were actively engaged in the destruction of traditional structures or in 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?

Theodore Dalrymple: I think that 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 preserve their hypocrisy. If they break the rules, they at least pretend not to be breaking that or try to pretend not to be breaking the rules on the whole.

But they are protected from the consequences of breakdown to some extent—not completely, of course, because there'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 a rather miserable support of the state, then the consequences are absolutely terrible. And I saw hundreds and thousands of cases.

Interviewer: 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 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 at constantly in your writings, is that there’s an entire worldview 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.

Theodore Dalrymple: Well, I concluded that we had created quite a lot of people who had nothing to hope for and nothing to fear, perceived 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 a 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 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 latitude, 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 demoralizing—the word I mean actual removal of morality from all human consideration. I remember once I had a patient with 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.

It seemed to me this, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a perfectly good way to—this is a place where the welfare state could actually help. So I phoned a social worker, and I made a great 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 is, 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.

Interviewer: And what we saw with these people who had no—

Theodore Dalrymple: That’s the case you’re making. It’s not even just removed; it’s actually actively punished, which is even worse than mere removal.

Interviewer: And you kind of claim, I think—and 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 apply anymore. 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 them out of the circumstances that they find themselves in.

Theodore Dalrymple: Yeah, well, I think one of the things that is clear about, shall I say, the intellectual classes is one of their greatest fears is the fear of being considered censorious. And of course, censoriousness is not a very attractive quality. But the best way to avoid being considered censorious is to fail to make any judgment whatever. But this is completely impossible; it’s impossible not to make judgments. Judgment is part of being human.

Interviewer: Yeah, well, you can’t perceive without judging because you have to select the thing you should be looking 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’re not making judgments, then you are actually facilitating the worst judgments. 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 censorious person? Because, 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—there’s actually quite costly education, but it’s extremely bad—and so on and so forth. Here I am coming in and making judgments, saying your behavior is what is causing your unhappiness, is at the root of your unhappiness, and actually, I try to de-medicalize a lot of their unhappiness because I didn’t think their unhappiness was a medical condition.

Interviewer: Well, that is the danger with judgment. I mean, I face 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.

Theodore Dalrymple: Yeah, well, judgment is always fallible. 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 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 you shouldn’t make judgments.

It’s also the abdication of responsibility. I mean, I thought this through with my clinical clients at a sort of a technical level too. I learned a lot from reading Carl 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.

And his critics pointed out that if you watched Carl Rogers in action, what he was practicing involved careful discrimination. But what he meant was something like accept that the person is a 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.

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 that means is you’re not distinguishing between what’s good and what isn’t.

Theodore Dalrymple: Well, I think what I was trying to get out with patients was, if you like, our existential equality—that I made choices, but they made choices too. I mean, of course, 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 on the whole. 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.

Interviewer: And why do you think they stopped?

Theodore Dalrymple: Ah, well, I provided an argument. I don’t know whether one is allowed to use bad language on your podcast.

Interviewer: You can. Anything you have to say that you think is necessary, you’re free to say.

Theodore Dalrymple: Okay. Well, the patient would come in and say, “I’ve got this [ __ ] headache.” So I would say, “Well, before we go any further, can you tell me the difference between a headache and a [ __ ] headache?”

Interviewer: Tell me the difference.

Theodore Dalrymple: And he would say, “Well, that’s how I speak.” And I said, “Yes, that’s what I’m complaining of.” And he said, “Well, why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I speak like this?” Because that’s me, you know.

And I said, “Well, supposing at the end of this consultation I say to you, ‘And I hear some [ __ ] pills—take two of the [ __ ] every four [ __ ] hours. And if they don’t [ __ ] work, [ __ ] come back, and I’ll give you some other fighters,’ you would find this a bit strange, wouldn’t you?”

He said, “Well, 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.

Interviewer: And you meant that; you meant that.

Theodore Dalrymple: I meant that, yeah.

Interviewer: Right. Well, that—in a way, you’re complimenting your 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.

Theodore Dalrymple: Yes, people are going to agree to use that. I mean, listen, 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, and 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 murderer! You’re not a doctor; you’re a murderer!”

And of course, this was a Victorian prison with ironwork and everything, so it was echoing all through this enormous building.

Anyway, in the end, I said, “Well, that’s enough; you have to go now.” And so he went, and screaming still, and then the next day I saw him, and he came up to me, and he apologized. He said, “I was bang out of order.” That was his expression. “I was bang out of order; I’m sorry, doctor.”

And then I said, “Oh, never mind. I’ve been called far worse than that.” And then I said, “And actually, you had a wonderful effect on the other prisoners whom I was examining because they were like lambs when they came in.”

And I said, “You couldn’t come and do it again this evening, could you? Come in and call me a murderer?” So we had a good laugh.

But on the other hand, of course, what I was saying is that you can control yourself; it’s not—

Interviewer: Well, that’s a compliment. It’s a compliment, and it might be the first time that some of these people had been complimented in that way.

Theodore Dalrymple: Well, yes. I mean, I unfortunately think that services have been set up to make them the victims of their own lives and behavior, so that’s how they presented themselves.

And I remember another person who 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 unintelligent people to understand it; but nevertheless, I found that they could actually follow quite complicated arguments.

I’ll give you an example. There was a chap who came to me and said, “You have to give me something because if you don’t give me something, I’m going to attack a child sex offender in the prison.”

Actually, they—generally, they were kept apart because they would be immediately attacked. 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.”

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 mothers, do they have boyfriends?” And he said, “Yes.”

And I said, “One or perhaps more? Have they had more than one?” And they said, “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, “Well, you’re not a sex—you haven’t interfered sexually with children yourself, but you 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 abusers.

Interviewer: And why do you think you got away with that?

Theodore Dalrymple: You said you took a risk, right?

Theodore Dalrymple: Yes, well, I took a risk. I mean, it was a risk that I didn’t know that he had children. I didn’t know. 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.

And your response wasn’t, “I better prescribe him a sedative at least to cover myself up,” let’s say, if anything does happen. Your response was, “Let’s call this guy out for his rather self-evident moral flaws, blind ignorance of which is facilitating an unearned sense of homicidal moral superiority.”

And let’s assume that that’s going to be curative. That’s a risk.

Theodore Dalrymple: Yes, 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 act and then someone might blame me.

I mean, yes, definitely that never happened. That never happened. But I was quite—I was fairly clear that their responsibility was not to behave like that.

And he didn’t, in my opinion, as far as I could tell, suffer from anything which would have excused him.

Interviewer: Right, some organic impulse control disorder, some prefrontal damage.

Theodore Dalrymple: Yeah, I mean, those things do occur. A certain percentage of violent criminals have rage that’s induced by epilepsy and that can be triggered by drinking. I mean, there are organic syndromes that mimic virtually every moral failing.

Interviewer: Yeah, yeah, right. So there were lots of other cases like that. I remember a chap 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.

Theodore Dalrymple: I think that’s a good place to stop.

Interviewer: Yeah, okay. Thank you very much for your conversation. I appreciate you talking with me today. I hope everyone finds this useful.

Theodore Dalrymple: Yes, I hope—I don’t know how many people watch or see it—a million.

Interviewer: A million.

Theodore Dalrymple: Yeah, and you get abuse. That’s a long story. I mean, I know you haven’t—

Interviewer: No, I mean abuse from this kind of thing, from a podcast—not at the moment, and likely not from this one.

Theodore Dalrymple: Yes. So, good. Well, I must say I haven’t really had abuse, but then, of course, I don’t look to see whether people are abusing me. So what the heart doesn’t see, what the eye doesn’t see, the heart can’t grieve over.

Interviewer: Much appreciated.

Theodore Dalrymple: Okay, thank you very much.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.

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