Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 298.
This talk is from the recently-concluded 19th annual PFS 2025 Annual Meeting (Sep. 18–23, 2025, Bodrum, Turkey).
Anthony Daniels (Dalrymple) (England): The Worldly Adventures of a Skeptical Doctor. Shownotes and transcript below.
Other talks appear on the Property and Freedom Podcast. Other videos may also be found at the PFS 2025 Youtube Playlist.
Grok shownotes
Theodore Dalrymple – Snapshots of a Life (20th Anniversary Conference Talk)
In this reflective lecture, Theodore Dalrymple (pen name of psychiatrist Anthony Daniels) shares personal anecdotes instead of a formal intellectual biography, emphasizing how formative experiences shaped his worldview.
Key Themes & Stories:
- Childhood & Resilience: A close friend paralyzed by polio thrived despite disability, thanks to family focus on capability—not victimhood—prompting Dalrymple’s lifelong rejection of the “cult of the victim.”
- Early Encounters with Cruelty & Cowardice: At age 11, witnessing youths mock a blind street musician revealed both human malice and his own failure to intervene due to fear.
- Death of a Friend & Bureaucratic Inertia: A brilliant 15-year-old classmate died from an asthma attack delayed by ambulance red tape; his mother’s bitter wish (“Why not the other one?”) exposed the complexity of grief and the peril of overreach in seeking “cosmic justice.”
- Rhodesia (Zimbabwe): Working as a young doctor, he observed efficiency born of necessity under sanctions, stark income disparities due to tribal obligations, and the predictable collapse into corruption post-independence.
- Tanzania: Julius Nyerere’s admired socialist experiment in collectivized agriculture failed despite massive Scandinavian/Dutch aid, confirming Peter Bauer’s quip: foreign aid transfers from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor ones.
- Trans-African Journey (1986): Traveling overland from Zanzibar to Timbuktu, he met only kindness—contrasting spontaneous vs. indoctrinated hostility—and viewed bribery as informal taxation in unpaid bureaucracies.
- Liberia (Monrovia): Amid civil war, he witnessed deliberate, hate-fueled destruction of civilization (e.g., sawn-off hospital trolleys, a defiled Steinway piano), symbolizing fragility journalists dismissed as trivial.
- Nauru: Sudden phosphate wealth turned a subsistence island into the world’s richest per capita—then into obesity, diabetes, and collapse, proving unearned prosperity is no blessing.
- Guatemala & Peru: Communist guerrillas were led not by peasants but by frustrated, over-educated elites denied expected status—echoed in Sendero Luminoso’s origins at a revived provincial university.
- North Korea: A clandestine whisper from a language student—“Reading Dickens and Shakespeare is the only joy of my life”—revealed literature’s power to preserve individual voice under totalitarianism.
- British Prisons & Slums: Decades as a prison psychiatrist exposed a deeper poverty: not economic, but of soul, intellect, and meaning—where false ideas about addiction became institutional orthodoxy via sentimentality and self-interest.
Closing Reflection:
Citing Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas (“The Conclusion in Which Nothing Is Concluded”), Dalrymple offers no life prescriptions—only that reading and lived experience must dialectically inform each other to avoid pedantry or shallowness.
A candid, contrarian meditation on human nature, civilization’s fragility, and the unintended consequences of ideology.
Grok transcript
Opening Thanks and Personal Authority
0:00
[Applause]
Well, ladies and gentlemen, first as ever I should like to thank Hans and Gulchin for their very gracious hospitality, and second I should like to congratulate them on the 20th anniversary of this conference. I have never organized anything in my life and so I admire organizers, especially people who organize something that is as pleasant as this conference.
But I have a third reason to thank Hans this year, because I think I have been to maybe 10 or 12 of these conferences—I do not remember how many—because he has at last asked me to speak on a subject on which I am a world authority, namely myself.
Limits of Truth in Autobiography
0:58
This does not mean of course that I will tell you the whole truth about myself for two reasons. First, no one knows everything about himself, and secondly everyone has something to hide.
But as a Victorian English novelist, Anthony Trollope, said in the introduction to his autobiography, I shall not tell the whole truth, but everything that I say shall be true.
Snapshots of Influential Events
1:28
I thought that instead of presenting what might rather grandiosely be called my intellectual development—assuming that there has been any—I would give you a few snapshots of events and processes that have been important to me. The effect of some of these events takes years to develop because the mind can be like a frying pan or it can be like a slow cooker or anything in between.
