Dalrymple in the media lately

Dalrymple has been appearing more in the media lately to promote his new book Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality. He sat down with the Chicago Tribune for this interview, which outlines the main arguments of the book:

Q: You lead with Shakespeare’s King Lear saying mental illness is “the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune…we (blame) the sun, the moon and the stars.”

A: Four hundred years later, it’s still true, but we blame psychology instead of astrology. We call it progress. Literature is far more illuminating into the human condition than psychology could ever hope to be.

And in this interview with Ginni Thomas for the Daily Caller, he talks about the dishonesty inherent in modern political correctness, which encourages people to say what they know isn’t true:

The question is: why has our society become so weak-willed in many respects? It accepts all kinds of obvious untruths and acts as if they were true, and that is a much worse threat than anything from outside. So that for example, just the way we think about social problems is often completely wrong. We treat people as if they were objects rather than subjects, as if they’re not reacting to their own circumstances, in fact. And we give them bad incentives and so on and so forth. So I think the intellectual dishonesty of the West is the greatest threat to our societies. We can’t say what we really think. We can only say what we don’t think (many of us), and that is really the greatest threat. And the only solution to that is for people to speak up and to write, which is what I’ve done — not with any great effect, I must say. But that’s all I can do anyway.

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