Why Are People Poor? with Dr. Theodore Dalrymple

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Buckle up everybody, here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House folks. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country.

He's done an amazing job. Building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here.

Brought to you by the loan experts I trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at AndrewandTodd.com. Really excited for this hour and this discussion. A couple months ago, a very good pastor friend of mine, Pastor David Engelhardt, who comes on our program and is also a board member at Turning Point USA, he came up to me and he handed me a book very forcefully. He looked at me in the eyes and he said, Charlie, you must read this. And when he does that, I take it very seriously. He's a very learned man. David Engelhardt really understands the scriptures. He said, Charlie, this book is one of the most powerful books I've ever read when it comes to describing the permanent poor.

And he says it debunks all of the Marxist materialist nonsense that has infected our universities. I said, OK, David, I trust you. And it was, of course, the book was endorsed by Thomas Sowell. So I started reading the book and I was blown away.

Within a couple chapters, I texted our team. I said, we have to have this author on the program. And the book is Life at the Bottom, and it is by Dr. Theodore Dalrymple. It's one of many books that he has published. This one in particular I found to be very moving and powerful.

And we'll talk about why. Dr. Dalrymple, thank you for taking the time. Well, thank you for asking me. So, Dr. Dalrymple, why don't you introduce to our audience your life's work? What I found most powerful about your book is this was decades of work with the poor and just noticing, analyzing and seeing patterns that what was driving people to remain poor was not necessarily a material issue.

Please tell us about it and we'll dive, we'll go from there. Well, first of all, I should say that I travelled very widely for a number of years and worked in Africa and I travelled across Africa by public transport, seeing it from the bottom up, and I also travelled widely in Latin America and other places. So I began to see my own country in a rather different light from how I'd seen it before. And then I worked for a number of years in what is called an inner city hospital and there was a prison next door and I started working in the prison next door as well. And the main difference between these two great institutions was that there was more violence in the hospital. But I suppose I saw about 10,000 people or something like that number who had taken overdoses, 10,000 to 15,000 people who had taken overdoses in a kind of suicidal gesture.

I didn't actually want to commit suicide but it's a kind of para-suicidal gesture. And they told me about the way they were living and the way the people around them were living. And in the morning I saw many victims of crime and in the afternoons I used to go and see the perpetrators in the prison.

And for a number of years I was on duty one night in three or one night in four for the prison and also one weekend or one weekend in three or four also on duty in the prison. So I saw quite a lot and I suppose I heard about the lives of maybe, I can't really put an accurate figure on it, but perhaps about 50,000 people. And this was in a poor part of the city.

Well that's extraordinary. So seeing and treating 50,000 people... No, hearing about it. I didn't treat 50,000 people. I heard about the lives. Of course when I talked to people they told me about the way they were living and the people they were living with.

And so that was a, at least the way I read the book, a launching off point for you to want to write this book because you started to notice patterns. What did you learn in the decades of doing this that was against the, let's just say, popular narrative when it came to the working poor or just the permanently poor and why they are in poverty? Well, the first thing I learned is that they are human beings just like everyone else. And as human beings, they make choices and they're encouraged to make certain choices.

But the choices have consequences. But the way to deal with this is not to deny their agency. And what we largely do is deny the agency of people who are, in our societies anyway, poor. They're relatively poor. They're not materially poor by the kind of standards that I saw in Africa. But they're relatively poor in our societies. And the fact is that their choices, the choices they made, which were almost very often the wrong ones, the easy ones, the wrong ones, they were made possible by our system of social security and so on. My point is not that the welfare state necessarily creates this subculture or culture, if that's what you want to call it. But it is a necessary condition of it.

And there's something else that is necessary. And that is the ideas that people have about how they should live. And many of these ideas have trickled down, I'm afraid, from the intellectual classes, never really believed them, but were playing around with them. So what I found to be so powerful in the first couple of pages of the book, it's very clear that there is a value system that the permanently poor embrace. If you had to summarize that for our audience, what would that be?

Well, I would say that it's a value system where the present moment is lived for the pleasure or sensation of the present moment is lived for without any thought of the morrow or even yesterday. And there is no higher or lower. And there's been nothing to aspire to. They have nothing to fear and nothing to hope for. And this is a terrible situation for a human being to be in. The academic consensus, doctor, and as I travel, I hear this more and more, especially on university campuses, is that people that are poor, there's nothing they can do about it.