Childhood Friend with Polio and Rejection of Victimhood
1:57
When I was about six years old, my closest friend, from whom I was inseparable, was one of the last people in the country to suffer from polio. He was left paraplegic.
His mother was a Christian Scientist, and Christian Scientists have a rather peculiar view of illness, as if it were an illusion. My parents, who had been very worried that I might contract polio myself, were in my recollection very, very good to my friend and took a matter-of-fact view of his problem, encouraging him to do everything that he could do and encouraging us to encourage him.
His mother, who alas died very early of cancer—I am not sure whether her religious belief and rejection of medicine shortened her life; I cannot say that—and my parents, both she and my parents emphasized what my friend could do rather than what he could not do. I think that this at least in part accounted for the fact that he had a very distinguished career, in fact including travel in Africa, which at the time was not easy even for the able-bodied.
The memory of my friendship with him had, I think, a subliminal effect on my rejection of the modern cult of the victim and of victimhood. To reduce people to their victimization, to their difficulties, is to do them a great disservice and is far from flattering to them.
Blind Accordionist and Insight into Cruelty
3:47
When I was 11, I thought in common with most boys that sport, and in particular football and cricket, were important. There was what I thought was a very important cup match in which the team I favored was playing, and unusually for that time admission was by advanced ticket purchase only, and I joined a very long queue to buy the ticket.
Along the queue walked an old blind man playing an accordion and singing. The song he sang I remember was “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.”
As he passed a group of young toughs ahead of me, they who had a portable radio with them turned up the volume of that radio and drowned out that man’s voice, and he was extremely confused by this. He was an old man and of course he could not see what they were doing, and I shall never forget the look of bewilderment on his face and the laughter of the toughs as they mocked him. Even at the age of 11 I was appalled by this.
This was a very small incident, of course, of no historical importance, but it gave me a sudden insight into the potential for gratuitous cruelty that lurks, if not in every human heart, at least in many human hearts. I also learned from this experience the limits of my own courage. I did not intervene in any way. Of course, such intervention would probably have been useless in any case, but that was not the reason for my failure to intervene. It was fear and cowardice.
Death of a Scholarly Friend
5:53
When I was about 15, I went to the house of a friend of mine who was 16, whom I had not seen for two weeks. He was a very clever boy destined for a life of scholarship to which I think he would have made a very valuable contribution, and he was also a very nice and a very good boy. In fact, he was a much nicer boy than was I.
He suffered terribly from both asthma and eczema, which gave him a pigeon chest and a skin whose scaling I can still see in my mind’s eye. Bear in mind this is more than 60 years ago.
His mother answered the door and I asked to see him. She told me that he had died and then described the manner of his death. He had had a very severe attack of asthma and told his mother to call an ambulance. As she did so, he wheezed that he was dying.
The ambulance controller insisted on taking details in a highly bureaucratic manner and in contacting his own doctor and so forth. It took several minutes just this bureaucratic procedure. The ambulance arrived a minute after he died.
It is possible that the bronchodilator that he used at that time, which again I can still see in my mind’s eye as he clutched it like a lifeline, which was called isoprenaline, played a part in his death. That was not appreciated at the time that it was slightly dangerous.
But what his mother then said startled me. I think she was a single mother, which was unusual at the time. Certainly there had never been any talk of a father. He had an older brother who I think was actually a half-brother. In those days one did not inquire into such things. We were much more sophisticated. We understood the virtues of silence. He was a handsome and charming youth who was probably destined for finance or prison or possibly both.
The mother said with unmistakable bitterness, “Why could it not have been the other one?” It was as if she believed that one of her two boys was destined to die. I fled from the house and never returned, though I feel that I perhaps should have done.
Lessons from the Death: Complexity, Bureaucracy, and Unfairness
8:46
This death, now more than 60 years ago, affected me in more than one way and affects me still when I think about it. First, in the depth of her grief and bitterness, the mother revealed to me the unstraightforwardness and the complexity of the human heart and the hiddenness of much that it contains that can under certain circumstances be suddenly revealed.
Her account of the death gave me a permanent hatred and contempt for unnecessary bureaucracy. Of course, the life of my friend might not have been saved had the ambulance come a few minutes earlier, but that is not the point, which is that it might have been saved.
I learned from his death also that human existence does not hand out its rewards like medals to deserving soldiers. If anything, this boy, my friend, was more deserving than I, and yet he was deprived of life undeservedly and far too early.
A little reflection on the unfairness of it all demonstrated to me that unfairness was ineradicable from human existence. By further reflection that attempts to eradicate it might lead to worse unfairness and indeed brutal injustice, and the attempt to produce what Thomas Sowell calls cosmic justice ends in disaster.
