The Charlie Kirk Show - Why Are People Poor? with Dr. Theodore Dalrymple

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody, today the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:00:01.000 Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, author of one of the most important books I've read recently, Life at the Bottom.

00:00:07.000 You're going to love this book.

00:00:08.000 Love this conversation.

00:00:10.000 Why are people poor?

00:00:11.000 Is it lack of stuff?

00:00:12.000 Is it their environment?

00:00:14.000 You'll really enjoy this conversation.

00:00:16.000 Email me as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:19.000 Subscribe to our podcast and become a member of the Charlie Kirk Show and listen to our podcasts, advertiser-free.

00:00:27.000 CharlieKirk.com and click on the members tab.

00:00:29.000 That is CharlieKirk.com and click on the members tab.

00:00:34.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:35.000 Here we go.

00:00:36.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:37.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:39.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:43.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:46.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:47.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:48.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:00:57.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:05.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:09.000 Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandTodd.com.

00:01:17.000 Really excited for this hour and this discussion.

00:01:21.000 A couple months ago, a very good pastor friend of mine, Pastor David Engelhart, who comes on our program and is also a board member at Turning Point USA, he came up to me and he handed me a book very forcefully.

00:01:32.000 He looked at me in the eyes and he said, Charlie, you must read this.

00:01:35.000 And when he does that, I take it very seriously.

00:01:37.000 He's a very learned man, David Engelhart, really understands the scriptures.

00:01:41.000 He said, Charlie, this book is one of the most powerful books I've ever read when it comes to describing the permanent poor.

00:01:50.000 And he says it debunks all of the Marxist, materialist nonsense that has infected our universities.

00:01:57.000 I said, okay, David, I trust you.

00:01:59.000 And it was, of course, the book was endorsed by Thomas Soule.

00:02:01.000 So I started reading the book and I was blown away.

00:02:03.000 Within a couple chapters, I texted our team.

00:02:05.000 I said, we have to have this author on the program.

00:02:07.000 And the book is Life at the Bottom, and it is by Dr. Theodore Dalrymple.

00:02:12.000 It's one of many books that he has published.

00:02:14.000 This one in particular, I found to be very moving and powerful.

00:02:19.000 And we'll talk about why.

00:02:20.000 Dr. Dalrymple, thank you for taking the time.

00:02:22.000 Well, thank you for asking me.

00:02:24.000 So, Dr. Dalrymple, why don't you introduce to our audience your life's work?

00:02:28.000 What I found most powerful about your book is this was decades of work with the poor and just noticing, analyzing, and seeing patterns that what was driving people to remain poor was not necessarily a material issue.

00:02:45.000 Please tell us about it and we'll dive.

00:02:47.000 We'll go in from there.

00:02:48.000 Well, first of all, I should say that I traveled very widely for a number of years and worked in Africa and I traveled across Africa by public transport, seeing it from the bottom up.

00:03:00.000 And I also traveled widely in Latin America and other places.

00:03:05.000 So I began to see my own country in a rather different light from how I'd seen it before.

00:03:13.000 And then I worked for a number of years in what is called an inner city hospital, and there was a prison next door.

00:03:22.000 And I started working in the prison next door as well.

00:03:26.000 And the main difference between these two great institutions was that there was more violence in the hospital.

00:03:32.000 But I suppose I saw about 10, 10,000 people or something like that number who had taken overdoses, 10 to 15,000 people who had taken overdoses in a kind of suicidal gesture.

00:03:49.000 I didn't actually want to commit suicide, but it's a kind of para-suicidal gesture.

00:03:55.000 And they told me about the way they were living and the way the people around them were living.

00:04:01.000 And in the morning, I saw many victims of crime.

00:04:05.000 And in the afternoons, I used to go and see the perpetrators in the prison.

00:04:10.000 And for a number of years, I was on duty one night in three or one night in four for the prison, and also one weekend or one weekend in three or four also on duty in the prison.

00:04:22.000 So I saw quite a lot.

00:04:24.000 And I suppose I heard about the lives of maybe I can't really put an accurate figure on it, but perhaps about 50,000 people.

00:04:33.000 And this was in a poor part of the city.

00:04:35.000 Well, that's extraordinary.

00:04:36.000 So seeing and treating 50,000 people in the hearing about.

00:04:43.000 I didn't treat 50, I heard about the live, because of course, when I talked to people, they told me about the way they were living and the people that they were living with.

00:04:52.000 And so that was a, at least the way I read the book, a launching off point for you to want to write this book, because you started to notice patterns.

00:05:00.000 What did you learn as you, in the decades of doing this, that was against the, let's just say, popular narrative when it came to the working poor or just the permanently poor and why they are in poverty?

00:05:15.000 Well, the first thing is, the first thing I learned is that they are human beings just like everyone else.

00:05:21.000 And as human beings, they make choices and they're encouraged to make certain choices, but the choices have consequences.

00:05:30.000 But the way to deal with this is not to deny their agency.

00:05:36.000 And what we largely do is deny the agency of people who are in our societies anyway, poor.

00:05:46.000 They're relatively poor.

00:05:49.000 They're not materially poor by the kind of standards that I saw in Africa, but they're relatively poor in our societies.

00:05:58.000 And the fact is that their choices, the choices they made, which were almost very often the wrong ones, the easy ones, the wrong ones, they were made possible by our system of social security and so on.

00:06:15.000 Welfare, my point is not that the welfare state necessarily creates this subculture or culture, if that's what you want to call it, but it is a necessary condition of it.

00:06:31.000 And there's something else that is necessary, and that is the ideas that people have about how they should live.

00:06:38.000 And many of these ideas have trickled down, I'm afraid, from the intellectual classes who never really believed them, but were playing around with them.

00:06:48.000 So what I found to be so powerful in the first couple pages of the book, it's very clear that there is a value system that the permanently poor embrace.

00:07:00.000 If you had to summarize that for our audience, what would that be?

00:07:04.000 Well, I would say that it's a value system where the present moment is lived for the pleasure of the or sensation of the present moment is lived for without any thought of the morrow or even yesterday.

00:07:20.000 So and there is no higher or lower.

00:07:25.000 And they've been, there's been nothing to aspire to.

00:07:29.000 They have nothing to fear and nothing to hope for.

00:07:32.000 And this is a terrible situation for a human being to be in.

00:07:38.000 The academic consensus, Doctor, and as I travel, I hear this more and more, especially on university campuses, is that people that are poor, there's nothing they can do about it.

00:07:52.000 They're nothing more than a victim of their environment, of their conditions, and we should just give them as much stuff as possible.

00:08:00.000 It is systemic.

00:08:02.000 With all of your experience, do you find that to be true?

00:08:06.000 Well, it's obviously not true.

00:08:08.000 I mean, my father was born in a slum in East London when people were incomparably poorer than they are now.

00:08:16.000 My mother arrived in Britain without any money at all.

00:08:21.000 She was much poorer, actually, than anybody is now.

00:08:25.000 So the simple absence of money or absence of resources does not explain permanent poverty.

00:08:36.000 And if you have the wrong ideas, then it doesn't matter what is done to you.

00:08:39.000 You will always remain in this situation.

00:08:42.000 It's the mind, what Blake called the mind-forged manacles that sustain permanent poverty.

00:08:49.000 You use an important thing.

00:08:52.000 If I may say, these have been assiduously propagated in the class by intellectuals.

00:09:01.000 Which is what's so interesting because many of the intellectuals are actually rather well off and they don't even embrace the very ideas that they defend.

00:09:09.000 And that's a theme that a writer in America called luxury beliefs, which is an interesting.

00:09:15.000 I don't know if you're familiar with this.

00:09:18.000 It's an idea that, yeah, it's a really fascinating idea, which is totally true that at the high society in America, Aspen or Upper East Side of Manhattan, they'll have a cocktail party talking about systemic racism or how we have to, why two-parent households aren't necessary.

00:09:35.000 But if you actually ask them, hey, what do you want for your kids?

00:09:38.000 Oh, you know, obviously a two-parent household.

00:09:40.000 And so it's a luxury belief that they themselves would actually never apply to themselves.

00:09:44.000 Private school is another great example.

00:09:47.000 Any thoughts here, Dr. Dalrymple?

00:09:49.000 Well, it goes further than that.

00:09:51.000 They've never actually met anybody other than as a servant or in these classes.

00:09:56.000 So I remember once I used to write for a left-wing magazine as well.

00:09:59.000 And it was a reasonable left-wing with a very distinguished intellectual history, actually.

00:10:04.000 And I used to write for it from time to time when the editor was a very decent man.

00:10:10.000 And I went to lunch there.

00:10:12.000 And by that time, for many years, I've been describing what I saw.

00:10:18.000 And this, I won't say who it was, but he was a well-known liberal person.

00:10:25.000 And I think he was a decent person.

00:10:27.000 But he leant across the table to me and said, with regard to what I had written, you know funny people.

00:10:35.000 And I said, well, there are a lot of them, you know.

00:10:39.000 And I offered to take him outside in the street and point them out to him.

00:10:45.000 And on another occasion, a very famous BBC correspondent, again, a very well-educated and I think decent man, said that he'd always wanted to meet me.

00:10:59.000 This was at another lunch.

00:11:01.000 And he said, he always wanted to meet me because he wanted to ask me whether I made it all up.

00:11:08.000 And by this time, I had been describing what I saw for weekly for about 14 years.

00:11:16.000 So I said, well, I'm very flattered that you'd think that I could make it all up, but I'm afraid it's actually much worse than I describe.

00:11:23.000 And if I just kept a diary of what I saw, it would be unbearable.

00:11:29.000 But anyway, these two people, who were very decent people, I have no, you know, I think they meant well, but they simply had no contact with the world that I was describing.

00:11:42.000 And they'd never met anybody or talked to anybody in that world.

00:11:48.000 And to be fair, I wouldn't have done unless I did the work that I did do.

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00:12:59.000 What I found to be unique about your book, Life at the Bottom, Dr. Dalrymple, is traditionally, let's just say social workers, when they spend a significant period of time with people who would be called permanently poor, their takeaway is one of a Marxist, left-wing, redistribute, like redistribute the property type of solution.

00:13:24.000 They become, as we call, I'm sure you have this phrase too in the United Kingdom, bleeding heart liberals.

00:13:31.000 And without politicizing it, your takeaway, you had sympathy for them as human beings, but you also said, wait a second, it's a value system that they're embracing.

00:13:42.000 They keep telling themselves the same stories.

00:13:46.000 For our audience that hasn't yet read the book, and I encourage them to buy it, what are some of the stories that these people are telling themselves?

00:13:53.000 Well, let's take the question of drug addiction because I saw a lot of people who were addicted to heroin, and this was a sudden important problem in Britain.

00:14:06.000 If I asked them how and why they started taking heroin, almost invariably their answer was, I fell in with the wrong crowd.

00:14:18.000 That is to say, it's a kind of passive thing.

00:14:20.000 It's like an apple falling from a tree or something like that.

00:14:23.000 And I said to them, Well, it's very odd, you know.

00:14:26.000 I meet lots and lots of people who fell in with the wrong crowd, but I never actually meet any member of the wrong crowd itself.

00:14:37.000 And they would laugh because they would get the point immediately.

00:14:41.000 They were uneducated, but they understood what I was getting at.

00:14:46.000 And when you think that what it takes to become a heroin addict, you have to overcome an inhibition against injecting yourself.

00:14:55.000 You have to overcome unpleasant side effects.

00:14:57.000 You have to learn where to get the drug.

00:14:59.000 You have to learn how to prepare it.

00:15:01.000 And actually, it's a very, if you're a criminal heroin addict, and it's perfectly possible to take heroin without becoming a criminal in any other sense, you have a very busy life, actually.

00:15:15.000 So, but they would tell themselves and they would reflect back to people like me the theory that they were simply victims of circumstance.

