Admirable Evasions Quotes

“As the Habsburg military used to say, the situation is catastrophic, but not serious.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“Behaviorism was but one instance of a terrible temptation for all intellectuals, namely that of nothing-but-ism. History is nothing but the clash of class interests, human behavior is nothing but a response to economic incentives, etc., etc.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“(Psychoanalysis, it seems, does wonders for a man’s prose style: it renders it labyrinthine without subtlety.) There is no place, then, for human agency, except the kind that leads you to talk about yourself in the presence of another for twenty years. Shallowness can go no deeper.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“The road to heaven is paved with fulfilled desires, and to hell with frustrated ones.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“He spent five years between 2007 and 2012 in prison, in which he was “radicalized,” that is to say, he was given (and adopted) an ideological justification for his psychopathic behavior.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“Psychoanalysis, as well as death, becomes a bourn from which no traveler returns: and like anything indulged in for a long time, concern over the small change of life becomes a habit, and an irritating one, that inhibits interest and taking part in the wider world. It is a poor center of a man’s attention, himself; compared with psychoanalysis, haruspicy or hepatoscopy (divination by entrails or the liver of sacrificed animals) is harmless to the character, for though it is absurd, it at least is limited in time.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“Metaphysics, said the late nineteenth-century idealist philosopher Bradley, is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct; but metaphysics has changed in the meantime, and is now the finding of bad reasons for what we cannot possibly believe however hard we try. All I can say is that the disbelief in the reality of consciousness or personal identity has never prevented anyone from copyrighting his book in which that unreality is argued; and I very much doubt that any author of such a book has ever been completely indifferent as to the bank account into which its royalties were paid.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“Behaviorism entails the systematic denial of meaning, a denial which does violence to both the evidence and the everyday experience of humanity.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“If complex behavior such as addiction is a chronic and relapsing brain disease (and it is complex, because it involves not just taking the addictive substance, but finding it), no one should be surprised if addicts awaited their salvation by means of a magic bullet. To imply that there is or could be such a magic bullet is, in effect, to compound the problem for addicts; for, already given to much self-deception, it is just what they want to hear so that they can continue their self-destruction with a clear conscience and that self-righteousness that comes nowadays with the awareness of being a victim – the victim of a chronic, relapsing brain disease, as revealed by brain scans. Those who tend them, of course, also need them to be victims. This is not just a matter of financial interest: seeing victims everywhere you look is the zeitgeist, it is what gives people license to behave as they like while feeling virtuous. Virtue is not manifested in one’s behavior, always so difficult and tedious to control, but in one’s attitude toward victims. This view of virtue is both sentimental and unfeeling, cloying and brutal: for it implies that those who are not victims are not worthy of our sympathy or understanding, only of our denunciation.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“(This is not to claim that horrific events may not have severe psychological consequences for those who experience them, only to say that the apparatus of supposed recuperation and aftercare has profound effects upon the incidence of psychological consequences, often of a much less horrific nature. It may well be, then, that the overall effect of the apparatus is negative rather than positive, even though it is positive in some cases. Incidentally, the virtue of resilience or fortitude is the sworn enemy of that apparatus, which needs human vulnerability as a carnivore needs meat.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“argued, with the inventive cunning that each of us possesses when a pet theory of ours is refuted by the evidence,”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“but only a moment’s reflection is necessary to realize that, where there is a choice of incarceration and so-called community sentencing, a reduction in the rate of recidivism is perfectly compatible with a rise, even a huge rise, in the numbers of crimes committed; and vice versa, with a rise in the rate of recidivism coincident with a fall, even a dramatic fall, in the rate of crime.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“The notion of self-love or self-esteem is in itself either ridiculous or repellent. No one ascribes his good character or successes in life to an adequate fund of self-esteem. No one says of any human achievement that it was the fruit of self-esteem. Indeed, a dose of self-doubt is, if anything, more likely than self-esteem to lead to the effort necessary (but not sufficient) for such achievement. Self-doubt, within reason, is something to be overcome; self-esteem is complacency elevated to an ontological plane.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“The Real Me may actually have no obvious connection to the Me as it acts in the world and appears to others. It is a secret and beautiful garden only accessible only by means of psychology”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“Self-esteem is a concept that belongs to the psychology of the Real Me. The Real Me, of course, is someone who is inherently good and admirable: Man being by nature good, inside every bad man there’s a good one trying to get out, obstructed, alas, by such phenomena as low self-esteem.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“A man may despise himself for being as he is, but that does not absolve him of the responsibility for being as he is.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“The object of cognitive behavioral therapy is to break the vicious circle, thus transforming a wretched mouselike creature who barely dares leave his mouse hole into a go-getter who wins friends and influences people. It is not difficult to see the connection between these ideas and the modern pedagogic tendency to praise children for their efforts, however desultory. In case people think I am exaggerating, let me here remark that an eminent professor at one of Britain’s foremost institutions of higher learning, at which many Nobel Prize winners both studied and taught, informed me recently that he was not permitted to use red ink in marking his students’ essays (they still wrote them by hand, apparently, to cheat by computer being too easy for them) because red ink is deemed by those in charge of the students’ well-being to be too intimidating. The sight of red ink on the pages of their immortal prose might cause the little ones to lose their self-esteem, traumatize them, and mean a blighted life for ever after. Does one laugh? Does one cry? Does one despair? Does one leap for joy at such delectable absurdity? Or all or none of the above?”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“We need everyone who suffers to be a victim because only thus can we maintain our pretense to universal understanding and experience the warm glow of our own compassion, so akin to the warmth that a strong, stiff drink imparts in the cold.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“Our fear of appearing censorious is accompanied by the wish to appear understanding. To understand all is to forgive all; therefore, if we forgive all, we understand all. We thus put ourselves in the position of an all-merciful deity, the very deity whose existence we often are at pains angrily to deny. Suffering of any kind, even that which would once have been deemed by most people as self-inflicted, is ipso facto evidence of victimhood. Our philosophical motto is not I think, therefore I am, but He suffers, therefore he’s a victim.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“Behaviorism was but one instance of a terrible temptation for all intellectuals, namely that of nothing-but-ism. History is nothing but the clash of class interests, human behavior is nothing but a response to economic incentives, etc., etc. Of course, it doesn’t require much knowledge or reflection (or for that matter self-examination) to agree that people often respond to economic incentives, but as an explanation of everything, and therefore of all history, it is as preposterous as the belief that the Mass in B Minor is really only a sublimation of Bach’s unacknowledged sexual desire for his mother, or a conditioned response to the death of Augustus II, Elector of Saxony”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality