Life at the Bottom | Theodore Dalrymple | Jordan B Peterson Podcast - S4: E23

[Music] hello everyone i'm very pleased to welcome today one of my one of the writers i i admire um for the content and for the quality of the prose itself he's been compared to george orwell uh which is high praise indeed as one of england's uh as one of great britain's finest essayists uh dr anthony daniels better known by his pen name theodore del rimple he worked as a prison doctor and psychiatrist retired in 2005 but worked all over the world and traveled and he's written many books some of which have had a rather profound cultural impact including life at the bottom the world view that makes the underclass 2001 where he discusses what you might describe as the philosophy of poverty our culture what's left of it the mandarins and the masses 2005 not with a bang but a whimper the politics and culture of decline 2008 spoiled rotten the toxic cult of sentimentality 2010 and the terror of existence with catholic theologian kenneth francis in 2018 for the spectator he wrote a weekly column on his experiences as a prison doctor for 14 years those were later collected in various books he wrote a weekly column for the british medical journal as well for six years discussing medicine and literature his essays have appeared in the finest newspapers and magazines in the world including the times the spectator and the wall street journal welcome and thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me well thank you for asking me i'm i'm going to start by telling you how i found out about you i when i was working as a clinical psychologist i had a social worker as a client who immigrant second generation immigrant female who had been a rather radically leftist thinker in her youth and then spent 20 years in the social work trenches and was eventually hounded out of her profession pounded out and bullied out of her profession by the radical leftists themselves and she mentioned life at the bottom to me and so i picked it up and read it and i thought i've never heard anyone state this so bluntly and what what struck me i guess was was three things was the you're apart from the quality of your writing and the content um you're the the particularities of your experience you said for example that you had dealt with poverty with people who were in poverty in various places in the world africa for example and then in great britain in the inner cities in what you regard as the underclass a permanent multi-generational uh segment of society that are in some sense they've fallen out of the bottom of the culture in your view and but what you you concentrated you you focused on the difference between that poverty and the poverty of absolute deprivation that you encountered in places like africa but then you added another twist to it which was you made a very very strong case that there was a philosophy in some sense or maybe an anti-philosophy but it boils down to the same thing a world view that constituted the essence of the poverty that you saw in great britain which you also regarded in many regard in many ways as more severe and less addressable than the poverty that you had seen in in other in the developing world for example so it was your combination of broad worldly experience intense involvement with the underclass that so many people feel morally obliged to save in some sense but actually never interact with your experience as a psychiatrist and then your willingness to put down these very critical and and and certainly politically incorrect by virtually every measure observations which to me rang true generally true and which i hadn't encountered with any other thinker yes well i didn't really start out with any uh preconception certainly not any political preconception i just i just saw a lot of patients and uh and the penny began to drop about what their lives were like and what they expected from life and who did you see tell tell everyone about about the world i worked in an inner city hospital the inner city hospital was right next door to the prison and the main difference between these two great institutions was that far more violence in the hospital than in the prison but and i would work in the morning in the hospital and then i would go and work in our prison in the afternoon and and often at night and weekends as well so in the in the hospital i saw maybe something in the region of i didn't count exactly 10 to 15 000 cases of attempted suicide or at least of suicidal gestures that varied from you know real attempts at suicide to attempts to bring bring parents to heal everything in between but anyway everyone i i examined them all or when i say examined i mean i spoke to them all and of course they told me about uh the life around them so they told me about the about the uh about the lives of people around them and so in the end i probably heard about the lives of maybe 40 50 000 people of course refracted through through these people's lenses but nevertheless though it was a selected sample of people it wasn't a small sample of people and so obviously i i began to draw some conclusions see some generalizations which i didn't start with so and so we could talk about the selection for a minute i mean you because you were working the hospital and in the prison you obviously saw people who were hospitalized or who were in prison and so obviously there's a selection there but you your your patients were drawn from lower socioeconomic strata so they were poor and dispossessed but comparatively speaking but and there they had got into trouble of one form or another that was sufficiently damaging so that they ended up being brought to the attention of the medical authorities because of the own the damage that had been inflicted on them or prison authorities because of the damage that they inflicted on other people so that's the selection it would be poor people relatively poor people who were also in trouble and yes and you you you said you didn't start with political intent while you're a psychiatrist um but well walk us through what you saw if you would and over and over and and what what you started to conclude and why you started to communicate it well i i'll deal with why i started to communicate it was that it was so terrible uh that it would uh uh that i would have found it very difficult to keep it to myself and remain sane in fact the my predecessor in the job i found uh little bottles of vodka everywhere where he he went because i think he had found it extremely difficult it was very very distressing once for example i kept a a diary of what i saw every day rather than rather than mold it in a kind of literary fashion for articles i just wrote down what i saw and after a very short time actually only a few days i thought i can't go on with this first of all no one would want to read it it's just too terrible so actually things were worse than i described in my book now what i saw was a complete social what seemed to me as such complete social breakdown i mean there were almost no families in the sense of mother father and children that was almost unknown in the area practically unknown if you ask 16 year olds who their father is they replied with things like do you mean my father at the moment or they would say when i say who is your father they just say no well i when i went i was listening to your book this morning uh life at the bottom at 2.5 times normal speed and it was quite the i mean i'd read it before but i i had forgotten what the it's an unending litany of complete calamity across every dimension you can possibly imagine and then you said you saw like 20 000 of people who were in dire suicidal straits in addition i i presumed that you had patients other than those who were suicidal as well yes well mainly because i was working in a general it was a general hospital then i would see organic patients with organic problems and a few others people who'd been beaten by their partners oh i saw that that was standard of course i mean i i discovered that about 80 percent of the women whom i saw had suffered violence at the hands of their one or more of their sexual partners well we could dig in there you tell this story that's really quite interesting so you're and very what would you say uh libel any discussion of it is liable to create controversy so you you talked about the women that you saw the patients who chronically chose males who you could identify at a glance as extraordinarily likely to burst into violent jealous rages and become physically violent and you also point out that the markers for that were not precisely subtle comparing the men that you were looking at i believe to your neighbors tomcat who had been in enough fights so his head was a mass of shredded ears and scars and missing an eye and so these were men who had shaved heads multiple scars from battles um often tattooed often tattooed on their fists with blatant messages of nihilism or or social rejection or anger or or threats or curse words or um so it wasn't exactly subtle these and you said that they invariably wore a uh an expression of contempt something like that and they were people you would obviously give wide birth to in the street in broad daylight yet they were in invariably tangled up with a woman or two or three or ten who they were abusing serially but and the the women seemed um in some sense blind to this but not only the underclass women that you were serving but you also mentioned that that was extraordinarily prevalent among the nursing staff and so to walk us through that and tell us how you make sense of that well it wasn't uh i wouldn't say it was prevalent amongst the nursing staff it was present at present in the nursing staff well my interpretation which would be of course uh regarded as highly reactionary in the end this is the conclusion i came to was that because sexual relations had been freed from all um contractual cultural um economic uh restraint and constraint then what was left was a kind of free-for-all and the men uh wanted exclusive sexual possession of somebody but at the same time they wanted exclusive they wanted complete sexual freedom now these things don't go together very well i mean uh if there's complete sexual freedom okay it has complete sexual freedom but if at the same time you want possibly for reasons of boosting your self-image the exclusive sexual possession of somebody then and everyone around you is the same then the men would see other men as threats so they would be and they would become extremely jealous um because they would fear any any uh contact between their girlfriend they were never wise girlfriend with another man would lead to or might lead to a liaison and after all since they were sexually predatory in this in that way uh they assumed that everyone around them uh was was of similar ilk and which was often true and this this used to lead to fights for example in um in so-called nightclubs which uh i mean when i was young a nightclub was a place where there was a floor show and little tables around but these were great cabins of of thousands of people where