00:15:27.000 And I would not accept that they were victims of circumstance.

00:15:32.000 So I can give you a story.

00:15:36.000 A burglar was in the prison, and he had been several times in prison having burgled, which proves that really he wanted to be caught because you have to want to be caught and be caught by the British police.

00:15:48.000 But anyway, he said to me, Do you think I burgled because of my happy childhood?

00:15:57.000 And I said, No, it's got absolutely nothing whatever to do with it.

00:16:00.000 Absolutely nothing.

00:16:02.000 And he was very surprised because this was the first time anyone had said something like that to him, saying, No, it's not your childhood.

00:16:09.000 And he said, Well, what is it then? 1.00

00:16:10.000 And so I said, Well, you're lazy and stupid, and you want things that you're not prepared to work for. 1.00

00:16:16.000 And he laughed. 1.00

00:16:17.000 He didn't get angry because he knew already that at some level, he knew that the kind of thing that he had told people and the kind of thing that people had told him were nonsense.

00:16:32.000 And if it were true, it would be very demeaning because it would mean that he was like a billiard ball being struck by another billiard ball. 0.97

00:16:40.000 And however foolish people are, they are not just billiard balls. 0.98

00:16:43.000 I totally agree. 0.99

00:16:44.000 Just hang on to that because when I visit these campuses, they say it's okay to allow these people to loot and to steal because it's just cause and effect.

00:16:53.000 They have no agency.

00:16:56.000 Are you prepared for the unthinkable ahead?

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00:17:57.000 So, Dr. Dalrymple, I'm not sure how deep you want to get into this, but some people will say that the new breakthroughs in neuroscience show that free will is just a trick that we play in ourselves.

00:18:09.000 You don't have any agency.

00:18:11.000 I don't believe that.

00:18:12.000 I think there's plenty of studies on the other side that say that free will is legitimate.

00:18:17.000 But how would you respond to that?

00:18:21.000 Because the high society academics believe we should not have any form of justice or prison system for those that steal, loot, even murder, because they're nothing more than it's determinant.

00:18:36.000 They're just acting out with something that happened previously.

00:18:39.000 How would you respond to that?

00:18:41.000 Well, the first thing to say is that this doesn't necessarily have liberal consequences.

00:18:44.000 If you're really saying that someone behaves extremely badly because of his circumstances, then that would suggest that you should lock him up for good.

00:18:53.000 If there's no connection between what he does and what he thinks, then he is actually just an object.

00:19:01.000 And for the sake of society, you should keep him apart.

00:19:04.000 So what we need are huge prison camps for all these people.

00:19:09.000 Now, I don't believe that.

00:19:11.000 I don't believe that people are just products of their circumstances, although it is also true that their circumstances affect them.

00:19:24.000 It's true that many people, of course, have very unfortunate backgrounds.

00:19:27.000 That's undoubtedly true.

00:19:29.000 But what is most important is the ideas that are given to them and which they accept.

00:19:36.000 So the struggle is one on the level of ideas rather than on whether they can have an even larger television than they already have, or any number of screens or any number of even more luxurious sneakers and so on.

00:19:52.000 This is all ridiculous.

00:19:55.000 So the idea of agency is unpopular with the new consensus. 0.87

00:20:01.000 Why do you think that is?

00:20:02.000 Free will, the ability that you can make rational choices.

00:20:07.000 Well, I think it's popular because, of course, it hands over a lot of power to those people who say, and responsibility to those people who say that other people don't have any agency.

00:20:18.000 If you don't have any agency and you're behaving badly, I should have complete power over you.

00:20:24.000 And so I would say it's a power seeking and it's also very grandiose, of course.

00:20:31.000 I mean, I can't force you to do anything.

00:20:34.000 I mean, I can intimidate you into doing something and I can menace you into doing something, but even that remains a choice whether you are intimidated or not.

00:20:45.000 So it is not true that people are just can be just herded into the right kind of behavior by the right kind of circumstances created by this powerful group of people who can never think of themselves as not having agency.

00:21:05.000 The whole point about being a human being is you can't possibly believe you don't have agency, at least for most of your life.

