BRUSHFIRES OF FREEDOM

The British Underclass: The Effect and America Follows UK

We recently published an article, Lessons from Life at the Bottom, providing an overview of one of the best books we have read this year. It is Dr. Theodore Dalrymple's Life at the Bottom. This article expands the discussion by profiling the British underclass, which serves as a canary in the mine for America. We are following Britain's path exactly, and their underclass provides profound insight into what is happening here, what has been causing it, and where we are along the continuum of degradation.

British psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple devoted 14 years of his professional life to the diagnosis and treatment of members of the British underclass, whom he encountered in hospitals and prisons of urban England. Almost a lone voice, he is trying to tell us that the underclass of England today is unlike the underclass of any previous period in English history. Today's underclass is the offspring and the responsibility of dominant leftist British intellectuals. England has undergone a complete inversion of the nature of its lowest socioeconomic inhabitants; the middle and upper classes of England are now adopting the values and behaviors of their lessers as England enters into what may be its final stages of cultural degradation.

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LESSONS FROM LIFE AT THE BOTTOM

"In the past few decades, a peculiar and distinctive psychology has emerged in England. Gone are the civility, sturdy independence, and admirable stoicism that carried the English through the war years. It has been replaced by a constant whine of excuses, complaints, and special pleading. The collapse of the British character has been as swift and complete as the collapse of British power. (Page 5)

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"It is a curious characteristic of our age that cultural influences now seem to flow from the lower social classes upward, rather than from the upper classes downward…And just as Britain in the most culturally degraded country in Europe, so does its cultural influence grow." (Page 55)

These are tough statements coming from a Brit of extraordinary talent, and he backs them up. This extraordinary thinker and writer is a British psychiatrist, now working for the Manhattan Institute. He is Theodore Dalrymple.

Dr. Dalrymple worked for many years as a psychiatrist among the English underclass in prison hospitals, as well as in and prison psychiatric facilities in urban England. In addition, he has worked internationally among third world populations on several continents, giving him unique comparatives. During his years of work among the third world peoples and among the British underclass, he observed, conceptualized, and wrote about them.

The Christian Right's Suicide Mission

The antidote to Islam and to the cultural disintegration spawned by the ideas of modern liberalism is NOT Christianity. If the Republicans and those who make up the dogmatic section of the Right want political power again, they had better get the message.

Right wing radio talk hosts as well as presidential candidates and scads of those on the right in Congress and their influencers push untruths in the guise of truths. Foremost is the notion that America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles and that this is a Christian nation. Even a new book by a famous author on the right over endows Christianity with founding reason, science, and all that is good in the West. Were their da'wa correct, they would have no need to push so hard.

[Continued on The New Enlightenment]

HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP

I am not a member of or supporter of the food police. If people want to smoke, imbibe in alcohol, smoke dope, eat fast foods, etc., well, that is their concern, as long as it does not spill over adversely to me. I am more concerned right now about the unofficial agents of the nanny state trying to control what we consume than any harmfulness in the products, many of which are just alleged. There is one thing, however, I have come to despise.

That something is called "high fructose corn syrup."

[Continued on Nous American]