if one where if a man looked at a girlfriend it was assumed to be a challenge by the girlfriend's boyfriend and and so there could be fights and even murder so i got in trouble with the new york times because i pointed out at one one point during the discussion with this journalist that societies all around the world and i thought of this as a universal anthropological truth and something that was well established to the point of being self-evident but apparently not that a major problem that every society faces is the control of aggression by young men in particular and generally as a consequence of sexual jealousy and striving and the universal answer to that insofar as there is one was the development of monogamous norms and social enforcement of those norms and you know you you just described it in some sense as inhibition and control but i i think it's also useful and to think about it as integration and into a more sophisticated game um you know being in a marriage obviously does involve not chasing after other people sexually but it isn't all inhibitory within the marriage something sophisticated and hopefully wonderful in the long term is supposed to occur as a preferable substitute and i mean preferable if it's done properly to the short-term gratification that might be obtained by serial relationships say or sporadic relationships because they're they're actually very difficult and they also produce these violent outcomes that you described and i was pilloried for that in quite a remarkable way claims were made that you know i was making the claim that governments should you know hand over unwilling women to undesirable monogamous men or undesirable men just to enforce monogamy but really what i meant was well part one of the reasons for marriage apart from the fact that two fem two parent families are clearly much better for children when the with the father there is that societies that allow unregulated polygamy or that degenerate into that are invariably rife with in extraordinarily high levels of violence yes well that's what i i saw now uh of course what the the the destruction of the idea of of the family as we once knew it has been a long process started i think by intellectuals literary intellectuals and it's perfectly true that a bad marriage from which you can't escape is hell i mean it's a kind of concentrated hell and marriage is not easy so people thought well i think this is this is my explanation they thought that there were if if we could get rid of all the inhibitions and restraints and frustrations because there are frustrations um then the full beauty of the human personality would emerge and we would associate with one another just by love and nothing else and when love was over then you just you just uh go on to something else somebody somebody else but this is actually a very shallow view of things apart from anything else in a marriage if a marriage if there are difficulties in the way of ending a marriage this gives you actual incentives to make it work it also tells you that society values what you're doing yeah which helps you continue to value it which makes you likely to stick more likely to stick with it during periods of doubt i mean obviously life is extraordinarily difficult and just on its own and and it's certainly no easier if you're alone that's for sure and so life is difficult when you have a partner and because of that difficulty but not because of anything necessarily intrinsic to the state of marriage itself you need social institutions to buttress the structure so that all of the weight doesn't fall on those individuals alone you know i mean i've had clients in my practice who are living together and you know when i ask them why they don't get married the man often will say well we don't need a piece of paper to signify our commitment and i think first i've heard that 20 times and you might think that's a philosophy but it's actually a pretty stunningly shallow cliche and second um we're not talking about a piece of paper here we're actually talking about something serious you stand up in front of your family your peers your friends the people that love you the people that you want to spend time with hypothetically for the rest of your life that you're going to depend on that are going to depend on you and you say look this is important i want you to recognize it we're now one thing we're going to give it our best shot and it would be nice if you support us and that's not trivial it's vital and that's still why i think marriage may be less frequent especially among the lower classes than it once was although cohabiting isn't or perhaps it is as well but um romance movies that feature a wedding are certainly not any less popular and marriage is still just as popular among the upper classes which is something you also discuss in books like uh the mandarins and the masses for example you're not very happy with these philosophical discussions of freedom conducted by people say like jean-paul sartre and the absolutely catastrophic consequences of that unbridled thinking on people who are at the bottom of the hierarchy yes with regard to the piece of paper business i remember i had a patient who had uh and she was not a foolish woman had taken tried to kill herself eventually unfortunately did kill herself she wanted very much a man to marry her and the man didn't want to marry her but he wanted to cohabit with her and i remember him saying to me i don't see what what she's uh what she's worried about it's only a piece of paper and i said well if it's only a piece of paper why don't you sign it because it's only a piece of paper either way so obviously this revealed that it wasn't only a piece of paper it was a commitment which he was unwilling or for some reason uh to make he had to he had personally well there's also the the question of well what what is the basis of your relationship if it isn't actually a a a a formally recognized permanent commitment say you're cohabiting with someone i think in canada it's six months and it's basically common law marriage so what is it is we're going to hang around with each other until one of us finds someone better but you'll do for now is that the like i don't know what well i think yes i think it's uh it's uh particularly with the men i think they uh they don't want to close off all possibilities they think you see they think that having an infinite choice is actually not committing to anything uh which of course is a mistake and what do you think it is committing to which uh the the the continual the hypothetical continual choice uh that is just uh they hope to be able to um to continue a life of uh pleasure and um and sensation i think that that's about it um and they don't want to uh they have a kind of anti-romantic idea um of um of love so do you think that the intellectuals that were actively engaged in the destruction of traditional structures or in the criticism of traditional structures were just so well protected by the fact of those structures that they were only able to see the residual problems i think that that was it yes and of course they were also protected economically because economics does make a big difference here i mean i know that in practice the upper classes uh at least uh they preserve their hypocrisy if they break the rules they at least pretend not to be breaking that or try to pretend not to be breaking the rules on the whole um but they are protected from consequences of breakdown to some extent not in completely of course because there's an emotional aspect but but money does make a big difference but if you have no money and you have no support or the only support you have is a rather miserable support of the state uh then the consequences are absolutely terrible and um and i you know i saw hundreds and thousands of cases so there's increasing support in the eu for example for schemes such as a universal basic income and you know you just made an argument that at least from one perspective could be viewed as supportive of a scheme like that given that if you have a dearth of material resources a dearth of money you're much more vulnerable to catastrophe and so you might think well if we grant people a minimum basic income that eradicates that problem but you also tie the degeneration that you saw which i want to talk about more um to the rise of the welfare state and so and one of the things that and i think this is because of my clinical experience and it isn't clear to me that giving people money actually solves the problem of poverty it because poverty is very much more complex than the mere lack of money even though that's certainly a cardinal element of poverty and that's the other thing i would say or another thing that you pushed at constantly in your writings is that there's an entire world view that is associated with violent and catastrophic poverty and that's not precisely an economic issue even though economic issues might exaggerate its danger so tell us some stories and and tell us what you concluded from from what you watched well i concluded that we had created quite a lot of people who had nothing to hope for and nothing to fear perceive of a life different from the life they had going to work wouldn't make much difference to them economically as failing to go to work would not make much difference to them this isn't actually necessary a necessary aspect of the of the welfare state after all britain was far worse in this risk in these respects than um other countries which have welfare states in some cases more generous than the british welfare state but it but the british welfare state created people a class of people who were permanently in this condition and had no real incentive to get out of it um so um this created a kind of it created sometimes a latitude but it was also dishonest it created a kind of dishonesty because actually the more problems they made for themselves the more they were rewarded i remember we had a peculiar demoralized of the world i don't mean uh i mean actual removal of morality from all human consideration i remember once i had a patient with multiple sclerosis and her husband worked but he didn't earn a lot of money and she had multiple sclerosis which were clearly not her fault and they needed some adjustments to their house so that she could get out of the house more easily and so on and it seemed to me this as far as i'm concerned that's a perfectly good way to this is a place where the where the welfare state could actually help so i phoned a social worker and i made a great mistake i said i have a particularly deserving case oh yes and there was a stony silence on the other end and then she said that all cases were deserving in other words you couldn't distinguish between this case of need which was just one of those things it was nobody's fault and someone who [Music] took drugs set fire to his house in a state of intoxication there was no there was no difference and since of course people who behave badly become more needy they actually gain more attention and more sympathy that's if you if you take dessert away if