Here's an article that is worth a read. In fact it is worth a lot more than that. It's something to think about and act upon.
It presents a case for the disease of victimhood that so many countries have propagated through dirty politics and the promotion of the dependence of the people upon the government. A culture that produces the growth of lazy, low class minions to the diminishing of family life, morals and hard work.
This article is applicable not only to countries worldwide but to individual citizens of every nation. It is a matter of ethics.
"If at any time all labour should cease, and
all existing provisions be equally divided among the people, at the end
of a single year there could scarcely be one human being left
alive---all would have perished by want of subsistence."
-Abraham Lincoln
The Worldview that Makes the Underclass
Anthony Daniels
Writer and Doctor
ANTHONY DANIELS, who often writes under the penname
Theodore Dalrymple, is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan
Institute and a contributing editor of
City Journal. Born in
London in 1949, he qualified as a doctor in 1974 and has worked in
various countries in Africa and elsewhere. From 1990 to 2005, he worked
as a doctor and psychiatrist in a prison in Birmingham, England. He has
written a column for the
London Spectator for 14 years, and writes regularly for
National Review and the
Wall Street Journal. He has published more than 20 books, including
Not
With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics & Culture of Decline, The
New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism, and
Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered on May 20, 2014,
at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Dearborn,
Michigan.
I worked for 15 years as a doctor and psychiatrist in a general
hospital in a poor area of a British city and in the prison next door,
where I was on duty one night in three. The really dangerous people were
in the hospital, perhaps because of the presence in the prison next
door of very large uniformed men who exerted a strangely calming effect
on the prisoners. In the hospital, I personally examined many thousands
of patients who had attempted suicide or at least made a suicidal
gesture (not quite the same thing of course). They were overwhelmingly
from poor homes, and each patient told me of the lives of the three,
four, or five people closest to them—and I spoke to many of those people
as well. I could not, of course, have spoken to so many people, and
heard about so many others, without some general impressions forming
themselves in my mind. One abiding impression was of the violence of
their lives, particularly that between the sexes—largely the consequence
of the fluidity of relations between the sexes—and also of the
devastating effect of prevalent criminality upon the quality of daily
existence.
Before I did this work, I had spent a number of years working as a
doctor in Africa and in other places in the Third World. I also crossed
Africa by public transport, such as it was, and consequently saw much of
that continent from the bottom up. These experiences also helped me in
my understanding of what I was later to see in England. As Dr. Johnson
put it, all judgment is comparative; or as Kipling said, “What should
they know of England who only England know?” Indeed, what should anyone
know of anywhere, who only that place knows?
On my return to England, I used to visit the homes of poor people as
part of my medical duties. Bear in mind that I had returned from some of
the poorest countries in the world, where—in one case—a single hen’s
egg represented luxury and the people wore the cast-off clothes of
Europe that had been donated by charity. When I returned to England, I
was naturally inclined to think of poverty in absolute rather than in
relative terms—as people not having enough to eat, having to fetch water
from three miles away, and so forth. But I soon ceased to think of it
in that fashion.
In the course of my duties, I would often go to patients’ homes.
Everyone lived in households with a shifting cast of members, rather
than in families. If there was an adult male resident, he was generally a
bird of passage with a residence of his own somewhere else. He came and
went as his fancy took him. To ask a child who his father was had
become an almost indelicate question. Sometimes the child would reply,
“Do you mean my father at the moment?” Others would simply shake their
heads, being unwilling to talk about the monster who had begot them and
whom they wished at all costs to forget.
I should mention a rather startling fact: By the time they are 15 or
16, twice as many children in Britain have a television as have a
biological father living at home. The child may be father to the man,
but the television is father to the child. Few homes were without
televisions with screens as large as a cinema—sometimes more than
one—and they were never turned off, so that I often felt I was examining
someone in a cinema rather than in a house. But what was curious was
that these homes often had no means of cooking a meal, or any evidence
of a meal ever having been cooked beyond the use of a microwave, and no
place at which a meal could have been eaten in a family fashion. The
pattern of eating in such households was a kind of foraging in the
refrigerator, as and when the mood took, with the food to be consumed
sitting in front of one of the giant television screens. Not
surprisingly, the members of such households were often enormously fat.