They're nothing more than a victim of their environment, of their conditions, and we should just give them as much stuff as possible. It is systemic. With all of your experience, do you find that to be true?

Well, it's obviously not true. My father was born in the slum in East London when people were incomparably poorer than they are now. My mother arrived in Britain without any money at all. She was much poorer, actually, than anybody is now. So the simple absence of money or absence of resources does not explain permanent poverty.

And if you have the wrong ideas and it doesn't matter what is done to you, you will always remain in this situation. It's what Blake called the mind-forged manacles that sustain permanent poverty. If I may say, these have been assiduously propagated in the class by intellectuals. Which is what's so interesting because many of the intellectuals are actually rather well-off and they don't even embrace the very ideas that they defend. And that's a theme that a writer in America called luxury beliefs.

I don't know if you're familiar with this. It's a really fascinating idea which is totally true that at the high society in America, Aspen or the Upper East Side of Manhattan, they'll have a cocktail party talking about systemic racism or why two-parent households aren't necessary. But if you actually ask them, hey, what do you want for your kids? Oh, you know, obviously a two-parent household. And so it's a luxury belief that they themselves actually never apply to themselves.

Private school is another great example. Any thoughts here, Dr. Dalrymple? Well, it goes further than that.

They've never actually met anybody other than as a servant or in these classes. So I remember once I used to write for a left-wing magazine as well, and it was a reasonable left-wing with a very distinguished intellectual history, actually. And I used to write for it from time to time when the editor was a very decent man. And I went to lunch there and by that time, for many years, I've been describing what I saw.

And I won't say who it was, but he was a well-known liberal person and I think he was a decent person. But he leant across the table to me and said, with regard to what I had written, you know funny people. And I said, well, there are a lot of them, you know. And I offered to take him outside in the streets and point them out to him. And on another occasion, a very famous BBC correspondent, again, a very well-educated and I think decent man, said that he'd always wanted to meet me.

This was another lunch and he said he always wanted to meet me because he wanted to ask me whether I made it all up. And by this time, I had been describing what I saw weekly for about 14 years. And so I said, well, I'm very flattered that you'd think that I could make it all up, but I'm afraid it's actually much worse than I described. And if I just kept a diary of what I saw, it would be unbearable. But anyway, these two people who were very decent people, I think they meant well, but they simply had no contact with the world that I was describing. And they'd never met anybody or talked to anybody in that world.

And to be fair, I wouldn't have done unless I did the work that I did do. America is at a tipping point. Charlie Kirk here to tell you about a new movie you have to see. Dinesh D'Souza's movie Police State exposes the government's relentless persecution of the conservative MAGA movement. The America we know and love is becoming more and more like a police state every day. The FBI has turned its eyes away from the real dangers in the world to target what they call domestic terrorists with a totalitarian agenda that's treating conservative Americans like criminals. They're targeting their political opponents using mass surveillance and censorship, indoctrinating our children and threatening families with military-style raids on our homes, threatening people like you and me who speak our minds and stand up for freedom of speech, freedom of religion and our God-given American liberties. Directed by Dinesh D'Souza, Debbie D'Souza and Bruce Schooley, Police State sounds the alarm. If you demand your freedom, they're coming after you. How did we get here and how do we turn the tide of this tyrannical government's agenda? You have to see this movie, Police State. Buy or stream it now at policestatefilm.net.

Check it out today, policestatefilm.net. What I found to be unique about your book, Life at the Bottom, Dr. Dalrymple, is traditionally, let's just say social workers, when they spend a significant period of time with people who would be called permanently poor, their takeaway is one of a Marxist, left-wing, redistribute the property type of solution. They become, as we call, I'm sure you have this phrase too in the United Kingdom, bleeding-heart liberals. And without politicizing it, your takeaway, you had sympathy for them as human beings, but you also said, wait a second, it's a value system that they're embracing. They keep telling themselves the same stories.

For our audience that hasn't yet read the book, and I encourage them to buy it, what are some of the stories that these people are telling themselves? Well, let's take the question of drug addiction because I saw a lot of people who were addicted to heroin and this was a sudden important problem in Britain. If I asked them how and why they started taking heroin, almost invariably their answer was, I fell in with the wrong crowd.