you remove dessert from all considerations and this means that actually one source of meaning in life is completely removed and what we saw with these people who had no that's the case you're making it's not even just removed it's actually punished actively punished yeah which is even worse than mere removal yeah and you kind of claim i think and correct me if i'm wrong that there's a perverse attractiveness of that to the educated helping classes in producing a group of people who are so much beneath them in some sense that normal moral standards don't don't anymore apply and what that means i mean if that's the case that perverse sense of superiority and the moral gratification that might provide if that's the case then people are being actively punished for doing anything that might lift them out of the circumstances that they find themselves in yeah well i think one of the things that's um that is clear about the shall i say the intellectual classes is one of their greatest fears is the fear of being considered sensorious and of course sensoriousness is not a very attractive quality so and the but the best way to avoid being considered sensorious is to fail to make any judgement whatever but this is this is completely impossible it's impossible to uh not uh to to um to make judgments judgment is part of being human um yeah well you can't perceive without judging because you have to select the thing you should be looking at from everything else you might be looking at so every act is hierarchical and implies a value structure and a choice i mean choice imposes the necessity to make judgments now if you pretend that you're not making judgments then you are actually facilitating the worst judgments so uh but as i said i think the the intellectuals and i mean i i i have this fear myself when i wrote i thought is anyone going to think you are an unfeeling censorious person because you i mean after all i'm comparatively fortunate here i am coming into the lives of people who are unfortunate many of them are unfortunate there's no question about that many of them you know they're born in a low social class they've been given an extremely bad educational there's actually quite costly education but it's extremely bad uh and so on and so forth and here i am coming in and making making judgment saying your behavior uh is what is causing your unhappiness uh is at the is that the root of your unhappiness and actually i try to de-medicalize a lot of their unhappiness because uh i i didn't think their unhappiness was a medical condition um so uh well that is the danger with judgment i mean i faced this with my clinical clients constantly but also in the case of my daughter and in my own life for that matter if you're dealing with someone who's ill it's very difficult to encourage and it's very difficult to discipline and by that i mean encourage and instill discipline which is something that you want to do if you're a parent if your child is ill you it's very difficult to tell when the illness is sufficient reason so that something isn't being done right and so when you're dealing with dispossessed people you have the same problem yeah well judgment is always fallible so i would never say that i had never made any mistakes in my judgment you know sometimes i would be too harsh maybe and sometimes i wouldn't be hard enough but the i but the uh i mean that's just a consequence of um not having enough knowledge and so on and so forth but to pretend you're not making a judgment is itself a judgment i mean you're judging that it's that you shouldn't make judgments it's also the abdication of responsibility i mean i thought this through with my clinical clients at a sort of a technical level too i i learned a lot from reading carl rogers and i would say a certain amount of unthinking sentimentality can be laid at his feet in the clinical and social work world partly because he proposed that unconditional positive regard for his clients was the appropriate pathway forward and his critics pointed out that if you watched carl rogers in action what he was practicing involved careful discrimination but what he meant was something like accept that the person is a fundamental value and has the capacity to move towards the light let's say and work in that vein but what what i would tell my clients and this was a consequence of my real my realization that judgment was not only necessary but crucially important to forward movement was that i'm not offering you unconditional positive regard i'm on the side of the part of you that wants things to be better and i'm going to help you discriminate between the part of you that doesn't want things to be better that might even want them to be actively worse for all sorts of reasons that all people are prey to and the part of you that is striving to make everything better and we'll discuss what better means and we'll negotiate the strategies but let's make it clear this enterprise is to get rid of what is undesirable and to foster what is desirable and to critically distinguish between those two which is absolutely vital you can throw your hands up and say i'm not going to be judgmental but all that that means you're not distinguishing between what's good and what isn't well i think the what i was what i tried to get out was with patients was are if you if you like our existential equality that i made choices but they made choices too i mean of course there were there are conditions where where that is not so and you have to make the distinction between those cases where people really do not have any capability i mean there are such cases of course but in the prison for example one thing that made me a little bit optimistic was that i never said anything in my articles that i didn't actually say to the patients and the patients understood on the whole i mean there were a few in the prison who i think were not reachable by this kind of argumentation but for example i would not i in the prison i said i would not allow the prisoners to swear in front of me and um i had no means of stopping them of course and if they continued i couldn't refuse to treat them on the grounds that they had sworn in from me but i did actually stop them and i i mean why do you think they stopped ah well i i provided i provided an argument i i don't know whether one is allowed to use bad language on your podcast you can anything you have to say that you think is necessary you're free to say okay well the patient would aim the prison would come in and say i got this [ __ ] headache so i would say well before we go any further can you tell me the difference between a headache and a [ __ ] headache tell me the difference and he would say well that's how i speak and i say yes that's what i'm complaining of and and he said well why shouldn't i why shouldn't i speak like this because that's me you know and i said well supposing at the end of this consultation i say to you and i hear some [ __ ] pills take two of the [ __ ] every four [ __ ] hours and if they don't [ __ ] work [ __ ] come back and i'll give you some other fighters you you find this a bit strange wouldn't you so he said we'll say he said yes so i said well we're equal i don't talk to you like that and you don't talk to me like that and they just stopped and you meant that what that you meant that i meant that yeah yeah right well that so you know so um you're complimenting you're complimenting your client instantly you're saying look you know we're engaged in a serious enterprise here and i actually care about it and maybe we should attend to the words we're using you too or we're just playing and i actually care about you getting better so how about we watch our language i'll do it you do it and and you know you can do it and so yes people are going to agree to use that i mean listen i used to have a good laugh sometimes i remember that law was that every prisoner had to be examined medically within 24 hours of being received into the prison and in practice it was usually within two hours of being received in prison and i used to do these um i used to do these uh uh examinations and one prisoner said he wanted his medicine and i didn't think he should have what he was he alleged he was taking i had no idea whether he was taking it or not and i said i see no medical in indication for him and he started screaming he said uh you murderer said you're a murderer you're not a doctor you're a murderer and of course this was a victorian prison with um uh with iron work and everything so it was echoing all through this enormous building and anyway in the end i said well that's enough you have to go now and um so he went and uh screaming still and all and then the next day i saw him and he came up to me and he apologized and um and he said i was i was bang out of order that was his expression i was bang out of order i'm sorry doctor i said oh never mind i said i've been called far worse than that and and then then i said and actually you you had a wonderful effect on the other prisoners who i whom i was examining because they were like lambs when they came in and and i said you couldn't come and do it again this evening could you come in and call me a murderer so we had a good laugh um and but on the other hand of course what i was saying is that you can control yourself it's not uh well that's and that's a compliment it's a compliment and it might be the first time that some of these people had been complimented in that way well yes i mean i i unfortunately i think that services have been set up to make them the victims of their own lives and behavior so that that's how they presented himself and i remember another another person who came in and said now he had he'd been in prison several times for burglary and such of the british police that really you have to be want to be caught to be caught by the british police for burglary but anyway um he said to me doctor do you think do you think my uh burglaring got anything do you think it's my childhood that caused me to burgle do you think it's got something to do with my childhood so i said absolutely nothing whatever and and he said what because he expected me to say it must be and then so so why do i do it i said well it's quite simple you're lazy and stupid and you're not prepared to work for what it is that you want and he laughed instead of being very angry he laughed and because he knew that what he was saying was nonsense um and then after that we could talk about his childhood because it was true that his childhood was a bad one and most of the prisoners have a very bad child many of them had very bad childhood that that was all true but it's not true that everyone who has a bad childhood is a burglar right just as it's not true that everyone who's sexually molested grows up to be a molester even though many molesters were molested yes yeah yeah right so there were lots of other uh cases like that i remember a chat came to me i mean prisoners were said to be of low intelligence on average lower than average intelligence all i can say is that i never found them incapable of understanding what i was saying now maybe what i'm saying isn't very intelligent so it's easy for unintelligent people to understand it but nevertheless i found that they could actually follow quite complicated arguments i'll give you an example there is also isn't a clear relationship between iq and anti-social behavior and partly it's complicated too because many prisoners have histories of head trauma often from violence and from child abuse and and damage from alcoholism and so on but i know i know the literature on antisocial behavior we looked at predictors for years and even neuropsychological tests that assess prefrontal function for example which is hypothetically the seat of inhibition or higher order cognition the predictive power of of cognitive ability in relationship to criminality is really quite low and iq is completely uncorrelated with conscientiousness which is a personality factor and with agreeableness so yeah so well i have obvious that criminals are stupid yeah i know i i i never i personally never found that and for example there was a trap came to me and said you have to give me something because um if you don't give me something i'm going to go and attack a child sex offender in the prison that actually they we generally they were kept apart because they would be immediately attacked but anyway he said i i i'm going to kill one if i if i get hold of one if you don't do something i said well let's think about this he said well why do you feel like that and he said well because they interfere with kiddies with children and so i took a bit of a risk i said do you have any children and he said yes three i said how many mothers and he said well three i said and um these mothers do they have boyfriends and and uh they said yes and i said one or perhaps more have they had more than one and they said yes i said well um is it likely that one or more of these boyfriends has sexually interfered with one of your children and he immediately got the point and and i said well you're not a sex you haven't interfered sexually with children yourself but you facilitated such you've created the conditions in which such behavior is likely to occur now it's too late you can't do anything about it now it's too late but you can make sure that you don't do anything to further it in the future and he went out he there was no more talk about uh killing uh sex abusers why and why do you think you got away with that go right away well you said you said you took a risk right so well i took her yes well i took a risk uh i mean it was a risk that i didn't know that he had children i didn't know what i mean i had a fair idea because it was a it was so common amongst prisoners sure and and outside prison but it's all it's also a risk i mean the risk you took he asked you to do something because he was going to become murderous and so that's a pretty uh uh salient immediate and credible threat given that a violent criminal uttered it in a prison yes and your response wasn't i better prescribe him a sedative at least to cover myself up let's say if anything does happen your response was let's call this guy out for his uh rather self-evident moral flaws blind ignorance of which is facilitating an unearned sense of homicidal moral superiority and let's assume that that's going to be curative that's a risk yeah it it it's a risk and i must say that when i had and i had lots of quite a few patients who said similar things uh and i didn't give in to what was in essence moral blackmail but of course it did always occur to me that maybe one day one of these people who was threatening something like that might actually uh commit the act uh and then someone might blame me i mean yes definitely that that never happened that that never happened um but i was i'm quite i was fairly clear that their responsibility their responsibility was not to behave like that and um and he didn't in my opinion as far as i could tell suffer from anything which uh which would have excused him right some some organic impulse control disorder some prefrontal damage yeah i mean those things do occur a certain percentage of violent criminals have um rage that's induced by epilepsy and that can be triggered by drinking and i mean there are organic syndromes that mimic virtually every moral failing yeah yeah if he had a psycho psychosis for example if he'd had a psychosis i i wouldn't of course i wouldn't have said what i said um uh my sense in reading your books like is so there is this sensoriousness or that something you could be criticized about uh uh for and i i'm sure and and you can tell me about that i'm sure you have been criticized for that um and you know you'll you you've written provocative tracts like the toxic cult of sentimentality which is a real dagger in some sense i mean because people let's not call it sentimentality for a moment let's call it empathy or sympathy and you make a case that i think and correct me if i'm wrong that excessive empathy unthinking sympathy is has has can produce catastrophic consequences because it's not tempered by judgment and and then i look at the personality literature you know we have two moral personality traits roughly speaking one is agreeableness and so people who are high in agreeableness are empathetic and sympathetic and self-sacrificing and perhaps resentful because of it so it's not an untrammeled virtue whereas the disagreeable types are more likely to be imprisoned so that's a predictor of of of antisocial behavior but they're they're implacable and stubborn and hard to push around and so people vary on that distribution um i think agreeableness is a the empathy dimension is a trait that's particularly good for fostering the care of infants because infants immediate empathy with an infant under six to nine months is almost invariably the right response if the infant is crying or in distress your job isn't to question or judge it's to alleviate the source of the trouble and it's very hard to take care of infants and it's no wonder that there's a moral virtue that's essentially devoted to the care of true dependence but we have conscientiousness too and conscientiousness is the best predictor of long-term life success apart from iq and conscientious people are good at um keep formulating and keeping contracts long-term contracts it's sort of a cold virtue and they are judgmental but as far as i'm concerned we wouldn't have both these personality traits like they're two of five so it's not like it's a trivial proportion of the variation in personality we wouldn't have two of our five personality traits um aimed at regulating our behavior if empathy alone was sufficient and so you go after it the toxic cult of sentimentality what do you mean by that well i mean the uh if if you like the the uh the infantilization of of people who are expressing emotion so uh we accept now that uh i mean there's if someone if someone expresses distress we don't inquire where that distress comes from how it arose we just simply try to alleviate it oscar wilde of course said that sentimentality is the uh desire to have the emotion without the without the cost of the emotion um [Music] i suppose sentimentality is to uh is uh is to empathy what kitsch is to art um and so what would you regard okay so let's get i'll give you i mean i start the book with an example which i read in my local newspaper which was of a man who bought a chicken in a supermarket uh and roasted it or and then gave it to they were eating their dinner and the girl uh the little girl finds that there are chickens feet in it and screams with horror and so the father and the the child is so horrified that the father says i don't know whether this is what he did literally but i had to throw it out of the window so he just took the emotion of the child and said i have to assuage that emotion any way i can and the quickest way is the best because of course she would have less emotion if it's dealt with quickly so there's no there's no rational there's no attempt to argue rationally about uh about this that actually chickens do have feet and they were live creatures once and this is something that children have to learn it's one of the things that children have to know and so what's the problem with reflexive empathy exactly well it's not exactly empathy actually okay okay i i think it's not genuine well then we we should define it genuine empathy we should define genuine empathy and distinguish it from counterproductive sentimentality yeah well it's not it's not easy fair enough i i know i'm i i'm putting you on the spot in this i'm saying that that's something that could be productively attempted yes i'm not sure i have the complete answer to that uh you you you're hitting at it from all sorts of different directions though you know like one of the things that that emerges from your book and and you know i i saw you as someone who wanted genuinely to be of help to the people that you were seeing and tortured by this constant immersion that you had in absolute bloody nightmarish catastrophe like to a degree that i don't really understand how you managed outraged by what you saw outraged by the thoughtless contribution of skeptical and critical intellectuals to this suffering which is swept under the table in some sense or or attributed only to you know the power hungry depredations of capitalism or something like that and so you're outraged by that and you're trying to use your capacity for judgment to help your clients your patients distinguish between those things that they're doing that clearly hurt them and those things that help them and also to attribute to them the capacity to do that which like i was talking to my wife today she we were talking about a woman she's dealing with who is having a hard time disciplining her one and a half year old and you know i mentioned to her that one of the things i've seen among especially my seriously affected clinical clients is that they actually have no idea that they could change their behavior in a manner that would improve the future that as a concept that's not part of the subculture that they're embedded in and that's so counterproductive and unhelpful just hindering it we also of course give them incentives not to think like that because if you have us if in fact you have a situation in which uh changing their behavior will not improve that certainly their economic situation very much um which is actually the condition would the situation of many of my patients that takes away one of the possible incentives for changing behavior and why is it that that finding gainful employment for example isn't going to produce a material change in circumstances why how is it that this is at the level of detail because you uh many of people if they go to work they lose benefits they have to start paying for things which were previously paid for them so they end up going to work uh for x number of hours and being uh very slightly better off in monetary terms which doesn't seem to them to be worth it and i can understand that so you're asking them to do low-level jobs get up maybe at six o'clock in the morning and furthermore of