I came to the conclusion that it always required judgment to distinguish the ineradicable from that which can be eradicated much less rationally. I still feel a slight guilt that I survived him when I did nothing to deserve having survived him.
Medical Work in Rhodesia
10:49
When I qualified as a doctor, I went for six months to what was then called Rhodesia. It had been Southern Rhodesia, then Rhodesia, and it is now called Zimbabwe. Apart from the urge to travel, I wanted to see what was then clearly the end of European colonialism in Africa.
To my surprise, I found the country was very well organized, though of course it was not in a completely just way. An ethnic minority of three to 4% of the population had inherited half the land and the better half of the land at that as a result of colonial expropriation. However, as a result of this, the country was the breadbasket of the region.
The regime which was fighting for its life against the hostility of the whole world was obliged to be efficient. Sanctions against it called forth new industries and provoked much ingenuity in getting around them. A lesson which I think no one has subsequently learned.
The hospital in which I worked was the best administered that I have ever worked in, perhaps because there were no people to spare for unnecessary positions.
Salary Disparities and Social Obligations in Rhodesia
12:12
There was an interesting phenomenon which puzzled me for a time. Unlike in South Africa, in Rhodesia, young black doctors—who were not very many but they existed—were paid exactly the same as young white ones such as I.
Yet, while I on my salary lived as a prince, perhaps in a way that was more agreeable to me than any way of life I have had since, the young black doctors lived in near squalor, not quite squalor, but near squalor. The question was why they received the same money.
The answer really was obvious. While I had only myself to please with my salary, the young black doctors had social obligations to impoverished extended families, also to villages and so forth. These obligations were so strong that they could not escape them. This was far from dishonorable. On the contrary, it was highly moral.
The problem came when using these principles, there was a modern state to administer. Naturally enough, everyone aspired to European levels of ease, comfort, and security. The colonialist was both disliked and admired. The corrupt chaos that resulted was, in my view, all too predictable, though not widely predicted. There is much, a lot more I could say on this subject but I do not have the time.
Tanzania: Failed Collectivization and Foreign Aid
14:03
I will mention three much later African experiences. The first was in Tanzania where an idealistic president called Julius Nyerere was much admired in the West, particularly by Scandinavians and the Dutch, because he talked fluent morality, and he attempted a socialization of agriculture.
That was to say agriculture was 90% of the economy of that country by collectivization and foreign aid—as I have mentioned specifically from Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands which have since recognized their mistake—paid for this experiment and made it possible, though the aid also prevented the mass starvation that would have resulted from the experiment if it had been tried without that aid.
A one-party system was instituted and you could more or less tell a party member by his girth. Everyone was thin but the party member had put on weight.
The fact that Tanzania received more foreign aid per capita than any other African country and yet produced ever less per capita suggested to me that the famous saying attributed to Peter Bauer, the development economist, that foreign aid is the means by which poor people in rich countries give money to rich people in poor countries was substantially correct.
Crossing Africa: Kindness, Corruption, and Informal Taxation
15:58
The second African experience to which I will allude is my crossing of Africa by public transport such as it was in 1986, and I went from Zanzibar to Timbuktu, and I chose those two destinations because I wanted to write a book and it sounded, I thought, Zanzibar to Timbuktu sounds quite good.
I should record that at no time as I saw Africa from the bottom up did I feel any hostility towards me as an alien, not even in those places which had experienced civil war or were about to do so. On the contrary, I met only kindness, politeness and generosity.
This suggested to me that there are two types of hostility. The rarer which is spontaneous and the second which unfortunately has become more common is programmed and indoctrinated.
On the border between Niger and Mali I saw the worst example of corruption in my entire journey. You may be interested to know that in 1986 when I was in Niger the population was 6 million and today it is 24 million.
For three days and nights, I slept by the side of the road, which was actually extremely pleasant, but I slept by the side of the road because the other passengers had been imprisoned successively by the customs officials, the police and the army as they extracted bribes from the passengers. I was excluded from this treatment eventually.
Although it was quite pleasant sleeping in the open air, I got exasperated and I shouted “Bribes, bribes, bribes.” A Malian soldier took me aside and said very kindly, “But what you have to remember, Monsieur, is that we have not been paid for three months.”
I have come to see bribery in such circumstances as this as an informal form of taxation. Once at Lagos airport landing there for the first time, the customs officer said to me, “Have you brought any presents?” “No,” I replied. I was very naive even though I had been across Africa. “No,” I replied, “I do not know anyone in Nigeria.” “For me,” he said.
