How Liberals Created the Underclass | Theodore Dalrymple – The Sceptic Ep.64

Theodore Dalrymple, on the 25th anniversary of his acclaimed Life at the Bottom, on crime, the underclass and liberal hypocrisy.

In Episode 64 of the Sceptic, host Laurie Wastell speaks to Anthony Daniels. Better known under his pen name, Theodore Dalrymple, the former prison doctor and psychiatrist turned writer and cultural critic has featured in the Spectator, City Journal, the Telegraph and the Wall Street Journal among many others, and is the author of numerous books and essay collections, including the acclaimed Life at the Bottom, of which the 25th anniversary edition is out this spring. Laurie and Tony discuss the violence and nihilism Tony observed as a prison doctor in the 1990s, why he started writing about it and why Life at the Bottom was so well received and had such a lasting impact. They also discuss how liberal ideology causes crime, not poverty, the hypocrisies of the “caring classes”, the unforeseen consequences of the therapeutic mindset, what has changed since the book came out, modern anarcho-tyranny and his awkward encounter at the New Statesman.

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Produced by Richard Eldred.
Filmed at the Westminster Podcast Studio.

00:00 Intro
01:30 From prison doctor to social witness
03:26 A deliberately pompous pen name
04:42 Why the reality was worse than the essays
05:29 First-hand observation vs armchair sociology
06:41 Why statistics miss the lived reality of crime
07:31 1938 vs today
09:57 Violence, survival rates and false reassurance
10:55 Reconvictions, reoffending and bureaucratic deceit
15:10 Why the liberal hypothesis linking poverty and crime fails
19:58 Broken norms and directionless lives
22:01 Why social work makes things worse
26:26 Why “non-judgmental” often means indifferent
28:24 Elites abandoning standards
29:52 Liberal denial of social breakdown
41:01 Therapy culture as moral exemption
44:40 The Kingdom of the Ugly and the hatred of beauty
48:47 High culture
50:29 When harm becomes a feeling rather than an action
52:14 Writing for survival
53:58 Why badly run prisons empower psychopaths
56:42 Worcester as a case study in national decline
58:56 Cautious grounds for hope