course it's not good for their children because often they are single parents so they've got no support at home other than other than whatever it is the state provides them and uh they had so they have to manage their children and going to work when it's it's very difficult for them right for no for no economic incentive for well i mean they literally marginally better off mm-hmm well maybe maybe they have to buy clothes there's it's expensive to work you you enter the workforce it's not trivial they have to arrange transportation that's also an expense and then you said child care that's a devastating expense because most people who would work on the margins don't make enough money to afford child care at all let alone child care of any quality yeah and so so it also means that this this unwillingness to pass judgment let's say on the part of helpers um also means that we're we abdicate our responsibility to design social welfare systems that would reward productive behavior because we don't want to make the judgments about what behaviors are productive and what aren't at least partly because we don't want to make mistakes and throw people out that are deserving but we can't differentiate but then because we won't make those judgments we produce systems that counterproductively reward the kinds of behaviors that produce the problems we want to solve they treat everybody as helpless and uh and it's a kind of learned helplessness actually and if you look at i mean it's very interesting to see the the success the economic success of uh certain groups of poor immigrants for example the sikhs in britain and i'm sure and certainly in canada they may come with nothing but within a very short time they've succeeded they've risen up the social scale their social and economic scale well you see that with first generation asian immigrants in north america so i looked into that in detail because because it's a very interesting phenomenon i was interested in the relationship between iq and conscientiousness iq and personality in predicting long-term life outcomes and by and large people with higher iqs do substantially better so if you had to pick one attribute to ensure your success at birth it would be high intelligence it's it's better to be born three standard deviations above the mean in iq then three standard deviations above the mean in wealth in terms of your position at 40 so 40 years later so iq is very powerful conscientiousness is also powerful but only about a third is much but it's still powerful enough so that asian immigrants their fur their children um perform on average um as well as native born caucasians who have a 15 iq point advantage which is roughly the difference between a college student and a high school student and so there's something in the asian culture and what it is is quite clear actually it's it's uh um it's uh incredibly intense work ethic and respect for achievement disciplined achievement in the economic realm that's hammered in right from now that disappears after about two generations yes but presumably also there's the maintenance of the family structure so that uh i mean you don't certainly where i was anyway you didn't get this this complete breakdown i mean i never met uh i never met uh children of indian immigrants who didn't know who their father was right right well and that's an interesting phenomenon too um i went to a talk at one point at the university five or six years ago and uh a feminist was speaking uh or a former feminist maybe still maybe a real feminist now her name was janice fiomingo and she had been a radical leftist feminist and was in the english literature department and and eventually realized that what she was involved in was a an academic scam fundamentally and turned into quite a vocal critic of that particular perspective post-modern say neil marx's perspective she mentioned to the audience that families with intact families with fathers the children in those families do much better on virtually every measure you can possibly imagine and in my naivety at that point i thought well that's going to be an incontrovertible uh statement because all you have to do is be remotely familiar with the childhood development literature and you figure that out right away and yet it was as if she dropped a live snake into the audience because and this is this is that toxic sentimentality that you were talking about say well look there are obviously struggling single parents who are struggling for no fault of their own a perfectly credible job of raising high performing children and then if you say well the two-parent family is more desirable by implication you're denigrating that accomplishment let's say but and and fair enough there is a real tension there and and there are exceptions to the rule but it's still the case that if you were trying to design public policy that was of benefit to children you would design public policy that would reward people for long-term monogamous relationships where one of the one of the participants was male 1 yeah but you need to use judgment for that yes but if you look at i mean if you look at uh literature for example there has been a consistent attack on that on that view um for many many years going back uh for example the fabians and and so on and and what happens is that people use marginal cases uh as being central so and as i've already said that it's undoubtedly true that many marriages were oppressive um and that being in a in an unhappy uh marriage uh is a horrible experience it's a terrible experience it's a long form of torture but uh people then thought that there was a perfect solution to this problem there's a perfect solution to human relationships and there is no perfect relationship a perfect solution there's only better and worse and whatever whatever form of human relationships you're going to have there are going to be terrible ones but you as far as i could see and i had no real no real opinion about this until i actually immersed myself in the world in which i did immerse myself it's quite clear to me that without without a formal structure of relationships things are absolutely terrible for for very large numbers of people now of course it's perfectly true that i i saw if you like only the failed cases or but there may have been a question then would be well where would you find the successful cases because let's think this through because it's it's crucial point you know okay so you have a biased sample and maybe you approach this from an ethically conservative perspective and so that produces your viewpoint and it bears little relationship to the real world but let's look for the counter example so well first of all you can't look among the high functioning middle to upper classes for counter examples because they're all married yeah right so so so then you think well is there a subset of people who are poor who are flourishing in their serial relationships in their fragmented serial relationships and well first of all probably not because they're poor right by definition you've already excluded the middle and upper class so i'm kind of curious about well i mean i tried to think i i thought well how is someone living in these circumstances supposed to get out of out of this situation right what would look like a viable practical alternative that would be better that yes but didn't involve changing the way they made their relationships or pursued their relationships so they have to do we have to keep the relationship [Music] the structure of the relationships the same what can they what else can they do that would make their lives better and i just couldn't see how their lives could get better while you have this kind of um this kind of free-for-all it wasn't really free for all it was free for some and um so i came to the conclusion that that it was a it was a social and cultural disaster well so let's we could look at the fantasies of sexual libertarianism let's say and i think a good place to look and you know i might be way off base here but whatever i'm gonna forge forward let's look at uh playboy cause playboy was the first mass market magazine that sort of introduced the idea of sophisticated sexual freedom into the mass audience right and that quickly degenerated into penthouse and hustler and then to this bloody online catastrophe where everything goes and and it's a cesspit of unimaginable proportions but in any case back to playboy um well you know you have two sophisticated people the woman's in her early 20s the guys may be five years older than that they both have a glass of nicely aged wine they're sitting in a 50s living room that's sophisticated discussing literature and they're both free to make their choices and and so they have sex and and then maybe your life is an unending sequence of those perfect dates it's like well what are the preconditions for that for that even to be possible well you both have to be young you both have to be attractive you both have to be healthy you both have to be rich you both have to be educated in all likelihood so that you're not rife with psychopathology um so that that can be an enjoyable and civilized evening let's say well you have to have come from a pretty stable family probably one with mother and father intact and and certainly not characterized by the constant unwanted serial switching of partners i mean it's virtually unattainable except in an unbelievably protected environment but you you're in that environment you think well i could maybe you're in a marriage and you're unhappy you have all those attributes you think well i could jump out of that into this fantasy and everyone could share the fantasy but no they couldn't it's not possible but it uh i mean actually what people are really doing and i mean uh one of the one of the most important figures in um in modern cultural histories marie antoinette who uh played shepherdess who went out and thought it would be nice to be a shepherdess and went out to be a shepherdess for the day but then always returned to her palace and that this is what these people are doing because probably they give up that life at some point the the people that you the rich people you've described and they actually settle down more or less well in very if they don't they're not happy about it yeah right if if they don't it's because they failed to get what they're actually aiming incidentally one interesting thing was that i would talk to mothers or single mothers about what they wanted for their daughters and what they wanted for their daughters was for them to find a nice man who would have a good job and would treat them decently and uh they'd buy a house and so on and so forth so but they had no idea how uh to encourage them right they have no idea what the micro elements are no no none whatever you see this in illiterate families too is that if you ask them do you want your children to be educated they say yes but if but there's no books in the house and they don't know where to buy a book and they're intimidated by books and if they have a book they don't know how to read it to their child you know and you get these huge differences at by the age of three between children illiterate and non-literate households that the three-year-olds in literate households might have been exposed to you know a thousand hours worth of books by the time they're three they can already sit in the child in a house like that you give them a book they know what it is they'll sit there and mime the action of reading they go through the pages they point at the pictures they have all these pre-literate behaviors built in that that's the necessary scaffold for the development of literacy and there's micro habits that that that are invisible if you're in that culture they're invisible because they're just part of how you live like the fact that you have a bookshelf like the fact that your relatives buy your children books if then if you don't know how to do that at all the barriers to entry are unbelievably unforgiving yes and probably also uh nobody tries to make up for it on on the behalf of the parents so i mean there's the schools are themselves now doubt the value of of literacy some of them they that teachers don't know what they're supposed to be teaching or or at least or alternatively a lot of them are more interested in the ideological correctness of of the children than they are in their ability to read well it's actually quite difficult to teach children to read you have to pay attention to each child then they they radically differ in their intellectual ability and then you actually have to know how to teach someone to read and that's actually complicated you start with the letters you you get the letters pronounced you get two word two-letter combinations and three-letter combinations you automatize that it's effortful ideological indoctrination that's relatively straightforward yeah well i've i mean i can't really speak about this because i never tried to teach anybody to read i had um an interesting experience well the data on that the data on that are pretty clear if you teach children to read using phonetics yes which breaks it you know we have a phonetic alphabet because that makes things easier you don't you only have to remember 26 characters and variants on them instead of 10 000 say you teach the phonemes and you get them to aggregate them and once they get to the point where they can read phrases they start to read on their own account because it becomes rewarding if you use other methods they don't learn as well well one one thing that i saw with my my patient i was interested in their their level of education which was catastrophically low i mean it was unbelievably low and i would give them something to read and they would you could see that they had difficulty doing it and i asked them to read it out loud and then when they came to a long word they would say i don't know that one word i don't know that one as if english were written in idiographs in chinese yes in chinese mandarin yeah definitely some teachers teach an idiogram method of verbal apprehension which is absolutely counterproductive that's how experts read but that's not how you learn to read yes no and and then i would say when they got through it i would ask them what did it mean and they would say i don't know i was only reading it unless you can read phrases at a glance you spend so much intellectual energy decoding the phonemes and the letters that you can't read for meaning and that's why it's not rewarding to begin with right you have to go through that slog of automatizing the subroutines and and and that happens much more uh much at a much earlier age in literate households yeah well i just i thought what i found very strange was that there was no sense of outrage that we spend on average a hundred thousand dollars probably more on each pupils education and about 20 of them come out functionally illiterate or barely literate the kind of people that i'm talking about who who couldn't read a phrase or who had difficulty sounding it out and then at the end of it uh didn't know what it meant now how is it possible to spend so much money and have these results and this has a catastrophic effect on their lives it's obvious that it must in any modern society it must have a catastrophic effect on their lives but nobody seemed to be interested or or saw it as a disaster you'd think the faculties of education would be interested and you'd think that by now they would have it'll say say assessed an immense variety of methods to teach children how to read let's say because i think pretty much everybody could agree that that would be good you know that they would have tried out 200 different educational techniques subjected them to stringent analysis and that we would see an increase in the efficiency of treating of teaching children to read that would be in keeping with the increase in technological power that we've seen over the last 20 years we should be teaching kids to read at a rate that's just beyond comprehension if the faculties of education were doing their jobs which they're not quite the contrary so yes that's a and i was thinking too you know this one of the things i found really interesting working with people who were dispossessed was you know you might think well you don't want to impose these external norms on them there's there's a form of colonialism that would be associated with that or or classism or something like that and and i suppose that's part of the non-judgmental stance but you can always just ask the people themselves and what you find right away is they they want for themselves pretty much what the middle class person or the upper class person has and i don't just mean material resources they they'd rather be educated than not educated or at least they'd want that for their children they'd rather have a relationship if they could figure out how to conceive of it that was stable and loving all of these things that you know you could regard as arbitrary a child would rather have a father and a mother that were around so there we could derive norms for the direction of our social policies that could be derived from the populations that were hypothetically trying to serve but we don't seem to do that either we can't even agree that all things considered it would be better to foster to reward the presence of two parent families yeah yes well i mean all that i said in my books i thought was common sense actually everything was more or less common sound it wasn't then it wasn't work of great reflection or anything like that it just seemed to me everything was obvious um and yet um and yet it takes maybe it takes exposure to twenty 000 cataclysmic failures to make what's obvious salient you know because the problem with what's obvious is that it's invisible you know i i found this out many times so if i'm called on in an interview for example to defend marriage i think well i don't actually know how to defend something that until 10 years ago was taken as a self-evident good it's not like i have or any of us for that matter have a mass massive array of arguments at hand to justify cultural norms in the fact that they're norms means you don't have the arguments at hand they're they're so self-evident that they're not buttressed by a differentiated description yeah well you see i i once i used to write for a left-wing magazine as well as the spectator which is conservative called the new statesman i mean it's not far left it's um you know moderately left and i used to go for lunch there uh sometimes and we would have a discussion and i met a a very distinguished bbc broadcaster in the days when the bbc actually was not terrible and um and he said he'd read me and then he said i i wanted to meet you because i wanted to ask you as uh he said uh do you make it up do you make it up yeah so i said well i'm very flattered that you think i could make it up but i don't make it up on the contrary i i i tone it down and of course i do disguise it for to so that people are not recognizable but but in essence everything is true and actually things are much worse than that well the thing is think things in a bad situation things are so bad that it's both inconceivable and incommunicable to the people that it's happening to and to anyone else like i've been in families that were dysfunctional for multiple generations and what i found was that in some situations you dig and you get to a lie and you think god i finally got to the fundamental lie and then you'd find that there was a a lie underneath that that was even bigger and then if you dug through that you'd find another catastrophe that was even more cataclysmic and it just never came to an end you you can't communicate what did you say in one of your books i think it was you quoted tolstoy every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way yes right so there's this specificity of misery that's complex beyond belief and and densely layered and so i know that reading your accounts which are you know hair raising and heart rending that's nowhere near as bad as the actual situation yes yeah well i used to go into the hospital thinking i had heard everything i've heard everything they can't surprise me can't surprise me but they always could surprise me the there was a kind of uh creativity about about the miseries that people inflicted on each other without i mean what was distressing to me about the misery that i saw is that it was not actually there wasn't a government inflicting it not certainly not directly it was it was not like the misery of shall we say mass deportation or uh you know civil war or anything like that but in a way that made it because i i used to have not exactly a hobby but i used to have a taste for going to dangerous countries and places where there was civil war where everything had broken down and in a way i found it less distressing than the kind of breakdown that i was that i was seeing around me in england because it was in a way it was unforced right well let me ask you about that then for a second i mean you're making two arguments you were making two arguments just then and i think you this happens regularly is that there is an underclass so three arguments there is an underclass that has a multi-generational component um things are really really bad in that class for all sorts of complex site reasons many of which are philosophical let's say or ethical or moral and it's worse than it was and i guess of the three of those the one i find least convincing let's say or i'm able to accept with less certainty is the idea that things are actually worse i mean people you know if you go back to 1820s and this is maybe where your experience in poor places in developing worlds might be useful if you go back to 1840 or thereabouts the typical person in the western world lived on about a buck 90 a day in today's dollar so below the un poverty level life was bloody brutal for people and you know so maybe things are worse now in the lower class with regards to familial structure than they were for a brief period after the second world war but it isn't obvious to me that they're necessarily worse by historical stuff i mean it's so yeah it's always a question of when you say something is worse there's always the question of what you're comparing it well yes so i mean you know we could compare it with 3000 bc or or or 1100 or whatever um i the things that it's incontestable that we are vastly better off physically than that's incontestable and um i mean when my my father was born in the east end of london and in his borough the um when he was born 1909 the infant mortality rate was if i remember rightly 124 per thousand which means that uh an eighth of children died before their first birthday and in 18th century london 50 of children died before they were five and there was you know poverty and filth and epidemic disease and every kind of so but i don't think that that's the kind of standard of comparison we we should use and if we take something like crime um violent crime i think the evidence is that it has increased enormously in a country like britain uh since 1900 when of course real there was absolutely terrible poverty by our standards today the kind of poverty that nobody suffers today in any in any western society and i was very struck by um by the story of um jack the ripper they're very instructive things which some people haven't noticed which was that in white chapel which was regarded as the worst part of london in the 1880s and was i mean the policy was just again inconceivable to us now when a body was found people ran off to find a policeman and they found a policeman and the policeman was armed with a bull's-eye lamp he had a truncheon which he was supposed to draw only in extremis and he had a whistle and that was how he was armed and he went around white chapel one by one not not in pairs or not in groups but with one birth so in white chapel today you wouldn't get a policeman doing that so i'm i am confused about that to some degree because you know they're stephen pinker for example i mean he makes a pretty strong case that overall your probability of um being murdered for example has just against its time frame issue is declining well it depends where yes what you're starting where you're starting with the future so i i think the more i think the more powerful argument is not necessarily so much that things have tell me what you think about this it could easily be that there's a degeneration of moral standards let's say that leads to a higher probability of um dispossession and that you see that in the uh in the in the in the class that's that's dropped out of society and that is a consequence of what would you say uh a failure a failure to abide by the same standards that might motivate middle-class prosperity and maybe the expectations for that class have have have transformed themselves over a 20-year period but it isn't obvious to me necessarily that that's associated with an increase in in criminality overall well i again i think that well certainly in britain it's perfectly clear that things like burglary and assault have increased enormous i mean they're not increasing they're not increasing further and they might now be decreasing but they've increased enormously by comparison with with the fairly recent past i'm not talking about 18th century uh london when you couldn't go anywhere without meeting a footpad or anything like that if i'm i mean this is slightly uh slightly altering the subject a little i'm i personally am not terribly keen on the idea of the underclass because i don't i this suggests that it's a bit like um marx's lump and proletariat if you like uh this is five percent of the population or whatever percentage of the population that is very uh separate from the rest of the population unfortunately as this was one of the points in my some of my books anyway uh the cultural uh influence is going from the is flowing from the bottom now upwards rather than what used to be the case from from middle classes or upper classes and middle classes downwards so that aspiration was to move upwards but now there seems to be a cultural um a desire for cultural um decline or descent it seems to me yeah you make that case with an upper-class mimicry of of lower class let's say lower economic class styles and that and that sort of thing which is a form of marry antoinettism because of course they hang on to their economic advantages right right right well then they get the advantages of being dispossessed and the advantages of being rich um let me ask you we're going to have to draw to a close here relatively quickly unfortunately um what are there other people writing in the same vein as you and that's one question the other question is what kind what has been the consequence for you of your writing and your popularization of these ideas i'd also like to know what sort of audience you're reaching your your most successful book let's say if you consider success popularity was life at the bottom correct that's 2001. and that one i think it's fair to say that that one brought you to wide public attention by writer's standards by non-fiction writers standards let's say um what's been the consequence what kind of criticisms have you faced and and how have you responded to what's been the consequence of that for you as well yeah well the first thing is i don't think many people are writing in my vein there was a a journalist a left-wing journalist called nick davis who wrote about this and he admitted the phenomena so he didn't deny the phenomena his analysis of the causes of it was different but i but nick davis nick davis yes what did he write i've forgotten the time okay i'll look it up i'll look it up yeah i mean interesting and i didn't of course i didn't agree with his analysis of the causes but he did admit that the phenomena were there which and all and we are very reluctant to admit that the phenomena are there and if they are admitted they're regarded as amusing there was a very interesting uh video made about the toki it was called the toki family in um in holland and this was a sort of underclass family which was drinking and taking drugs and it was making the lives of its neighbors terrible and they i mean i don't like to use the word degenerates but that's the word that comes to mind and finally they they managed something which is very difficult in holland they were evicted from where they were living and this is almost and there's an impossible achievement in holland but anyway they went off in their white van and their consequence was that they were going on holiday to their punishment for their behavior was going on holiday to spain in a white van and some producer made a little um video of them uh singing that they were going on holiday to spain in in there and you see them drinking and you know just as my they were just like my patients and what it was quite clear to me was that they were being exhibited as amusing to the middle classes of holland it was just a joke but these people were not a joke they were they'd been very violent to their neighbors they'd made their live the lives of their neighbors hell and what we saw was the metropolitan middle classes just turning them into a joke as if their lives and the lives of the people around them were not to be taken seriously so that i think is i mean that i think is the attitude of of the kind of people who have no contact with this world as i would have had no contact with the world with this world if i if i hadn't done the work i i did as to consequences for me haven't really been any i haven't been viciously attacked um why not i think well first of all it helps to be a doctor secondly right well you have some credibility too because you're you know you're actually working directly well that was that i think was it this yeah this was not this was uh this was my ideas weren't just born out of some kind of theoretical uh superstructure so for all your flaws you're you're genuinely in the trenches and that comes across you know that comes across immediately just the sheer number of people that i mean it's you saw how many people who had tried to commit suicide well but i think it was ten thousand ten and fifteen thousand right so that's that's such an inconceivable number that it sort of i would imagine it would sort of leave critics aghast it's like well i've never talked to three people like that and you've talked to 15 000 that's that's actually quite a difference so the best way of dealing with that is to ignore it you know so i i mean you say i'm well known i don't think i'm well known i mean it's true that my book has i don't know how many i don't know how many my book is uh sold i was very surprised to discover that it sold 13 000 in the netherlands and i was surprised because actually what i was describing was england and i couldn't see how that could interest a dutch audience but many people have have said well i have observed this many people who are in the trenches as it were and one of the things that really pleased me i mean this was possibly the most pleasing thing to me was that i i oddly enough my the books have sold quite well in brazil of all countries i mean i never it never occurred to me that they might sell in brazil and i gave a lecture in sao paulo and people came up afterwards they wanted to book sign and there were a couple among them who said we are for we were born in the favelas of of sao paulo which actually are not the worst in brazil but but still pretty bad and it's said we recognized all that you said all that you said about england we saw in the favelas so let's let's go through what what you saw and and then maybe we could talk about what you've seen and what you think might be effective amelioration so you see um fragmented intimate relationships is that is that the most salient feature is the impermanence of intimate relationships i you know yes i would say so because i think without uh without better relationships it's very difficult to see how large numbers of people can escape this world okay and so out of that because the relationships the sexual relationships aren't bound by mutual long-term support love contractual obligations and all of that that spins into higher levels of male violence and also to predation on vulnerable females by psychopathic and aggressive males yes although i wouldn't say that the the women are just passive uh victims they're not just passive victims i mean they are victims but they're not passive victims i mean and i guess i was sorry i was thinking that they're they're easier prey yeah with multiple children they're not they're they're easier pickings that's that's what i mean that's right yes right so the fragmentation so if you have a fragmented couple of relationships and and you're a woman you end up with children you're no longer 20 and single you're 28 or 35 you have two children um your your the array of high quality men that you have to choose from is going to decrease substantially yes it was never very great to begin right right right okay so then we add to that um i studied alcohol for years and its effects on violence and you can basically say that if people didn't get drunk half the violence in the world would instantly disappear so rape murder familial