That is to say, it's a kind of passive thing, it's like an apple falling from a tree or something like that. And I said to them, well, it's very odd, you know, I meet lots and lots of people who fell in with the wrong crowd, but I never actually meet any member of the wrong crowd itself. And they would laugh because they would get the point immediately. They were uneducated, but they understood what I was getting at. And when you think what it takes to become a heroin addict, you have to overcome an inhibition against injecting yourself.

You have to overcome unpleasant side effects, you have to learn where to get the drug, you have to learn how to prepare it. And actually, it's a very, if you're a criminal heroin addict and it's perfectly possible to take heroin without becoming a criminal in any other sense, you have a very busy life, actually. So, but they would tell themselves and they would reflect back to people like me the theory that they were simply victims of circumstance. And I would not accept that they were victims of circumstance.

So I can give you a story. A burglar was in the prison and he had been several times in prison having burgled, which proves that really he wanted to be caught because you have to want to be caught to be called by the British police. But anyway, he said to me, do you think I burgled because of my unhappy childhood? And I said, no, it's got absolutely nothing whatever to do with it, absolutely nothing. And he was very surprised because this was the first time anyone had said something like that to him, said, no, it's not your childhood. And he said, well, what is it then?

And so I said, well, you're lazy and stupid and you want things that you're not prepared to work for. And he laughed. He didn't get angry because he knew already that at some level he knew that the kind of thing that he had told people and the kind of thing that people had told him was nonsense. And if it were true, it would be very demeaning because it would mean that he was like a billiard ball being struck by another billiard ball.

And however foolish people are, they are not just billiard balls. I totally agree. Hang on to that, because when I visit these campuses, they say it's OK to allow these people to loot and to steal because it's just cause and effect.

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Go to MyPatriotSupply.com. So, Dr. Dalrymple, I'm not sure how deep you want to get into this, but some people will say that the new breakthroughs in neuroscience show that free will is just a trick that we play in ourselves. You don't have any agency. I don't believe that.

I think there's plenty of studies on the other side that say that free will is legitimate. But how would you respond to that? Because the high society academics believe we should not have any form of justice or prison system for those that steal, loot, even murder, because they're nothing more than it's determinant. They're just acting out with something that happened previously. How would you respond to that? Well, the first thing to say is that this doesn't necessarily have liberal consequences. If you're really saying that someone behaves extremely badly because of his circumstances, then that would suggest that you should lock him up for good.

If there's no connection between what he does and what he thinks, then he is actually just an object, and for the sake of society, you should keep him apart. So what we need are huge prison camps for all these people. Now, I don't believe that. I don't believe that people are just products of their circumstances, although it is also true that their circumstances affect them. It's true that many people, of course, have very unfortunate backgrounds.

That's undoubtedly true. But what is most important is the ideas that are given to them and which they accept. So the struggle is one on the level of ideas rather than on whether they can have an even larger television than they already have or any number of screens or any number of even more luxurious sneakers and so on. This is all ridiculous. So the idea of agency is unpopular with the new consensus.

Why do you think that is? Free will, the ability that you can make rational choices. Well, I think it's popular because, of course, it hands over a lot of power and responsibility to those people who say that other people don't have any agency. If you don't have any agency and you're behaving badly, I should have complete power over you.

And so I would say it's a power seeking and it's also very grandiose, of course. I mean, I can't force you to do anything. I mean, I can intimidate you into doing something and I can menace you into doing something. But even that remains a choice whether you are intimidated or not. So it is not true that people can be just herded into the right kind of behavior by the right kind of circumstances created by this powerful group of people who can never think of themselves as not having agency. The whole point about being a human being is you can't possibly believe you don't have agency, at least for most of your life. I mean, I'm not saying that there are no circumstances in which you don't have any agency and I can give examples of that. But for most of our lives, most of the time, we have agency and we have choice and we have to make the choice. The question of determinism, in my opinion, is irrelevant because even if we lived in a completely determined world, the judge who sentences someone to prison is just as determined on his behavior as is the person whom he is sentencing.

So it leaves absolutely everything the same. And the fact is that we constantly have to make decisions. Supposing I'm driving a car and I come to a T junction, I can turn either right or left. I can't just sit there and wait for my brain to make a decision.

I have to think about whether I turn right or left. So, in other words, the whole idea that we don't have agency is nonsense. I mean, we can't live like that. And in fact, the people who claim that would claim a great deal of agency for themselves and they would claim a great deal of responsibility because they, unlike everybody else, have agency and therefore they must choose what other people do. To socially redesigned society. What, if any, policy solutions or even, let's just say, communication changes do you recommend to change a poverty mindset that has now basically dominated the lower 25, lower 30 percent of the West? At least in America, there are entire communities that live in what we consider poverty. As you appropriately said, it's not even close to world poverty. They still have air conditioning televisions, three meals a day.

They suffer from obesity. But what we consider to be poverty in the West, cell phones, you know, Wi-Fi, all that stuff. What, what, if anything, can break the poverty mindset in your decades of experience?

Well, on an individual basis, I hope that I had a kind of Socratic dialogue with some people and it affected some people and how they thought about their own lives. Most people don't think about their own lives, actually, in a biographical sense. They don't see what happens to them as the consequence of what they've done or the choices they've made in the past. So it's very important to get them to see that.

Now, actually, what happens is the consequence of what they've done and their beliefs and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, for many people, it really is too late. 50 or 60 is not the age at which you change your way of life.

But for young people, it should be possible. Unfortunately, I mean, there are some, there are huge obstacles to making things better on a big scale. For example, our schools. Our schools are absolutely useless.

We're not useless, but harmful. And I, for example, used to try and fathom the level of education of people 15 to 25. And the majority of them had absolutely no knowledge, for example, of history whatsoever.

Nothing. You couldn't ask them for a single date. In all, in about 15 years, I must have seen thousands of people aged between 16 and 25. And I found three who knew when the Second World War was.

And I mean, I thought one was particularly good because he deduced from the fact that there was a Second World War that there must have been a first. And that, and I mean, it's funny, but it's dreadful. It's tragic.

It's tragic. And they're not people of deficient intelligence. These are not unteachable people.

When I used to, I used to give them, I used to test their literacy and I would give them a sentence to read and they would come to a three syllable word and say, I don't know that one as if English were written ideographically rather than alphabetically. And they're doing nothing but just, they're just recognizing. Yes.

Yes. And sometimes when they struggled with the end of a sentence, I'd say, what does it mean? What does it mean? What you just read? And they would say, oh, I don't know.

I was only reading it. So it was a kind of propitiatory ceremony that they were engaged in in reading. Now, here one could say that in a sense they were the victims, but they were not the victims of poverty. They were victims of a terrible ideology of teaching. And it's been proven over and over again that you can teach almost anyone to read, except people of genuinely biologically low intelligence. So this and this, incidentally, was after they had had an education that costs on the average $80,000. So $80,000 and people come out not being able to multiply six by five and not being able to read a sentence. And how is one to explain this?

It's kind of miracle in a way. I mean, it's a challenge to spend $80,000 on the education of a child and for him to come out semi-literate or even illiterate. So here is something that has to be done and there has to be a change in, of course, in the way we teach and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, and I think in America, it's just as bad as Britain.

It might even be a little worse. The resistance of teachers to these kind of ideas is absolutely, well, it's terribly strong. And it exists in France. I remember I read an article in a French newspaper by an educational correspondent who said that the same problems are coming in France. They're a bit behind us if going in this direction is to go backwards.

But anyway, go forwards, I mean. Anyway, he said he wrote an article saying that teaching methods in France were deteriorating and literacy was deteriorating. And he received 600 letters of protest from teachers, 200 of which had spelling errors. So we now have teachers who themselves do not teach elementary skills.

I remember I had a friend who was in the middle, middle class, who was a doctor like me. He sent his child to the local school and the child used to come home with spellings to learn. And he found that three out of 10 were misspellings. So he went to the head mistress of the school and said, look at this, you're teaching my child misspellings. And she said, well, what does it matter? You can see, you know what the word means when it's written in this, misspelt in this way.

You know what it means. And at that point, he took his child out of the school and put the child into a private school. But if that is what's happening in a middle class area, you can imagine what's happening in very poor areas. Now, my father was a very, as I mentioned, was born in a slum in London. And this was in 19, he was born in 1909. And he went to an extremely good school where no, there were no compromises. He had to learn French and German and Latin. And they didn't say your parents are very poor. In fact, they didn't speak English very well. Your parents are very poor. So you don't have to learn this because it's too difficult for you or it's of no use to you.

And so, of course, he escaped from that world very, very quickly. So we are up against a kind of institutional resistance to the kind of changes that would be needed to to make things better for the children in our poorest areas. One of the reasons I love your book is that it also cuts through some of the overarching guilt that even infects the American right. I've given this book to many people and they say, oh, wow, this maybe we should talk more about values and less about stuff.

