Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass
Theodore Dalrymple
Top 10 Best Quotes
“IT IS A MISTAKE to suppose that all men, or at least all Englishmen, want to be free. On the contrary, if freedom entails responsibility, many of them want none of it. They would happily exchange their liberty for a modest (if illusory) security.”
“I have had the following conversation on innumerable occasions with young men of about 20 who have been unemployed since leaving school, and whose general educational level is outlined above: ‘Have you thought of improving your education?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘There’s no point. There are no jobs.’ ‘Could there be any other reason to get educated?’ ‘No.”
“This is the lie that is at the heart of our society, the lie that encourages every form of destructive self-indulgence to flourish: for while we ascribe our conduct to pressures from without, we obey the whims that well up from within, thereby awarding ourselves carte blanche to behave as we choose. Thus we feel good about behaving badly.”
“What do we mean by poverty? Not what Dickens or Blake or Mayhew meant. Today no one seriously expects to go hungry in England or to live without running water or medical care or even TV. Poverty has been redefined in industrial countries, so that anyone at the lower end of the income distribution is poor ex officio, as it were-poor by virtue of having less than the rich. And of course by this logic, the only way of eliminating poverty is by an egalitarian redistribution of wealth-even if the society as a whole were to become poorer as a result.”
“Experience has taught me that it is wrong and cruel to suspend judgment, that nonjudgmentalism is at best indifference to the suffering of others, at worst a disguised form of sadism. How can one respect people as members of the human race unless one holds them to a standard of conduct and truthfulness? How can people learn from experience unless they are told that they can and should change? One doesn't demand of laboratory mice that they do better: but man is not a mouse, and I can think of no more contemptuous way of treating people than to ascribe to them no more responsibility than such mice.”
“For example, the number of patients admitted to our ward declined precipitously during the first days of the Gulf War and during the European soccer championships. People were too absorbed for a time in affairs other than their own – albeit by the proxy of television – to contemplate suicide. The boredom of self-absorption is thus one of the promoters of attempted suicide, and being attached to a cardiac monitor for a time or having an intravenous infusion in one’s arm helps to relieve it. I’m treated, therefore I am. Patterns”
“This underclass is not poor, at least by the standards that have prevailed throughout the great majority of human history. It exists, to a varying degree, in all Western societies. Like every other social class, it has benefited enormously from the vast general increase in wealth of the past hundred years. In certain respects, indeed, it enjoys amenities and comforts that would have made a Roman emperor or an absolute monarch gasp. Nor is it politically oppressed: it fears neither to speak its mind nor the midnight knock on the door. Yet its existence is wretched nonetheless, with a special wretchedness that is peculiarly its own.”
“The climate of moral, cultural, and intellectual relativism – a relativism that began as a mere fashionable plaything for intellectuals – has been successfully communicated to those least able to resist its devastating practical effects.”
“Finally, consider the effect that the mass media’s constant rehearsal of injustices has upon the population. People come to believe that, far from being extremely fortunate by the standards of all previously existing populations, we actually live in the worst of times and under the most unjust of dispensations. Every wrongful conviction, every instance of police malfeasance, is so publicised that even professional criminals, even those who have performed appalling deeds, feel on a priori grounds they too must have been unjustly, or at least hypocritically, dealt with.”
“Linguistic and educational relativism helps to transform a class into a caste – a caste, almost, of Untouchables.”
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Book Keywords:
poverty-line, morality, relative-poverty-and-wealth, judging-others, nonjudgemental, squalor, poverty, human-dignity, ethics
