Fidolatry

Of course Dalrymple anthropomorphised his late dog. His dog was Dalrymple’s companion, Dalrymple was never lonely or unhappy in his dog’s company, Dalrymple loved his dog and believed that his dog loved him.

Dalrymple’s dog

• had his moods and he understood Dalrymple’s
• went to sleep when Dalrymple slept
• hated it when Dalrymple left him
• was a dog of taste inasmuch as he far preferred human food to the slop normally served up to dogs
• was playful but knew when to be serious

Dalrymple

didn’t mind the vet’s fees in the least; on the contrary, I was pleased to pay them, I was pleased rather than angry or disdainful when I was recorded as his father in the vet’s records, and I certainly didn’t regard myself as his owner—our relationship was far too equal for that. In fact, our relationship was so perfect that I never considered what kind of relationship it was.

Dalrymple’s dog was

exceptional, not to say unprecedented: intelligent, expressive, gifted. I draw no general or universally valid conclusions from his existence, any more than I would from that of Leonardo da Vinci.

The Soviet Union won the Cold War — culturally, morally and intellectually

The ghost of the Soviet Union, writes Dalrymple,

has taken its revenge on the West by the increasing Sovietisation of Western life.

Worse, he notes, than the unnecessary material deprivation of the communist way of life was

the violence it did to mentalities. The constant and inescapable propaganda was not intended to persuade, much less to inform, but to humiliate.

People under a Marxist-type regime had not merely to refrain from dissenting from propaganda lies,

they had actively to assent to them. The less true the propaganda, the more it diverged from everyday experience, the better, for then the humiliation would be the more complete. A humiliated population, forced to assent constantly to lies, would be a passive, compliant one.

In the final days of the Ceaușescu regime,

people had to queue for hours for a few mouldy potatoes, but were regaled on television with film of bumper crops. Ceaușescu, the Conducător, the Danube of Thought, was overthrown, and the Epoca de Aur was over, but only after decades of misery.

This might seem to have little to do with the current situation in the West. But wait, says Dalrymple. He points out that

increasingly, applicants for posts to universities have to sign up to an ideology and to orthodoxies in which they probably do not believe, else they will not get the job that they want. This makes them feel besmirched, and besmirched people are easy to control because they have lost their probity. Once having compromised their beliefs, they might as well go on doing so, as Macbeth found that he might as well go on spilling blood.

The examples are legion. Dalrymple cites part of an unctuous oath that medical students of Minnesota university are expected to take:

With gratitude, we, the students of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Medical School Class of 2026, stand here today among our friends, families, peers, mentors, and communities who have supported us in reaching this milestone. Our institution is located on Dakota land. Today, many Indigenous people from throughout the state, including Dakota and Ojibwe, call the Twin Cities home; we also recognize this acknowledgment is not enough. We commit to uprooting the legacy and perpetuation of structural violence deeply embedded within the healthcare system. We recognize inequities built by past and present traumas rooted in white supremacy, colonialism, the gender binary, ableism, and all forms of oppression. As we enter this profession with opportunity for growth, we commit to promoting a culture of anti-racism, listening, and amplifying voices for positive change. We pledge to honor all Indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by Western medicine. Knowing that health is intimately connected to our environment, we commit to healing our planet and communities. We vow to embrace our role as community members and strive to embody cultural humility. We promise to continue restoring trust in the medical system and fulfilling our responsibilities as educators and advocates. We commit to collaborating with social, political, and additional systems to advance health equity.

Dalrymple comments:

What would be the response if the Dakota or Ojibwe turned up and claimed their land back? And why confine multicultural obeisance to other ways of healing to ethnic minorities? Why not display respect for our medical ancestors by returning to bleeding, purging, cupping, and operations without anæsthetic?

He asks whether it is worse if

(a) all the medical students who intoned this Soviet-style rubbish believed it

or

(b) didn’t believe it but intoned it nonetheless, because not to have done so would put an end to their careers before they had begun.

Neither horn of the dilemma is attractive.