Yes, the world view that quite honestly, as you say here, makes the underclass life at the bottom. Check it out, Dr. Dalrymple. Look, I want to tell you about Donors Trust. We're sponsored today by them, the principal tax friendly way to simplify your charitable giving. Fidelity Charitable recently released its latest giving report. According to its report, its account holders recommended in 2022 $11 billion to nonprofits in the mixed planned parented foundation of America. In fact, according to the report, Planned Parenthood was the sixth most popular nonprofit among Fidelity Charitable account holders. Last year, six out of nearly 200000 unique charities. Does that upset you?

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The book is Life at the Bottom. Give it to any person that is a bleeding heart liberal in your life. It is incredibly powerful. And Dr. Dalrymple, I want to just compliment you on your writing style.

You get straight to the heart of the manor. The prose is excellent, very, very gifted writer, very readable, entertaining and also real. Dr. Dalrymple, we we could go any direction here. Are there other books you'd like to speak about that you've published or anything that we didn't talk about in regards to Life at the Bottom?

We have five minutes remaining. We can proceed at your choosing. Well, I, I wrote a book against psychology, against the study of psychology when I was a psychiatrist and also a general doctor. But I wrote a book about against the psychologisation of life because I came to the opinion. And this this doesn't concern only the poor sector of society, it's the whole of society, that the ideas of psychology actually prevent people from examining their lives in an honest way, because they begin to see their lives through a lens of psychological theory rather than directly.

And this prevents them from thinking honestly about their own lives. And over the past century or a bit longer than that, we've had successively various theories which were said to explain ourselves to ourselves. For example, psychoanalysis. Well, I think psychoanalysis doesn't really explain anything, never did explain anything.

It was founded on actually no evidence, whatever, and a lot of lies. I'm sorry to say Freud was a very brilliant man, but he was not a truthful man. And we've had behaviourism. I don't know whether people remember behaviourism, the behaviourism of Skinner, for example. There was Watson and Skinner who tried to condition babies into all kinds of various states and so on, and adults thought that conditioning and response explain the whole of life. We've had Darwinistic explanations of behaviour. We're now, I think, exaggerating neuroscientific explanations of behaviour. There's neurochemical explanations of behaviour. So if you're on a bus, you may hear people talking about their neurochemistry, although they wouldn't know the chemical formula for salt.

Nevertheless, they know about the chemicals in their brain, and there have been too much of them or too little of them. And all of this, actually, if you talk in these terms, ends up that you're talking about yourself as if you're talking about an object. So you become an object to yourself rather than a subject. So I think on the whole, and this, of course, is a bit of an exaggeration, but Grosso Moda, the psychologisation of life has been a disaster or not a disaster. A disaster is perhaps a strong word, but it hasn't been an advantage for individuals and it hasn't been an advantage for society.

The name of the book? Admirable Evasions. It's a quotation from Shakespeare. And what I say is that it's an admirable evasion of poor master man to lay his goatish disposition at the charge of a star. In other words, to blame what he does, what he is, on forces that are beyond him.

And it's always very easy to do, and I'm sure we've all done it. We'll have to have you back on just to discuss this, because the worship of modern psychology is nearly ubiquitous. And the book Admirable Evasions, How Psychology Undermines Morality, that is a bold, bold take.

I love it, to be honest with you. And I just want to say, Dr Dalrymple, your emphasis on agency and it is inherently empowering for someone whose life might not be going the way you want it to go. Well, then make better choices. I think that is very uplifting, considering how some people think they're just a victim of their circumstances. Dr Dalrymple, any closing thoughts? Well, not really. I hope that they find this book Admirable Evasions.

I mean, it's good knock-about fun, apart from anything else. I hope it makes them laugh, because some of the ideas are laughable. Very good. Dr Dalrymple, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

Thanks so much for listening, and God bless. And have my words policed by HR, words like grandfather, peanut gallery, long time no see, no can do. When I grow up, I want to be obsessed with emotional safety and do workplace sensitivity training all day long. When I grow up, I want to climb the corporate ladder just by following the crowd. I want to be a conformist. I want to weaponize my pronouns. What are pronouns? It's time to grow up and get back to work. Introducing the number one Woke-free job board in America, RedBalloon.Work.