Dalrymple has often said that satire becomes prophecy these days, and this seems to have come to pass at least once in his case…
Not long after I suggested satirically that money might be the cure for the terrible disease of burglary, experiments were performed to bribe drug addicts into remaining abstinent. I had suggested that money was a genuine pharmacological treatment of burglary because there would be a dose-response relationship (the larger the dose of money given to burglars, the greater and longer-lasting their law-abidingness) and that, as with most drugs, there would be treatment failures. Some burglars are more interested in the excitement of burglary than in its material rewards; money would have little or no effect on them.
Now, this approach has been tried on schizophrenics:
….18 of 75 patients changed their behaviour considerably as a consequence of the bribes but 57 did not. This probably means that the dose of money will have to be upped if better results are wanted. I suppose this should surprise no one. The mad are different from us, but not that different.
Eeek! “… law-abidingness.” That kind of word-inventiveness, even if done with a certain tongue-in-cheekness, offends my sense of good-Englishness.
Still, cheaper than a lobotomy, eh?
Mr Dalrymple has written a few articles over on Taki website.
In this article he mentions that he’s just finished his latest book.
http://takimag.com/article/i_have_seen_the_future_and_it_is_idiocy_theodore_dalrymple#axzz2l1ztbcMO