00:00:48.000His 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.
00:00:57.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:09.000Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandTodd.com.
00:01:17.000Really excited for this hour and this discussion.
00:01:21.000A 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.
00:01:32.000He looked at me in the eyes and he said, Charlie, you must read this.
00:01:35.000And when he does that, I take it very seriously.
00:01:37.000He's a very learned man, David Engelhart, really understands the scriptures.
00:01:41.000He said, Charlie, this book is one of the most powerful books I've ever read when it comes to describing the permanent poor.
00:01:50.000And he says it debunks all of the Marxist, materialist nonsense that has infected our universities.
00:02:24.000So, Dr. Dalrymple, why don't you introduce to our audience your life's work?
00:02:28.000What 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.
00:02:45.000Please tell us about it and we'll dive.
00:02:48.000Well, 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.
00:03:00.000And I also traveled widely in Latin America and other places.
00:03:05.000So I began to see my own country in a rather different light from how I'd seen it before.
00:03:13.000And then I worked for a number of years in what is called an inner city hospital, and there was a prison next door.
00:03:22.000And I started working in the prison next door as well.
00:03:26.000And the main difference between these two great institutions was that there was more violence in the hospital.
00:03:32.000But 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.
00:03:49.000I didn't actually want to commit suicide, but it's a kind of para-suicidal gesture.
00:03:55.000And they told me about the way they were living and the way the people around them were living.
00:04:01.000And in the morning, I saw many victims of crime.
00:04:05.000And in the afternoons, I used to go and see the perpetrators in the prison.
00:04:10.000And 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.
00:04:36.000So seeing and treating 50,000 people in the hearing about.
00:04:43.000I 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.
00:04:52.000And 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.
00:05:00.000What 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?
00:05:15.000Well, the first thing is, the first thing I learned is that they are human beings just like everyone else.
00:05:21.000And as human beings, they make choices and they're encouraged to make certain choices, but the choices have consequences.
00:05:30.000But the way to deal with this is not to deny their agency.
00:05:36.000And what we largely do is deny the agency of people who are in our societies anyway, poor.
00:05:49.000They're not materially poor by the kind of standards that I saw in Africa, but they're relatively poor in our societies.
00:05:58.000And 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.
00:06:15.000Welfare, 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.
00:06:31.000And there's something else that is necessary, and that is the ideas that people have about how they should live.
00:06:38.000And 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.
00:06:48.000So 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.
00:07:00.000If you had to summarize that for our audience, what would that be?
00:07:04.000Well, 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.
00:07:25.000And they've been, there's been nothing to aspire to.
00:07:29.000They have nothing to fear and nothing to hope for.
00:07:32.000And this is a terrible situation for a human being to be in.
00:07:38.000The 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.
00:07:52.000They're nothing more than a victim of their environment, of their conditions, and we should just give them as much stuff as possible.
00:08:52.000If I may say, these have been assiduously propagated in the class by intellectuals.
00:09:01.000Which 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.
00:09:09.000And that's a theme that a writer in America called luxury beliefs, which is an interesting.
00:09:15.000I don't know if you're familiar with this.
00:09:18.000It'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.
00:09:35.000But if you actually ask them, hey, what do you want for your kids?
00:09:38.000Oh, you know, obviously a two-parent household.
00:09:40.000And so it's a luxury belief that they themselves would actually never apply to themselves.
00:09:44.000Private school is another great example.
00:10:27.000But he leant across the table to me and said, with regard to what I had written, you know funny people.
00:10:35.000And I said, well, there are a lot of them, you know.
00:10:39.000And I offered to take him outside in the street and point them out to him.
00:10:45.000And 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.
00:11:01.000And he said, he always wanted to meet me because he wanted to ask me whether I made it all up.
00:11:08.000And by this time, I had been describing what I saw for weekly for about 14 years.
00:11:16.000So 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.
00:11:23.000And if I just kept a diary of what I saw, it would be unbearable.
00:11:29.000But 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.
00:11:42.000And they'd never met anybody or talked to anybody in that world.
00:11:48.000And to be fair, I wouldn't have done unless I did the work that I did do.
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00:12:59.000What 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.
00:13:24.000They become, as we call, I'm sure you have this phrase too in the United Kingdom, bleeding heart liberals.
00:13:31.000And 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.
00:13:42.000They keep telling themselves the same stories.
00:13:46.000For 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?
00:13:53.000Well, 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.
00:14:06.000If I asked them how and why they started taking heroin, almost invariably their answer was, I fell in with the wrong crowd.
00:14:18.000That is to say, it's a kind of passive thing.
00:14:20.000It's like an apple falling from a tree or something like that.
00:14:23.000And I said to them, Well, it's very odd, you know.
00:14:26.000I 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.
00:14:37.000And they would laugh because they would get the point immediately.
00:14:41.000They were uneducated, but they understood what I was getting at.
00:14:46.000And when you think that what it takes to become a heroin addict, you have to overcome an inhibition against injecting yourself.
00:14:55.000You have to overcome unpleasant side effects.
00:14:57.000You have to learn where to get the drug.
00:15:01.000And 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.
00:15:15.000So, but they would tell themselves and they would reflect back to people like me the theory that they were simply victims of circumstance.
00:15:27.000And I would not accept that they were victims of circumstance.
00:15:36.000A 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.
00:15:48.000But anyway, he said to me, Do you think I burgled because of my happy childhood?
00:15:57.000And I said, No, it's got absolutely nothing whatever to do with it.
00:16:17.000He 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.
00:16:32.000And 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.
00:16:40.000And however foolish people are, they are not just billiard balls.
00:16:44.000Just 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.
00:17:57.000So, 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.
00:18:21.000Because 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.
00:18:36.000They're just acting out with something that happened previously.
00:18:41.000Well, the first thing to say is that this doesn't necessarily have liberal consequences.
00:18:44.000If 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.
00:18:53.000If there's no connection between what he does and what he thinks, then he is actually just an object.
00:19:01.000And for the sake of society, you should keep him apart.
00:19:04.000So what we need are huge prison camps for all these people.
00:19:29.000But what is most important is the ideas that are given to them and which they accept.
00:19:36.000So 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.
00:20:02.000Free will, the ability that you can make rational choices.
00:20:07.000Well, 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.
00:20:18.000If you don't have any agency and you're behaving badly, I should have complete power over you.
00:20:24.000And so I would say it's a power seeking and it's also very grandiose, of course.
00:20:31.000I mean, I can't force you to do anything.
00:20:34.000I 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.
00:20:45.000So 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.
00:21:05.000The 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.
00:21:14.000I 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.
00:21:21.000But for most of our lives, most of the time, we have agency and we have choice and we have to make the choice.
00:21:29.000The 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.
00:21:49.000So it leaves absolutely everything the same.
00:21:52.000And the fact is that we constantly have to make decisions.
00:21:56.000Supposing I'm driving a car and I come to a T junction, I can turn either right or left.
00:22:01.000I can't just sit there and wait for my brain to make a decision.
00:22:04.000I have to think about whether I turn right or left.
00:22:08.000So, in other words, the whole idea that we don't have agency is nonsense.
00:22:18.000And 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.
00:22:36.000What, 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?
00:22:52.000At least in America, there are entire communities that live in what we consider poverty.
00:22:57.000As you appropriately said, it's not even close to world poverty.
00:23:01.000They still have air conditioning, televisions, three meals a day.
00:23:06.000But what we consider to be poverty in the West, cell phones, Wi-Fi, all that stuff.
00:23:12.000What, if anything, can break the poverty mindset in your decades of experience?
00:23:19.000Well, 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.
00:23:30.000Most 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.
00:23:46.000So it's very important to get them to see that.
00:23:48.000Now, that actually what happens is the consequence of what they've done and their beliefs and so on and so forth.
00:23:57.000Unfortunately, for many people, it really is too late.
00:24:00.000I mean, 50 or 60 is not the age at which you change your way of life.
00:24:06.000But for young people, it should be possible.
00:24:12.000Unfortunately, I mean, there are some, there are huge obstacles to making things better on a big scale.
00:24:48.000In all, in about 15 years, I must have seen thousands of people aged between 16 and 25.
00:24:54.000And I found three who knew when the Second World War was.
00:24:58.000And 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.
00:25:09.000And that, and I mean, this is funny, but it's dreadful.
00:25:25.000When 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.
00:25:42.000So they're doing nothing but just recognizing the struggled toward the end of a sentence, I'd say, what does it mean?
00:25:55.000What does it mean, what you've just read?
00:25:58.000And they would say, oh, I don't know, I was only reading it.
00:26:02.000So it was a kind of propitiatory ceremony that they were engaged in reading.
00:26:07.000Now, here one could say that in a sense, they were the victims, but they were not the victims of poverty.
00:26:15.000They were victims of a terrible ideology of teaching.
00:26:24.000And it's been proven over and over again that you can teach almost anyone to read except people of genuinely biologically low intelligence.
00:26:36.000So this, and this, incidentally, was after they had had an education that costs on the average $80,000.
00:26:44.000So $80,000, and people come out not being able to multiply six by five and not being able to read a sentence.
00:28:57.000And at that point, he took his child out of the school and put the child into a private school.
00:29:06.000But if that is what's happening in a middle-class area, you can imagine what's happening in very poor areas.
00:29:12.000Now, my father was a very, as I mentioned, was born in a slum in London.
00:29:19.000And this was in 19, he was born in 1909.
00:29:22.000And he went to an extremely good school where no there were no compromises.
00:29:28.000He had to learn French and German and Latin.
00:29:34.000And they didn't say, Your parents are very poor.
00:29:37.000In fact, they didn't speak English very well.
00:29:39.000Your 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.
00:29:47.000And so, of course, he escaped from that world very, very quickly.
00:29:53.000So 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.
00:30:08.000One of the reasons I love your book is that it also cuts through some of the overarching guilt that even infects the American right.
00:30:15.000I've given this book to many people, and they say, Oh, wow, maybe we should talk more about values and less about stuff.
00:30:22.000Yes, the worldview that, quite honestly, as you say here, makes the underclass, life at the bottom.
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00:32:11.000Very, very gifted writer, very readable, entertaining, and also real.
00:32:17.000Dr. Dalrymple, we could go any direction here.
00:32:20.000Are 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?
00:32:29.000Well, I wrote a book against psychology, against the study of psychology, although I was a psychiatrist and also a general doctor.
00:32:38.000But 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.
00:33:07.000And this prevents them from thinking honestly about their own lives.
00:33:11.000And over the past century, or a bit longer than that, we've had successively various theories which were said to explain ourselves to ourselves.
00:33:24.000I think psychoanalysis doesn't really explain anything, never did explain anything, was founded on actually no evidence whatever and a lot of lies.
00:33:36.000I'm sorry to say Freud was a very brilliant man, but he was not a truthful man.
00:33:42.000I don't know whether people remember behaviorism, the behaviorism of Skinner, for example.
00:33:47.000There 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.
00:34:05.000We've had Darwinistic explanations of behavior.
00:34:10.000We're now, I think, exaggerating neuroscientific explanations of behavior.
00:34:15.000There's neurochemical explanations of behavior.
00:34:18.000So if you're on a bus, you may hear people talking about their neurochemistry, although they wouldn't know the chemical formula for salt.
00:34:28.000But nevertheless, they know about the chemicals in their brain and there being too much of them or too little of them.
00:34:35.000And 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.
00:34:46.000So you become an object to yourself rather than a subject.
00:34:49.000So I think on the whole, this, of course, is a bit of an exaggeration, and it's but grosso model.
00:34:58.000The 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.
00:36:05.000And 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.