00:21:14.000 I mean, I'm not saying that there are no circumstances in which you don't have any agency, and I can give examples of that.

00:21:21.000 But for most of our lives, most of the time, we have agency and we have choice and we have to make the choice.

00:21:29.000 The question of determinism, in my opinion, is irrelevant because even if we lived in a completely determined world, the judge who sentences someone to prison is just as determined on his behavior as is the person whom he is sentencing.

00:21:49.000 So it leaves absolutely everything the same.

00:21:52.000 And the fact is that we constantly have to make decisions.

00:21:56.000 Supposing I'm driving a car and I come to a T junction, I can turn either right or left.

00:22:01.000 I can't just sit there and wait for my brain to make a decision.

00:22:04.000 I have to think about whether I turn right or left.

00:22:08.000 So, in other words, the whole idea that we don't have agency is nonsense.

00:22:15.000 I mean, we can't live like that.

00:22:18.000 And in fact, the people who claim that would claim a great deal of agency for themselves and they would claim a great deal of responsibility because they, unlike everybody else, have agency and therefore they must choose what other people do.

00:22:33.000 To socially redesign society.

00:22:36.000 What, if any, policy solutions or even, let's just say, communication changes, do you recommend to change a poverty mindset that has now basically dominated the lower 25, lower 30% of the West?

00:22:52.000 At least in America, there are entire communities that live in what we consider poverty.

00:22:57.000 As you appropriately said, it's not even close to world poverty.

00:23:01.000 They still have air conditioning, televisions, three meals a day.

00:23:04.000 They suffer from obesity.

00:23:06.000 But what we consider to be poverty in the West, cell phones, Wi-Fi, all that stuff.

00:23:12.000 What, if anything, can break the poverty mindset in your decades of experience?

00:23:19.000 Well, on an individual basis, I hope that I had a kind of Socratic dialogue with some people and it affected some people and how they thought about their own lives.

00:23:30.000 Most people don't think about their own lives, actually, In a biographical sense, they don't see what happens to them as the consequence of what they've done or the choices they've made in the past.

00:23:46.000 So it's very important to get them to see that.

00:23:48.000 Now, that actually what happens is the consequence of what they've done and their beliefs and so on and so forth.

00:23:57.000 Unfortunately, for many people, it really is too late.

00:24:00.000 I mean, 50 or 60 is not the age at which you change your way of life.

00:24:06.000 But for young people, it should be possible.

00:24:12.000 Unfortunately, I mean, there are some, there are huge obstacles to making things better on a big scale.

00:24:19.000 For example, our schools. 0.92

00:24:20.000 Our schools are absolutely useless. 0.96

00:24:22.000 Well, not useless, but harmful. 0.69

00:24:26.000 And I, for example, used to try and fathom the level of education of people 15 to 25.

00:24:39.000 And majority of them had absolutely no knowledge, for example, of history whatsoever.

00:24:46.000 You couldn't ask them for a single date.

00:24:46.000 Nothing.

00:24:48.000 In all, in about 15 years, I must have seen thousands of people aged between 16 and 25.

00:24:54.000 And I found three who knew when the Second World War was. 0.62

00:24:58.000 And I mean, I thought one was particularly good because he deduced from the fact that there was a Second World War that there must have been a first.

00:25:09.000 And that, and I mean, this is funny, but it's dreadful.

00:25:17.000 Oh, it's tragic.

00:25:19.000 It's tragic.

00:25:20.000 And they're not people of deficient intelligence.

00:25:23.000 These are not unteachable people.

00:25:25.000 When I used to, I used to give them, I used to test their literacy and I would give them a sentence to read, and they would come to a three-syllable word and say, I don't know that one, as if English were written ideographically rather than alphabetically.

00:25:42.000 So they're doing nothing but just recognizing the struggled toward the end of a sentence, I'd say, what does it mean?

00:25:55.000 What does it mean, what you've just read?

00:25:58.000 And they would say, oh, I don't know, I was only reading it.