Surveys have shown that a fifth of British children do not eat a meal
more than once a week with another member of their household, and many
homes do not have a dining table. Needless to say, this pattern is
concentrated in the lower reaches of society, where so elementary but
fundamental a means of socialization is now unknown. Here I should
mention in passing that in my hospital, the illegitimacy rate of the
children born in it, except for those of Indian-subcontinental descent,
was approaching 100 percent.
It was in the prison that I first realized I should listen carefully,
not only to what people said, but to the way that they said it. I
noticed, for example, that murderers who had stabbed someone always said
of the fatal moment that “the knife went in.” This was an interesting
locution, because it implied that it was the knife that guided the hand
rather than the hand that guided the knife. It is clear that this
locution serves to absolve the culprit, at least in his own mind, from
his responsibility for his act. It also seeks to persuade the listener
that the culprit is not really guilty, that something other than his
decisions led to the death of the victim. This was so even if the victim
was a man against whom the perpetrator was known to have a serious
grudge, and whom he sought out at the other side of the city having
carried a knife with him.
The human mind is a subtle instrument, and something more than
straightforward lying was going on here. The culprit both believed what
he was saying and knew perfectly well at the same time that it was
nonsense. No doubt this kind of bad faith is not unique to the type of
people I encountered in the hospital and the prison. In Shakespeare’s
King Lear, Edmund, the evil son of the Earl of Gloucester, says:
This is the excellent foppery of the world: that when we are
sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behaviour—we make guilty
of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were
villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves,
and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and
adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all
that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of
whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!
In other words, it wasn’t me.
This passage points, I think, to an eternal and universal temptation
of mankind to blame those of his misfortunes that are the natural and
predictable consequence of his own choices on forces or circumstances
that are external to him and outside his control. Is there any one of us
who has never resorted to excuses about his circumstances when he has
done wrong or made a bad decision? It is a universal human tendency. But
in Britain, at any rate, an entire class of persons has been created
that not only indulges in this tendency, but makes it their entire world
outlook—and does so with official encouragement.
Let me take as an example the case of heroin addicts. In the 1950s,
heroin addiction in Britain was confined to a very small number of
people, principally in bohemian circles. It has since become a mass
phenomenon, the numbers of addicts having increased perhaps two
thousandfold, to something like 250,000 to 300,000. And with the
statistically insignificant exception of members of the popular culture
elite, heroin addiction is heavily concentrated in areas of the country
such as the one in which I worked.
Heroin addiction has been presented by officialdom as a bona fide
disease that strikes people like, shall we say, rheumatoid arthritis. In
the United States, the National Institute on Drug Abuse defines
addiction quite baldly as a chronic relapsing brain disease—
and nothing else.
I hesitate to say it, but this seems to me straightforwardly a lie,
told to willing dupes in order to raise funds from the federal
government.
Be that as it may, the impression has been assiduously created and
peddled among the addicts that they are the helpless victims of
something that is beyond their own control, which means that they need
the technical assistance of what amounts to a substantial bureaucratic
apparatus in order to overcome it. When heroin addicts just sentenced to
imprisonment arrived, they said to me, “I would give up, doctor, if
only I had the help.” What they meant by this was that they would give
up heroin if some cure existed that could be administered to them that
would by itself, without any resolution on their part, change their
behavior. In this desire they appeared sincere—but at the same time they
knew that such a cure did not exist, nor would most of them have agreed
to take it if it did exist.
In fact, the whole basis of the supposed treatment for their supposed
disease is rooted in lies and misconceptions. For example, research has
shown that most addicts spend at least 18 months taking heroin
intermittently before they become addicted. Nor are they ignorant while
they take it intermittently of heroin’s addictive properties. In other
words, they show considerable determination in becoming addicts: It is
something, for whatever reason, that they
want to become. It is something they
do,
rather than something that happens to them. Research has shown also
that heroin addicts lead very busy lives one way or another—so busy, in
fact, that there is no reason why they could not make an honest living
if they so wished. Indeed, this has been known for a long time, for in
the 1920s and 30s in America, morphine addicts for the most part made an
honest living.