The West, Dalrymple observes,

is reaching North Korean levels of saturation by propaganda.

Crossing the road in London, he notices that

the little green man who lit up on the traffic light when it was safe to cross has been replaced by the sign for non-binary gender.

A friend of Dalrymple’s who is publishing a book on Africa has been forced by his publisher to upper-case the letter ‘b’ in the word ‘black’,

a sign of what the publishers really think of black people, that they are incapable of making their way in the world without condescending gestures from omnipotent whites.

Britishers are slaves to the State

Britain, writes Dalrymple, faces

a cycle of high taxation and expenditure, with low growth necessitating ever higher taxation and expenditure. Much of the educated class already believes in the moral value of taxation irrespective of its effects. The British are trapped into slavery to their State — a State more incompetent, and more corrupt, than its European equivalents or even than the European Union.

An apparatchik class

will prosper among the embers of the slowly expiring economy.

The country

has been living beyond its means for 40 years at least, borrowing to sustain levels of consumption that it has not earned.

A clue to the despair that many people feel in Britain is

the incapacity and lack of courage of the political class, no matter how lengthily or expensively educated. Its incompetence and lack of probity, its absence of the most elementary understanding, compares unfavourably with the practical intelligence of the local plumber, carpenter, or electrician.

The solution to Britain’s deep-seated problems offered by almost the entire political class

is to turn the country into a giant version of the National Health Service, the country’s socialised healthcare system that has made paupers of the population, which is obliged to accept what it is given whether good, bad, or indifferent.

On Anthony Burgess’s great novel A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess

There is an assumption, writes Dalrymple,

that for every psychological peculiarity that we deem undesirable, especially in others, there’s an equal and opposite form of ‘treatment’ that will neutralise it. With appropriate treatment, the listener to rap music will become a devotee of Schubert.

This view, he notes,

was the theme of Anthony Burgess’s great book A Clockwork Orange. Burgess wrote it during the high tide of behaviourism, when many academic psychologists regarded Man as a glorified laboratory rat: if you provided him with the right stimulus, either positive or aversive, that is to say a food pellet or an electric shock, you could mould him to exactly your desired specifications. Who was to do the desiring, of course, was less clear.

Burgess, Dalrymple points out,

was writing against the notion that behavioural technology was either possible or desirable if attempted.

The high tide of behaviourism

has passed (no one now electrically shocks homosexuals to try to turn them heterosexual), but the idea that we have advanced greatly in human self-understanding such that we can now avert, control, or eliminate all behaviour that we find undesirable lives on. It seems sempiternal. Thirty years after A Clockwork Orange, a book entitled Listening to Prozac, a best-seller, claimed that the age of designer neuropharmacology was upon us, such that we should be able to design our  personalities with pills, as a chef tweaks his recipe with a little tarragon or paprika.

💩 The heap of ordure Johnson leaves behind 💩

The bill is coming due for the defenestrated prime minister’s economic profligacy

The political demise of Boris Johnson is, writes Dalrymple,

well merited

but it has come about

for the wrong reasons. His peccadilloes and errors, and his failure to own up to them in manly, timely, and unequivocal fashion, no doubt point to defects of character, but defects of character are what we expect in our politicians and seekers after power. They keep us entertained.

The problem is finding someone better than Johnson,

not in the sense of someone who has scattered his seed less carelessly than he, or who isn’t a jolly toper having forbidden such jolly toping to others, but someone better in the economic-policy sense.

What is needed, says Dalrymple, is someone who believes in economic principles that will deliver the country from the shambles Johnson has left behind, the appalling mess of

• stagnation
• high inflation
• high taxation
• an incompetent State more preponderant in the economy than ever before
• indebtedness on a vast scale thanks to money-printing and a corrupt (and corrupting) government largesse

Dalrymple notes that Johnson’s government

spent untold billions supporting people who needed no support, in part because it is generations since our bureaucracy has even tried to distinguish between the deserving and undeserving, even denying that such a distinction was to be made.