I gave him a small amount of money and we had a good laugh. But had I expressed moral outrage saying this is corrupt and so forth, I probably would still have been in Lagos airport today.
Monrovia During Civil War: Destruction of Civilization
19:07
The third African experience to which I will allude is a brief stay in Monrovia, which is the capital of Liberia, during a lull in the city’s civil war there that killed a quarter of a million people—a tenth or a twelfth of the population—and displaced a much higher percentage of the population.
Monrovia was very difficult to get to. It was an enclave surrounded completely by rebels. I went on a boat from the Ivory Coast by a buccaneering Welsh captain called Monty Jones.
On board was an American ex-Marine known only as Rambo who kept watch for pirates from the deck and seemed to be disappointed that none appeared for him to blow out of the water. There was also a French mercenary soldier who found France unbearably bourgeois and boring and had come to train a militia in Liberia.
Monrovia had been destroyed with a thoroughness that beggared description. It was not just the destruction of war. It was not that bombs had fallen on buildings or shells had fallen on buildings. It was much, much worse than that.
It was that almost every vestige of civilization or of Western civilization at any rate had been destroyed with a minuteness that bespoke real hatred of it. For example, at the university hospital which was very large—it was called the John F. Kennedy Hospital where open-heart surgery had been performed not long before and was now utterly deserted—was a complete shell.
Every last piece of equipment had not so much been destroyed as dismantled beyond hope of repair. So that for example the wheels had been sawn off every trolley at the cost of considerable labor. This was not the work of just a bomb or a shell. People had gone through destroying every last piece of equipment.
In the Centennial Hall where presidents were inaugurated and other national ceremonies performed, a Steinway piano, probably the only Steinway piano in the country, had had its legs sawn off, its body lying on the ground, and piles of human excrement were placed neatly rounded in a kind of necklace. It was not so much gang rape as gang defecation.
I showed this to two young British journalists who had braved difficulties like I suppose I had really to come to the city, and they saw absolutely nothing significant in the fate of the piano and found it odd that I did find it significant. Why worry about such a thing in the middle of a civil war?
Civilization is fragile and not valued by many, including by intellectuals and including by people who benefit from civilization. People nowadays find many things more important than the preservation of civilization.
Nauru: Sudden Wealth Without Effort
22:51
Now referred to another couple of experiences, one from the central Pacific and one from Central America. The little island of Nauru in the central Pacific was once the richest place on earth per capita. It was about 10 miles round and its population was 4,000.
It was given independence in 1968 when it gained control of the valuable phosphate rock that was mined until then by the British Phosphate Commission that amalgamated British, Australian and New Zealand interests. Suddenly this people who had lived essentially at subsistence level were very rich.
Almost everything became free to them. There was nothing for them to do except import. They were not very sophisticated importers. They imported huge quantities of rice, tinned meat, Fanta which they drank 24 cans at a time, and chatter.
They became enormously fat consuming on average more than twice as much in calories as a Canadian lumberjack working in a freezing forest. No doubt as a result partly of genetic predisposition, half of them came to suffer from type 2 diabetes and their life expectancy was not more than the late 40s.
There are lessons to be drawn from this. An Australian professor, Paul Zimmet, came to study the medical situation. At the time, I thought that this was a typical example of absurd academic concern with arcana. But in fact, what he was studying was an important aspect of the future of the whole world.
Furthermore, this experience—and I went several times to this island—it convinced me that wealth without any effort to produce it was not an unmixed blessing.
Guatemala: Educated Discontent and Revolution
25:15
I stayed a few months in Guatemala during the era of the Central American peninsula civil war. There was a civil war in El Salvador at the time as well. All the literature on the subject at the time—and there was a great deal of it; people have lost interest in Central America since—was favorable to the guerrillas who were of course communist.
The so-called revolutions were treated by academics as if they were spontaneous uprisings of impoverished, oppressed and downtrodden peasantry—and the peasantry was indeed often impoverished, oppressed and downtrodden. But it was obvious to me that such people were incapable of more than jacquerie and that revolution required a discontented educated and intellectual class. This was precisely what I found.
The ancient University of San Carlos in Guatemala was in effect an armed revolutionary camp at that time. Oddly enough, the traditional extraterritoriality of the university by which it is meant that the agents of the state were not allowed to enter it—and it was known as autonomy—was respected but it was tempered by abduction and extrajudicial execution once the students left the university.