abuse the contribution of alcoholism is stunningly high stunningly high so maybe that's the third factor that plays in it is that reasonable well it's certainly uh it's unmistakably uh part of it yes yeah say 50 of murderers are drunk when they kill and 50 of victims are intoxicated when they die yeah so it's it's it's a major and it's the only drug it's the only drug that has that magnitude of an effect on violent behavior so um then low low educational attainment yes that's obviously very important and and interestingly the state does very little to try to address it or try to to make things better okay and then and then beliefs what what do you think are the key beliefs that that characterize the phenomenon that you saw uh well there's there is now certainly a sense of entitlement the sense of it's wrong for anyone to judge people have internalized that so not only do they not judge others but they don't judge themselves and it's not right for anybody to judge them so that's an abandonment of judgment or even a demonization of it when it's just a crucial thing that you need to separate your but you can spend your life at the same while at the same time because it's existentially impossible not to make judgments they are making judgments but they don't they are not they don't accept that they're making judgments that they are making judgments um attitude towards the future what's the attitude uh i think uh shall we say it's not thought about very deeply right okay so that's the first thing is that it doesn't come up much yes but what i've noticed is is that there there's no implicit sense that the future is something that could be altered for the for the better by changes of behavior currently yes yeah which is there's an element of truth in that in the economic aspect because then you know they're not going to get good job even if they behave responsibly and so on they're not going to get good jobs however their lives will be better if they behave responsibly but another thing that i would i i mean this is very speculative but i thought that um lots of people have become stars in their own soap opera and they prefer a a a dramatic life a life full of incident to a life that would be actually very flat if they if they did the kind of things that you and i would suggest their lives might be very flat because they would not be well off uh they would still be struggling economically and so on and their lives would be very very dull well that's dostoyevsy's famous criticism of socialist utopia right people are fundamentally unable to deal with uh satiated dullness they'll break it they'll fragment it just so that something dramatic and exciting happens and there's definitely truth and that i think that's a testament to some degree to the adventurousness of the human spirit even though it's something that can well manifest it in the ways that you described yeah well i think i'm not boring yes well i mean i've fled i mean i can't say that i haven't um i haven't like chasing sensation myself because i when i was younger i used to like danger of a certain kind i used to like going to countries which were dangerous i crossed africa by public transport in days when it was impossible to communicate with anyone there were no mobile phones or anything so i was in communicado for months as well and you did work in prisons as a psychiatrist yeah well i didn't i never felt really that was very dangerous but i'd um you know countries where there's uh civil war and and so on are dangerous and i liked it uh but i always felt i suppose maybe falsely that there was some higher purpose it wasn't just a liking for danger there was some kind of purpose behind it all well there is some you there is some utility in seeking out adventure and and strife if that's integrated into a functional and productive generous honest life that's better it's better so um obviously in and of itself it can become a problem but um so how did you handle this emotionally which um well the endless onslaught of misery amongst your amongst your clients i mean one way of dealing with it of course was writing about it because i i've what i found is that when you write about an experience even an unpleasant experience it distances you from that experience so you you not only having the experience you're observing having the experience i was once arrested in albania and uh and mildly say mildly beast with a truncheon by a by policeman and actually as he was hitting me i i wasn't thinking this is painful i was thinking how am i going to describe this subsequently so that being able to describe it or having the intention of describing it actually distances yourself in a good way i think from from your experience well you draw the conclusions that way and i mean the purpose of your memory in some sense is to draw the appropriate conclusions from your experience to guide you into the future and so um i have a series of writing exercises online at a place called selfauthoring.com that steps people through writing a biography and it highlights experiences that were emotionally extreme and because there is plenty of evidence that writing them out they have to be somewhat distant from you you know yes you can't do it the next day yes exactly because you're just re-traumatizing yourself in some sense but the evidence is quite strong i would say that doing that well you're transforming the emotion into words and replacing in some sense the emotion by the words you're making sense of it um yeah there was a very interesting experience i had an interesting experience with that in that regard in the prison we had a writer who would come in and teach writing creative writing if you like to interested prisoners and they were of course a selected group and so on and the writer told me he came to me because of course the the uh there wasn't really any evidence that he was doing any good because of course that such evidence would be almost impossible to to gather right but and so of course the prison authorities are constantly trying to cut down costs so they want to get rid of them so he wanted me to write in his uh favor which i did which of course sealed his fate but um but anyway uh he told me something very interesting all the people who wrote wrote autobiographically as you would expect and they would they would come to a point in their lives when they had to stop when they found it extremely difficult to go on because actually what it did this was the first time in their lives they'd really ever thought biographically or perhaps even thought well maybe well i really mean that it's like you know that people think they think but what happens is thoughts appear in their head that's way different than sitting down programmatically and voluntarily going over your life and trying to make sense anyway they came they came to a point where they couldn't go on at least for quite a long time and that point was when they realized that all that they'd been telling themselves about their own behavior was actually false and so i came to the conclusion that this actually now whether it changed their behavior subsequently i can't tell you i don't know and anyway well you know you you probably need to marry that with a plan yeah you know like the problem is is that if you if you realize that what you're doing is wrong but it's habitual and you don't know what else to do you're going to do what you know because what else are you going to do you don't know anything else yeah i mean one thing about the statistics in an ending rate in britain are quite clear that people stop coming into prison on new offenses i mean overwhelmingly not not absolutely 100 but overwhelmingly for for offenses like burglary and they stop after the age of 39 and um and their rate of conviction goes down in the 30s so there is a kind of spontaneous change now whether this would accelerate i mean what you would want to do is accelerate that change so that they they didn't have to reach the age of 39 before they stopped committing those crimes and my guess was that this did actually have an effect but i have no proof of that i have no proof that this yeah i don't know of any studies that look at autobiographical writing and recidivism um well it would be very difficult because it would be very difficult very yeah you i mean it would be difficult to find the control group and and so on so but i mean instinctively i felt that this was a good thing to be doing well insofar as thought is useful and verbal thought is high quality thought you'd hope that it would be helpful um okay so how did your conclusions change your clinical practice for the better let's say in your opinion and what about social policy suggestions well the the first clinical practice it made me very wary of medicalization of misery [Music] that's the first thing so that i spent far more time persuading people not to take medication and take it in fact there's a kind of law in prison if if people want medicine they don't need it and if they won't take it they do need it so but um as far as social policy is concerned i'm very very wary of making and perhaps this is very cowardly of me very wary of making any suggestions because uh if anyone would take me seriously and the results would work catastrophic i i would feel very bad so well it's an unfair actually i'm i'm i think also that actually what we need is a cultural change and i'm not sure how much the government can bring about a cultural change so i was trying to in my way trying to persuade people particularly the the intellect maybe this is grandiose but i was trying to persuade intellectuals that a lot of their world outlook was was bad and was doing harm rather than good um um and to be and to be cognizant of that because of the fact that radicalism translated down the socioeconomic hierarchy is often devastating yes yeah so that the destruction of the family which you know rich people perhaps can survive is devastating for people who need solidarity social solidarity more than anybody else and that the social solidarity which now runs entirely through the state is a very cold form of solidarity that that is very unpleasant that's a good place to stop yeah thank you very much for your conversation i've appreciate it for for talking with me today i hope everyone finds this useful yeah i hope i don't know whether how many people um how many people watch or see it a million a million yeah and you get abuse that's a long story i mean i know you haven't no i mean abuse from this kind of thing the from a podcast no not at the moment and and and likely not from this one yes so yeah good well uh yeah i i mean i must say i i haven't really had abuse but then of course i don't i don't i don't look to see whether people are abusing me so what the heart doesn't see what the eye doesn't see the heart can't grieve over much appreciated okay thank you very much thank you very much [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 636,708

Rating: 4.904963 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism

Id: _ET7banSeN0

Length: 115min 1sec (6901 seconds)

Published: Thu May 20 2021