Having spent much of his career mocking the absurdities of extreme environmentalism, Johnson did a U-turn under the influence of his mistress and

shackled the economy with his net-zero policy, putting a halt to hydrocarbon prospection at the worst moment in history to do so. The policy was ridiculous, a cowardly surrender to adolescent utopianism. Thanks to Johnson, many more poor people may shiver to death in their homes next winter than might otherwise have done if he had had the guts to face down this evident absurdity early in his premiership. Britons are supposedly to be converting to electric cars, though without the electricity to charge them.

Having promised a low-tax and low-regulation economy, one of the touted benefits of Brexit, Johnson

raised taxes to their highest level in decades to pay for profligate social programmes, largely to protect the estates of the elderly, and did nothing to pare back the additional bureaucracy caused by Brexit.

Dalrymple says that while no doubt all politicians must be shameless to a degree, Johnson

mastered the art exceptionally well.

In retrospect, he

did not deserve to be prime minister.

Two ways of responding to the universal cant

Survival in the woke era

Ideologists, writes Dalrymple,

are inherently totalitarian, especially when a still small voice tells them that their opinions are vulnerable to criticism. Shrillness becomes the mental white noise with which they drown out their doubts.

They cannot allow any corner of the world to escape their attention. Uniformity

will demonstrate their correctness and, if it lasts long enough, make criticism unthinkable. As the white noise of shrillness once did, perpetual silence will allay their doubts.

He points out that surrender by the likes of you and me to the ideological folly

is wrought by cowardice and, slightly less dishonourably, by boredom. What intelligent person wants to spend his life disputing evident absurdity? It would be tedious to have to clear away this whole hinterland of psychological and sociological rubbish.

Dalrymple sets out two possible responses — other than outright opposition — to the Augean stable.

1️⃣ Go into inner emigration

Find a niche in which to get on with your life undisturbed by the surrounding idiocy and viciousness. Lay low. Take up an interest that flies below the ideological radar.

This method cannot be 100% successful, because the ideological monomaniacs demand not merely absence of dissent but proof of adherence, for example by signing up to policies on equality, inclusion, and diversity. By signing up to such self-contradictory nonsense, you who seek inner emigration feel soiled; you have undermined your probity. But at least, or so you hope, you will be free of interference.

This hope is usually dashed. The ideologist always comes back for more self-abasement: today it is transgenderism, tomorrow it will be — what? The glories of incest, the social necessity and benefit of infanticide? It does not matter: the aim is not improvement, it is the exertion of power, for one of the cultural or psychological characteristics of the age, at least among the educated, is the belief that, in human relations, everything is a matter of power and only power counts or is to be trusted.

2️⃣ If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em

Join up to the new secular religion.

Since you are not an out-and-out villain or opportunist, you have to persuade yourself that you believe the tenets of the religion. As is often the way with converts, you become a fanatic, not merely to persuade yourself, but to expunge your wicked past in which your were not a believer and were quite possibly a mocker.

Management, Dalrymple notes, is a little like a religion. Joining management has a terrible effect on professional people like you who previously had seemed good and sensible. Within weeks of being absorbed into management, though you may well have sworn that you would never be co-opted, you start to speak a strange hieratic language and claim to believe passionately in what you are doing, for example sacking people or closing down a department. You are like the Fore people of New Guinea, who used to eat their deceased relatives’ brains, becoming infected with a molecule called a prion that led to dementia and death, passing through a phase of fatuous laughter.

The prions of idiocy seem to have infected universities above all. The university tower is not so much ivory as a water tower that exerts pressure on the whole water system, and so university idiocy soon becomes political and social idiocy, of which only a certain amount can be withstood without severe damage and even collapse.

Keep this Wolf at bay

Feeble-minded: Martin Wolf

The economics journalist Martin Wolf: pompous, pretentious, portentous, imprudent, shallow and idiotic

Dalrymple observes that there are now so many economists or economics commentators that

some of their predictions must sometimes come true. If economists make enough predictions, some of them will be right.

But he notes that certain economics journalists are

especially gifted, in that, despite many prognostications, they get everything wrong.

