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