Rapid expansion of the class of educated people led to bitter disappointment that the society and economy was not able automatically to offer them elite status that had once been the automatic reward of attendance at the university. No doubt this has lessons for us all, not just for Latin Americans.
I should add that the worst of all the Latin American guerrilla movements, the Sendero Luminoso of Peru, began when the government of Alan García decided to resuscitate the University of Ayacucho in Ayacucho, which was a poor area of Peru, poor even by Peruvian standards. He attempted to revive it. It had become defunct at the end I think at the end of the 17th century.
The professor of philosophy appointed there, Abimael Guzmán who wrote a thesis on Kant, had founded a political movement that I am convinced from what I saw in Ayacucho—and it seemed at the time that the Sendero Luminoso might actually overthrow the Peruvian government—that I became convinced that Peru if that happened would have become a Cambodia on a much larger scale.
North Korea: Literature as Sole Joy
28:31
I will just also briefly mention perhaps the most extraordinary conversation—if you call it conversation, perhaps communication—I have ever had in my life, and this was in North Korea. I went to North Korea as a member of the British delegation to the International Festival of Youth and Students although by that time I was neither a youth nor a student. But they wanted—even communists want a doctor. So, I went to North Korea.
The only conversation or the only insight I had from something that a North Korean said was when I left the Great People’s Study House, which was a kind of cross between a pagoda and a fascist mausoleum, into an enormous urban area outside which reminded me of what de Custine said about St. Petersburg. De Custine who wrote a famous book on Russia in 1839. He said in Petersburg a crowd would be a revolution. Which is exactly right.
Anyway, as I was walking across this enormous urban space which was practically empty, a North Korean went by me and said surreptitiously, “Do you speak English?” So I said, “Yes.” And he said, “I am a student at the Foreign Languages Institute. Reading Dickens and Shakespeare is the greatest, the only joy of my life.”
I understood exactly, I think I understood exactly what he meant because in Dickens and Shakespeare and of course in other literature, even the poorest person speaks with his own voice. But in North Korea, that was completely impossible. So this was the only time he ever heard or read speech that actually came from the person, from inside the person who was speaking.
I do not think you would find many students of English literature in Anglophone countries who would say their greatest joy was reading Dickens and Shakespeare. Recently I think there was an article that I read about English students in Harvard who found even a single page of Dickens too difficult for them. So I think that tells you something about our decadence.
British Prisons and Slums: Poverty of the Soul
31:16
Well, enough of foreign parts. They are foreign that is to me. One must always remember of course that exotic countries are not exotic to those who live in them.
Somehow I managed while doing all this traveling to pursue a medical career though not a very distinguished one despite my peregrinations. I was for many years a doctor and psychiatrist in a large British prison and psychiatrist in the general hospital next door and what I saw and learned there actually shocked me for avoidable degradation.
There is nothing to beat a British slum where the poverty is not so much economic—though of course the people are relatively poor by comparison with other people in the society—but a poverty of culture, of intellect and in a wider sense of spirit.
The reasons for this are no doubt complex or as we say when we are not sure of the causes of something multifactorial. But at any rate, I came to the conclusion that ideas, the ideas that people had, their conception of the world as it was and as it ought to be, is very important and that any kind of explanation of their behavior that did not include the nature and content of people’s ideas was deeply flawed and inadequate.
In other words, you cannot treat people or you cannot explain people without the concept of meaning in their lives. I was much struck by the way in which obviously false conceptions of the problem of addiction existed particularly addiction to heroin and how an obviously false idea—and it was not difficult to establish that it was a false idea—became orthodoxy amongst decent, intelligent and well-educated people and indeed became, if I might say so, an institutional orthodoxy.
I came to the conclusion that a rather toxic combination of sentimentality and self-interest accounted for this. However, if I remember rightly, I devoted a whole talk to this subject some years ago. I cannot tell you how many. So I shall not repeat myself.
Conclusion: No Firm Conclusions
34:10
You might say, you might ask what does all this amount to, all this experience. One lesson I have drawn is that I think that reading and experience should be in dialectical relationship as it were that the one without the other leads either to pedantry or shallowness.
But I have nothing to say to you about how life should be lived, how you should live your life. I have no firm conclusions and I refer to the last chapter of Dr. Johnson’s great philosophical fable Rasselas which was published in the same year as Voltaire’s Candide which is Candide is much less profound and therefore more widely read.
The title of the last chapter of Rasselas is “Conclusion in which nothing is concluded” and that is my conclusion. Thank you.
[Applause]
35:21
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