Dalrymple asks how such fools become panjandrums.

Is there a special school for them? If there is, I suppose they teach there such subjects as gravitas and pomposity, pretentiousness and portentousness. No doubt students are selected by natural ability in these subjects.

One such panjandrum is Martin Wolf, described officially as chief economics commentator of the London Financial Times newspaper and unofficially as the most conceited journalist in England. Dalrymple writes:

It is not my intention to pour scorn on anyone, but still one must sometimes take individual examples to illustrate a general point, in this case the foolishness of economic panjandrums.

He cites three typical sentences in a Wolf column for the newspaper:

Borrowing by the government for any programme or project with a zero or better real return must be profitable. Such a programme might be to sustain aggregate demand, in order to minimise long-term scarring caused by the pandemic. It might be investment in physical or human capital. Either should be economically beneficial, now that debt is so cheap.

Dalrymple looks at the

combination of imprudence, sheer idiocy, and shallowness

of the passage, asking,

What of the possibility that the government, by its expenditures, will create future liabilities rather than productive assets, and indeed, by a variety of methods, for example by the granting of rights and privileges to certain persons or classes of person, has often done so? What of the possibility that rolling over debt will become ever more expensive? (In 2018, even with low interest rates, Britain spent more on servicing its debt than on its defense.) For the month of December 2021, British debt repayment was 300% what it had been for December 2020. And interest rates had barely risen.

Dalrymple recounts the experience of an acquaintance of his who has a small business. He

received a $40,000 grant from the government, not repayable (at least not by him), though he did not need it and never ceased to make a profit, albeit a smaller one than the year before.

The government was

unable or unwilling to distinguish between those who needed propping up and those who did not.

And this is the organisation that the fool Wolf would entrust with making investments! Dalrymple asks:

Would he take the government as his personal financial adviser?

As to increasing human capital, so-called,

in the hands of government it is likely to result in an overgrowth of qualifications irrelevant to, and even obstructive of, any productive activity whatsoever, to what one might call, if it were a disease, fulminating diplomatosis.

Dalrymple says:

It is true that there are several possible ways to solve the problem of excessive borrowing. There is real economic growth, but it is at least very likely that growth in debt repayment will outpace real economic growth. Taxation might fill the gap but beyond a certain level has an inhibiting effect on growth. There is repudiation of the debt by default, which is a form of theft, and there is debauching the currency, another form of theft, and much favoured by Lenin as the midwife of the glorious future.

Bohemian anarchy without culture or intellect to redeem it

Dalrymple writes that whenever he has a patient who belongs to the first generation of Jamaican immigrants,

I cannot help but ask myself what England has done to the Jamaicans. How has such a charming and humorous community been turned into the sullen, resentful people that so many of their children or grandchildren seem to be today, particularly the males, possessed as they are of an arrogant sense of radical entitlement that renders them almost extraterritorial to the laws of the land and the laws of good manners?

There is still a strong strand of churchgoing respectability among the Jamaicans. Respectability

is a much-mocked quality, and no doubt has its drawbacks: but its opposite, a kind of bohemian anarchy without culture or intellect to redeem it, has no advantages. Besides, the respectability of poor people is moving, constituting a constructive attempt to overcome hardship.

Dalrymple points out that

radical anti-racism (a kind of employment opportunity for bureaucrats of limited ability) has persuaded many young men of Jamaican descent that when someone asks them at three in the morning to turn their music down, or upbraids them in any other way or circumstances, he is motivated by racism. This is convenient for the young men, who are enabled to behave badly while convinced of their moral superiority based on permanent, insuperable and existential victimhood; and it is convenient for the anti-racist bureaucracy, who assure themselves of ‘work’ for the foreseeable future.

However, as Dalrymple notes, the Jamaicans

are not a race, and their conduct is in marked contrast with that of West Africans and even West Indians from other islands.

Many wastrel young men of Jamaican extraction

take to the life of what they conceive to be the immemorial Jamaican culture: the getting of bastards, the smoking of dope, the collecting of social security, the wearing of gold chains, the driving at high speed with music thumping, the refusal of work.