Withdrawal from opiates, the fearfulness of which, reiterated in film
and book, is often given as one of the main reasons for not abandoning
the habit, is in fact a pretty trivial condition, certainly by
comparison with illnesses which most of us have experienced, or by
comparison with withdrawal from other drugs. I have never heard an
alcoholic say, for example, that he fears to give up alcohol because of
delirium tremens—a
genuinely dangerous medical condition, unlike withdrawal from heroin.
Research has shown that medical treatment is not necessary for heroin
addicts to abandon their habit and that many thousands do so without any
medical intervention whatsoever.
In Britain at least, heroin addicts do not become criminals because
they are addicted (and can raise funds to buy their drugs only by
crime); those who take heroin and indulge in criminal behavior have
almost always indulged in extensive criminal behavior before they were
ever addicted. Criminality is a better predictor of addiction than is
addiction of criminality.
In other words, all the bases upon which heroin addiction is treated
as if it is something that happens to people rather than something that
people do are false, and easily shown to be false. This is so whatever
the latest neuro-scientific research may supposedly show.
I have taken the example of heroin addiction as emblematic of what,
with some trepidation, I may call the dialectical relationship between
the worldview of those at the bottom of society and the complementary
worldview of what one might call the salvationist bureaucracy of the
government. In the old Soviet Union there was a joke in which the
workers would say to the party bosses, “We pretend to work and you
pretend to pay us.” In the case of the heroin addicts, they might say,
“We pretend to be ill, and you pretend to cure us.”
One of the possible dangers or consequences of such a charade is that
it creates a state of dishonest dependency on the part of the addicts.
They wait for salvation as Estragon and Vladimir wait for Godot in
Samuel Beckett’s play; they wait for something that will never arrive,
and that at least in some part of their mind they
know will never arrive—but that officialdom persists in telling them will arrive someday.
Dishonest passivity and dependence combined with harmful activity
becomes a pattern of life, and not just among drug addicts. I remember
going into a single mother’s house one day. The house was owned by the
local council; her rent was paid, and virtually everything that she
owned, or that she and her children consumed, was paid for from public
funds. I noticed that her back garden, which could have been pretty had
she cared for it, was like a noxious rubbish heap. Why, I asked her, do
you not clear it up for your children to play in? “I’ve asked the
council many times to do it,” she replied. The council owned the
property; it was therefore its duty to clear up the rubbish that she,
the tenant, had allowed to accumulate there—and this despite what she
knew to be the case, that the council would never do so! Better the
rubbish should remain there than that she do what she considered to be
the council’s duty. At the same time she knew perfectly well that she
was capable of clearing the rubbish and had ample time to do so.
This is surely a very curious but destructive state of mind, and one
that some politicians have unfortunately made it their interest to
promote by promising secular salvation from relative poverty by means of
redistribution. Whether by design or not, the state in England has
smashed up all forms of social solidarity that are independent of it.
This is not an English problem alone: In France the word
solidarité,
solidarity, has come to mean high taxation for redistribution by state
officials to other parts of the population, which of course are neither
grateful for the subventions nor find them sufficient to meet their
dreams, and which are, in fact, partly responsible for their need for
them in the first place. And not surprisingly, some of the money sticks
to the hands of the redistributionist bureaucracy.
By a mixture of ideology and fiscal and social policies, the family
has been systematically fractured and destroyed in England, at least in
the lowest part of the society that, unfortunately, needs family
solidarity the most. There are even, according to some researchers,
fiscal and welfare incentives for parents at the lower economic reaches
of society not to stay together.
