Freudulent poseur

The work of Sigmund Freud, writes Dalrymple, is

more like soothsaying than science.

This, he says, explains its popularity in the 20th century,

with its need for pagan mystics masquerading as rationalists.

Neither the plausibility nor the persuasiveness of Freud’s speculations

accounts for his influence on so many intelligent and well-educated people for so long; rather it was the convoluted implausibility of his speculations that attracted them. We like to be in on a secret not comprehensible to others.

Dalrymple mère and the homœopath

Dalrymple writes that his mother

suddenly suffered from a non-life-threatening but disfiguring skin condition of her scalp that caused her great distress.

But

old ladies in their 80s worried about their appearance are not high on the National Health Service’s list of priorities; and this, combined with a severe shortage of dermatologists, meant that she could not be seen on the NHS for 18 months. In dermatology the Grim Reaper is used as an auxiliary in the government’s Waiting Time Initiative.

So Dalrymple mère

went private. Even the private dermatologist had a waiting list of nine months, however, so she chose another. He prescribed something that made her condition much worse. She consulted another, with the same unhappy result.

Finally she sought out a homœopath and,

to both my pleasure and my chagrin, his ministrations cured her. At least, she got better after them.

In the circumstances it was difficult, says Dalrymple, to persuade Dalrymple mère that homœopathy had

no rational basis, quite the reverse, and that properly conducted scientific trials had demonstrated its inefficacy. She had undertaken the only trial that interested her, and it was successful. What more could a patient ask?

Islamism is as nonsensical and malevolent as Marxism

Islamism, writes Dalrymple,

is so stupid, preposterous, intellectually nugatory and appallingly catastrophic in its effects that it makes one almost nostalgic for the days of Marxism.

Almost.

The classless society: of this earth only

At least Marxism

had a patina of rationality, and most of its adherents (in the West at any rate), while not averse to violence in the abstract, were willing to postpone the final, extremely violent apocalypse to some future date and did not believe that by blowing themselves up or cutting people’s throats they would ascend directly to the classless society or meet Marx in his pantheon.

You could be a martyr in the Marxist cause,

Richard Sorge was hanged in Japan in 1944. He became a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964

but only on the understanding that death was final. The best you could hope for was that, after the final victory of the proletarian revolution, you would have a postage stamp issued in your memory.

This does not have quite the same attraction as

an everlasting orgy in a cool desert oasis while everyone else is roasting eternally in Gehenna. (No bliss is quite complete without someone else’s agony.)