A certain kind of modernity has produced

the ludicrously self-satisfied, macho, lupine-gaited, gold-chained-and-front-toothed predators of the slums, with the bodies of giants and the mind of a pea.

Dalrymple explains that a powerful influence has been

so-called popular culture, which is to real culture what McDonald’s is to real cookery.

The British educational system

can be characterised as a conspiracy by the Department for Education, acting as a sub-committee on behalf of the British bourgeoisie, to protect the bourgeoisie from any competition from the lower orders by keeping them in a state of preternatural ignorance and uncouthness.

Likewise, what is known as black culture is

a conspiracy by the musico-industrial complex to keep blacks (actually, Jamaicans) in a permanent state of exploitable helotry, that is to say as a reserve army of reluctant casual labourers.

A few among them,

possessed of minimal talent and little different from the rest, become very rich, though few hang on to their money because of the ‘culture’ of which they are the creators and the victims, stardom these days being awarded not to exceptional people but to mediocrities, in order to keep the rest of the population daydreaming rather than forming proper and realisable ambitions.

The output of the musico-industrial complex

reinforces and makes actual the stereotype of the Jamaican as a man of small brain but large appetites, with a powerful though primitive sense of rhythm. These are not qualities that are very useful in social ascent: on the contrary, they inhibit it. It is no accident that rap music is lionised in our Press, even taken seriously as a genuine rather than as an ersatz and prefabricated, that is to say industrialised, cry of protest from the streets.

Meanwhile, Pentecostal religion,

the other pole of Jamaican culture in Britain, one that is genuine and spontaneous, is laughed to scorn. Pentecostal religion offers the frightening prospect of Jamaicans breaking free of the musically and bureaucratically forged manacles that keep them forever subordinate, marginalised and criminalised. As a 16th-century German bishop remarked, the poor are a goldmine; so are the Jamaicans — for the record companies and welfare bureaucracies.

Zemmour’s passion is to arrest the decline of France

Éric Zemmour

Éric Zemmour, writes Dalrymple,

has by application, high intelligence and talent carved out a brilliant career for himself as a patriotic polemicist and broadcaster.

He poses as

what every so-called populist candidate poses as, an outsider to the political class, which he constantly attacks as betrayer of the country’s glorious past and traditions. His pose as an outsider is false, even if the views that he expresses are highly unusual, or extreme, for journalists and broadcasting personalities such as he.

Dalrymple notes that Zemmour’s passion is to arrest what he sees as the inexorable decline, economic, social and cultural, of France, which he attributes to two main factors:

• the liberal social policies pursued since the student revolt of 1968 (the leaders of which were to become the ruling and cultural élite)
• mass immigration from North Africa — Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia — which has fractured or undermined the cultural, civilisational and political unity of the country

Zemmour’s hostility to and fear of Muslim immigration

is widely shared, loudly by some of the lower classes, sotto voce by the higher, who even go so far as to suppress awareness of it in themselves. The long official state of denial that there was a problem of growing Islamism in what amounted to informal ghettoes gave such as Zemmour his opportunity to pose as a brave truth-teller in contradistinction to the cowardly treachery and betrayal of the political class. There is nothing like political correctness for giving demagogues their chance.

Here again, says Dalrymple,

is one of those ambiguous pictures of the perceptual psychologists: all Muslim immigrants are either simple French citizens who differ from others only in their Muslim faith, or all Muslim immigrants are jihadists or supporters of jihad. It seems very difficult for people to keep in mind at one and the same time that there are very well-integrated citizens of Muslim immigrant descent and that there are fanatics of Muslim immigrant descent who seek to extend their power over their peers and eventually over the state itself.

Zemmour exudes

a real and not purely theoretical hatred of the immigrants and their descendants.

Dalrymple

cannot help but wonder what it is like to be the object of such obsessive hatred ex officio, when you are trying your best to integrate and wish nothing more than the chance of a better life for your children.

Dalrymple does not think that he would care to be a member of a group hated by a brilliant popular demagogue and polemicist.