Certainly the notions of dependence and independence have changed. I
remember a population that was terrified of falling into dependence on
the state, because such dependence, apart from being unpleasant in
itself, signified personal failure and humiliation. But there has been
an astonishing
gestalt switch in my lifetime. Independence has
now come to mean independence of the people to whom one is related and
dependence on the state. Mothers would say to me that they were pleased
to be independent, by which they meant independent of the fathers of
their children—usually more than one—who in general were violent swine.
Of course, the mothers knew them to be violent swine before they had
children by them, but the question of whether a man would be a suitable
father is no longer a question because there are no fathers: At best,
though often also at worst, there are only stepfathers. The state would
provide. In the new dispensation the state, as well as television, is
father to the child.
A small change in locution illustrates a change in the character and
conceptions of a people. When I started out as a doctor in the
mid-1970s, those who received state benefits would say, “I receive my
check on Friday.” Now people who receive such benefits say, “I get
paid
on Friday.” This is an important change. To have said that they
received their check on Friday was a neutral way of putting it; to say
that they get
paid on Friday is to imply that they are
receiving money in return for something. But what can that something be,
since they do not appear to do anything of economic value to anyone
else? It can only be existence itself: They are being paid to continue
to exist, existence itself being their work.
It has been said that the lamentable state of affairs I have
described has been brought about by the decline, inevitable as we now
see it, of the kind of industry that once employed millions of unskilled
workers, whose wages, though low by today’s standards, were
nevertheless sufficient to sustain a stable, though again by today’s
standards not rich, society. And I do not think that this view can be
altogether dismissed. But it is far from the whole story. One of the
curious features of England in the recent past is that it has
consistently maintained very high levels of state-subsidized idleness
while importing almost equivalent numbers of foreigners to do unskilled
work.
Let me here interject something about the intellectual and moral
corruption wrought by the state in recent years—and I don’t know whether
it applies to America. The governments of Britain, of both political
parties, managed to lessen the official rate of unemployment by the
simple expedient of shifting people from the ranks of the unemployed to
the ranks of the sick. This happened on such a huge scale that, by
2006—a year of economic boom, remember—the British welfare state had
achieved the remarkable feat of producing more invalids than the First
World War. But it is known that the majority of those invalids had no
real disease. This feat, then, could have been achieved only by the
willing corruption of the unemployed themselves—relieved from the
necessity to seek work and relieved to have a slightly higher
subvention—but also of the doctors who provided them with official
certificates that they knew to be bogus. And the government was only too
happy, for propaganda purposes, to connive at such large-scale fraud.
One begins to see what Confucius meant when he said, 2,500 years ago,
that the first thing to do to restore a state to health was to rectify
the names—in other words, to call things by their right names rather
than by euphemisms.
There are three reasons that I can think of why we imported foreign
labor to do unskilled work while maintaining large numbers of unemployed
people. The first is that we had destroyed all economic incentive for
the latter to work. The second is that the foreigners were better in any
case, because their character had not been rotted; they were often
better educated—it is difficult to plumb the shallows of the British
state educational system for children of the poorest homes—and had a
much better work ethic. And the third was the rigidity of the housing
market that made it so difficult for people to move around once they had
been granted the local privilege of subsidized housing.
I will leave you with an anecdote. As Mao Tse-tung might have put it, one anecdote is worth a thousand abstractions.
I had been asked by the courts to examine a young woman, aged 18, who
was accused of having attacked and injured her 90-year-old
great-grandmother, with whom she lived, while under the influence of
alcohol and cannabis. She had broken her great-grandmother’s femur, but
fortunately it did not prove fatal. (Incidentally, the homicide rate, it
is said, would be five times higher than it is if we used the same
medical techniques as were used in 1960.) I asked the young woman in the
course of my examination whether her mother had ever been in trouble
with the police.
“Yes,” she replied.
“What for?” I asked.
“Well, she was on the social,” she said—“on the social” in English argot means receiving welfare payments—“and she was working.”
“What happened?” I asked. “She had to stop working.”
She said this as if it was so obvious that my question must be that
of a mental defective. Work is for pocket money, the public dole is the
means by which one lives.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the view from the bottom, at least in
Britain: but it is a view that has been inculcated and promoted from the
top.
“Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.”
