81
" 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
87
" 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
88
" The extreme intellectual elegance of the proposal to legalize the distribution and consumption of drugs, touted as the solution to so many problems at once (AIDS, crime, overcrowding in the prisons, and even the attractiveness of drugs to foolish young people) should give rise to skepticism. Social problems are not usually like that. Analogies with the Prohibition era, often drawn by those who would legalize drugs, are false and inexact: it is one thing to attempt to ban a substance that has been in customary use for centuries by at least nine-tenths of the adult population, and quite another to retain a ban on substances that are still not in customary use, in an attempt to ensure that they never do become customary. Surely we have already slid down enough slippery slopes in the last thirty years without looking for more such slopes to slide down. "
― Theodore Dalrymple , Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses