ONE OF THE SILLIEST questions I have ever heard, and heard often, is . . .
. . . why some or many countries are poor. This is to get everything exactly the wrong way round, as if Man were born rich and had somehow to achieve poverty. Of course, it is possible for those who were formerly rich to become poor, for example by improvidence or the spoliation of others; but immemorial poverty requires no explanation. It is wealth that needs explaining, mankind not having been born in marble halls with a silver spoon in its mouth.
Theodore Dalrymple (pseudonym of Anthony Daniels), Out Into the Beautiful World (New English Review Press 2015)
This is a book of essays. It's about this and that, but whatever the subject, Beautiful World offers a seminar on good writing. Here's another excerpt:
Freud was no scientist; he was instead an unscrupulous charlatan, oscillating between wishful thinking and outright lying, a psychopathic manipulator who owed his success not to the truth but to the emptiness of his theories, the founder of a religious sect than of a scientific discipline, a man avid for fame and fortune and only too aware that he might not achieve them by more conventional means, and an incestuous adulterer to boot. Moreover, this technique, if something so nebulous as psychoanalysis can be called a technique, was of no greater therapeutic value than exorcism, although much more expensive and a great deal less fun -- except for those who desired to talk endlessly about themselves and were willing to pay someone else to listen to them or at least pretend to listen to them.
Comments