The Liminalist # 148 (Elder Wisdom 2): The Unintended Consequences of the Quest for Sub-Lunar Perfection (with Theodore Dalrymple)

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Two-part conversation with Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels), opening Dalrymple excerpt on equality of opportunity, conspiracy or coincidence of interest, totalitarianism without accoutrements of tyranny, how nothing succeeds like failure, perpetual motion misery machine. Conversation: discovering Dalrymple, degenerative culture and improved living conditions, the value of comfort, medical advances, milk and licorice cures, when the devil makes work for idle hands, humanity as Sisyphus, the assumption of progress, Scottish colorists and the idea of progressive art, solving the problem of death, a misapplied metaphor, the attempt to remove suffering, Job’s suffering, the religion of social progress, serial monomania, moral enthusiasms, Marxism & transcendence, determinism & voluntarism, history-as-God, being Fabianized, reforming relationships between men & women, no escaping misery, the unintended consequences of the quest for sub-lunar perfection, contradictory desires & original sin, religious heresy, Jasun growing up among champagne socialists, a secular religious mindset, the aesthetic dimension of religion, Catholic advertising, God’s truth as beauty, belief as a means to reconcile oneself to suffering, Theodore’s father & East London in the early 1900s, infant mortality rates, the question of intention, UN in Haiti and a cholera epidemic, the difference between conspiracy & cover-up, UNICEF’s poisoned wells in Bangladesh, distinguishing incompetence from malevolence, when good intentions turn into malevolence, hiding from original sin, wishing our friends’ ill, a disease of the poor, redefining poverty in the context of equality, impoverished multi-millionaires, the desire for a providential role.

Accompanying essay: High-Road to Hell: Theodore Dalrymple & Progressive Politics as Perpetual Misery Machine (1 of 2)

Songs: “I’m Going Insane 2,” “Away from Here,” “Hymne Venus,”  & “Ouverture” by Lee Maddeford.