Zemmour says that Dreyfus may have been guilty, and that Pétain saved the Jews of France. Dalrymple comments:

The former is almost laughable; the latter arouses wrath and disgust, not least among the dwindling Jewish survivors of Vichy and the Occupation.

The question arises as to why Zemmour has taken the line he has. Dalrymple surmises that he has done so

to distance himself as far as possible from any identity politics, apart from those of national identity. The last thing you would expect a French Jew to do is declare Dreyfus guilty and Pétain a saviour: very well, that is what he was prepared to do to prove his nationalist credentials and his distance from any other identity.

Thunbergism is objectively pro-Putin

They wanted net zero — they got 100% Putin

In his State of the Union address, Joe Biden called the Ukrainians Iranians. Dalrymple comments:

What Biden said was correct: it is unlikely that Vladimir Putin will win the hearts and souls of the Iranians. He is not really a hearts-and-souls-capturing type of person. Recently, indeed, he has emerged as more of a mind-concentrating kind of person, especially of German minds.

Dalrymple concedes that it is rather worrying that the second or third most powerful man in the world appeared to confuse the names of the inhabitants of a hostile and friendly nation because they happened to share three of four syllables.

One wouldn’t make a clinical diagnosis solely on this basis, but it can hardly have convinced Vladimir Vladimirovich that he was faced by a mentally very formidable interlocutor.

He writes that once the Russians have flattened and occupied Kiev, Lvov, Kharkov, etc.,

the question will be asked in the West, ‘Who lost Ukraine?’

Spoilt brat

Dalrymple’s answer is: Greta Thunberg.

The Thunberg episode must have been of great aid and comfort to the man in the Kremlin, for it must have convinced him, as it convinced his apologists in the West, of the almost total decadence and fundamental unseriousness of the West. Here was a spoilt upper-middle class girl claiming that her childhood had been stolen — by whom and by what, exactly? — and no one in any position of power or responsibility had the guts to tell her to shut up and to stop broadcasting her disgusting self-satisfied and highly privileged self-pity. Instead, she was the object of deference and almost of adulation, as if she were being brave in the way that anti-war demonstrators in Russia have been brave.

Sentimental tosh

Why did no one in any position of power or responsibility tell Thunberg to go away? The answer is

sentimentality: adolescence is the springtime of idealism. To destroy the fatuous illusions of the ignorant and inexperienced is cruel; we must submit meekly to be lectured, or hectored, and to do as they say. The fact that the person in question may have been as manipulated as a cruise missile was not allowed to enter anyone’s mind.

The idea of Thunberg trying to hector Putin or Xi

is so absurd that it cannot be entertained for a moment. It was for this reason, that Putin was not decadent enough to take her seriously even for a moment, that some in the West admired Putin: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. As we now see, Putin is not anyone’s friend: but little Greta was his friend, in what Stalin would have called the objective sense.

Net-zero delusions

Thunberg, Dalrymple notes,

assisted in creating Europe’s extreme vulnerability to Russia’s control over its energy supplies. We do not want

• nuclear
• coal
• gas
• oil

The reality, however, is that the population does want to be warm over winter. It does not want the factories to close down. It is quite attached to the continuous electricity supply that renewables cannot guarantee. Thus, the political class paid lip service to the Thunbergs while continuing, indeed extending, the continent’s dependence on energy from Russia—a potentially, and now actually, hostile power.

(Of Boris Johnson’s net-zero policy, Dalrymple can barely bring himself to speak.)

They chuckle in the Kremlin

Putin’s hand, Dalrymple points out,

would have been much weaker had Europe not chosen to be so abjectly dependent on Russian energy.

How Putin must have giggled to see the fawning reception of Thunberg in the West.

With what contempt must he have regarded us, he, an ex-KGB operative who believes that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. Thunberg and her ilk must therefore bear some of the responsibility for bringing about the war in Ukraine.

They wanted net zero.

What they got was the scramble for more nuclear power stations, more oil and gas exploration, and even a resort to coal, plus Russia into the bargain.