00:26:02.000 So it was a kind of propitiatory ceremony that they were engaged in reading.

00:26:07.000 Now, here one could say that in a sense, they were the victims, but they were not the victims of poverty.

00:26:15.000 They were victims of a terrible ideology of teaching.

00:26:24.000 And it's been proven over and over again that you can teach almost anyone to read except people of genuinely biologically low intelligence.

00:26:36.000 So this, and this, incidentally, was after they had had an education that costs on the average $80,000.

00:26:44.000 So $80,000, and people come out not being able to multiply six by five and not being able to read a sentence.

00:26:54.000 And how is one to explain this?

00:26:57.000 It's kind of miracle in a way.

00:26:59.000 I mean, it's a challenge to spend $80,000 on the education of a child and for him to come out semi-literate or even illiterate.

00:27:12.000 So here is something that has to be done.

00:27:15.000 And there has to be a change in, of course, in the way we teach and so on and so forth.

00:27:20.000 Unfortunately, and I think in America, it's just as bad as Britain, and it might even be a little worse.

00:27:26.000 The resistance of teachers to these kind of ideas Is absolutely, well, it's terribly strong.

00:27:38.000 And it exists in France.

00:27:40.000 I remember I read an article in a French newspaper by an educational correspondent who said that the same problems are coming in France.

00:27:48.000 They're a bit behind us.

00:27:50.000 If going in this direction is to go backwards, but anyway, go forwards, I mean.

00:27:57.000 Anyway, he said he wrote an article saying that teaching methods in France were deteriorating and literacy was deteriorating.

00:28:07.000 And he received 600 letters of protest from teachers, 200 of which had spelling errors.

00:28:13.000 So we now have teachers who themselves cannot teach elementary skills.

00:28:20.000 I remember I had a friend who was in the middle, this is the middle class, or he was a doctor like me.

00:28:27.000 He sent his child to the local school, and the child used to come home with spellings to learn.

00:28:33.000 And he found that three out of ten were misspellings.

00:28:37.000 So he went to the headmistress of the school and said, Look at this, you're teaching my child misspellings.

00:28:44.000 And she said, Well, what does it matter?

00:28:46.000 You can see, you know what the word means when it's written in this, misspelt in this way.

00:28:55.000 You know what it means.

00:28:57.000 And at that point, he took his child out of the school and put the child into a private school.

00:29:06.000 But if that is what's happening in a middle-class area, you can imagine what's happening in very poor areas.

00:29:12.000 Now, my father was a very, as I mentioned, was born in a slum in London.

00:29:19.000 And this was in 19, he was born in 1909.

00:29:22.000 And he went to an extremely good school where no there were no compromises.

00:29:28.000 He had to learn French and German and Latin.

00:29:34.000 And they didn't say, Your parents are very poor.

00:29:37.000 In fact, they didn't speak English very well.

00:29:39.000 Your parents are very poor, so you don't have to learn this because it's too difficult for you or it's of no use to you.

00:29:47.000 And so, of course, he escaped from that world very, very quickly.

00:29:53.000 So we are up against a kind of institutional resistance to the kind of changes that would be needed to make things better for the children in our poorest areas.

00:30:08.000 One of the reasons I love your book is that it also cuts through some of the overarching guilt that even infects the American right.

00:30:15.000 I've given this book to many people, and they say, Oh, wow, maybe we should talk more about values and less about stuff.

00:30:22.000 Yes, the worldview that, quite honestly, as you say here, makes the underclass, life at the bottom.

00:30:28.000 Check it out, Dr. Dalrymple. 0.85

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00:31:55.000 The book is Life at the Bottom.

00:31:57.000 Give it to any person that is a bleeding heart liberal in your life.

00:32:02.000 It is incredibly powerful.

00:32:04.000 And Dr. Dalrymple, I want to just compliment you on your writing style.

00:32:08.000 You get straight to the heart of the matter.

00:32:10.000 The prose is excellent.

00:32:11.000 Very, very gifted writer, very readable, entertaining, and also real.

00:32:17.000 Dr. Dalrymple, we could go any direction here.

00:32:20.000 Are there other books you'd like to speak about that you've published or anything that we didn't talk about in regards to life at the bottom?

00:32:26.000 We have five minutes remaining.

00:32:27.000 We can proceed at your choosing.

00:32:29.000 Well, I wrote a book against psychology, against the study of psychology, although I was a psychiatrist and also a general doctor.

00:32:38.000 But I wrote a book against the psychologization of life because I came to the opinion, and this doesn't concern only the poor sector of society, it's the whole of society, that the ideas of psychology actually prevent people from examining their lives in an honest way because they begin to see their lives through a lens of psychological theory rather than directly.

00:33:07.000 And this prevents them from thinking honestly about their own lives.

00:33:11.000 And over the past century, or a bit longer than that, we've had successively various theories which were said to explain ourselves to ourselves.

00:33:22.000 For example, psychoanalysis.

00:33:24.000 I think psychoanalysis doesn't really explain anything, never did explain anything, was founded on actually no evidence whatever and a lot of lies.

00:33:36.000 I'm sorry to say Freud was a very brilliant man, but he was not a truthful man.

00:33:41.000 And we've had behaviorism.

00:33:42.000 I don't know whether people remember behaviorism, the behaviorism of Skinner, for example.

00:33:47.000 There was Watson and Skinner who tried to sort of condition babies into all kinds of various mental states and so on, and adults thought that conditioning and response explain the whole of life.

00:34:05.000 We've had Darwinistic explanations of behavior.

00:34:10.000 We're now, I think, exaggerating neuroscientific explanations of behavior.

00:34:15.000 There's neurochemical explanations of behavior.

00:34:18.000 So if you're on a bus, you may hear people talking about their neurochemistry, although they wouldn't know the chemical formula for salt.

00:34:28.000 But nevertheless, they know about the chemicals in their brain and there being too much of them or too little of them.

00:34:35.000 And all of this, actually, if you talk in these terms, ends up that you're talking about yourself as if you're talking about an object.

00:34:46.000 So you become an object to yourself rather than a subject.

00:34:49.000 So I think on the whole, this, of course, is a bit of an exaggeration, and it's but grosso model.

00:34:58.000 The psychologization of life has been a disaster, or not a disaster is perhaps a strong word, but it hasn't been an advantage for individuals and it hasn't been an advantage for society.

00:35:14.000 The name of the book?

00:35:16.000 Admirable Evasions.

00:35:17.000 It's a quotation from Shakespeare.

00:35:20.000 And what I say is that it's an admirable evasion of poor master man to lay his goatish disposition at the charge of a star.

00:35:30.000 In other words, to blame what he does, what he is, on forces that are beyond him.

00:35:40.000 And it's always very easy to do.

00:35:43.000 And I'm sure we've all done it.

00:35:45.000 We'll have to have you back on just to discuss this because the worship of modern psychology is nearly ubiquitous.

00:35:54.000 And the book, Admirable Evasions, How Psychology Undermines Morality.

00:36:01.000 That is a bold, bold take.

00:36:03.000 I love it, to be honest with you.

00:36:05.000 And I just want to say, Dr. Dalrymple, your emphasis on agency and it is inherently empowering for someone whose life might not be going the way you want it to go.

00:36:17.000 Well, then make better choices.

00:36:18.000 I think that is very uplifting considering how some people think they're just a victim of their circumstances.

00:36:25.000 Dr. Dalrymple, any closing thoughts?

00:36:28.000 Well, not really.

00:36:28.000 I hope that they find this book Admirable Evasions.

00:36:32.000 I mean, it's good knockabout fun apart from anything else.

00:36:35.000 I hope it makes them laugh because some of the ideas are laughable.

00:36:43.000 Very good.

00:36:43.000 Dr. Dalrymple, thank you so much for your attention.

00:36:45.000 Thank you.

00:36:46.000 Thank you very much.

00:36:48.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:36:49.000 Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:36:52.000 Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.

00:36:57.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - October 31, 2023

Why Are People Poor? with Dr. Theodore Dalrymple

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