The cause of much contemporary misery in Western countries – criminality, domestic violence, drug addiction, aggressive youths, hooliganism, broken families – is the nihilistic, decadent and/or self-destructive behaviour of people who do not know how to live. Both the smoothing over of this behaviour, and the medicalisation of the problems that emerge as a corollary of this behaviour, are forms of indifference. Someone has to tell those people, patiently and with understanding for the particulars of the case, that they have to live differently. Poverty does not explain aggressive, criminal and self-destructive behaviour. In an African slum you will find among the very poor, living in dreadful circumstances, dignity and decency in abundance, which are painfully lacking in an average English suburb, although its inhabitants are much wealthier. An attitude characterised by gratefulness and having obligations towards others has been replaced – with awful consequences – by an awareness of "rights" and a sense of entitlement, without responsibilities. This leads to resentment as the rights become violated by parents, authorities, bureaucracies and others in general. One of the things that makes Islam attractive to young westernised Muslim men is the opportunity it gives them to dominate women. Technocratic or bureaucratic solutions to the problems of mankind produce disasters in cases where the nature of man is the root cause of those problems. It is a myth, when going "cold turkey" from an opiate such as heroin, that the withdrawal symptoms are virtually unbearable; they are in fact hardly worse than flu. Criminality is much more often the cause of drug addiction than its consequence. Sentimentality, which is becoming entrenched in society, is the progenitor, the godparent, the midwife of brutality. The ideology of the Welfare State is used to diminish personal responsibility. Erosion of personal responsibility makes people dependent on institutions and favors the existence of a threatening and vulnerable underclass. Moral relativism can easily be a trick of an egotistical mind to silence the voice of conscience. Multiculturalism and cultural relativism are at odds with common sense. The decline of civilised behaviour – self-restraint, modesty, zeal, humility, irony, detachment – ruins social and personal life. The root cause of our contemporary cultural poverty is intellectual dishonesty. First, the intellectuals (more specifically, left-wing ones) have destroyed the foundation of culture, and second, they refuse to acknowledge it by resorting to the caves of political correctness. These are the beliefs of Theodore Dalrymple. Read his books. He makes a lot more sense than anyone else I can think of. Jordan Fair, Adam Service
Posted on: Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:20:05 +0000
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