Our reactionary doctor comes across a “till hostess” at a French supermarket and ponders the critical role played by cashiers during the height of the pandemic, the concept of creative destruction, and the kind of dietary advice he would be dishing out if he had to man a cash register.

Deliberate and programmed changes in terminology, and in the designations of workers, are interesting in themselves and seem to occur with ever-increasing frequency. One has to keep up with them, of course, for fear of being regarded as a reactionary. What was not merely acceptable but compulsory yesterday becomes taboo today, and use of a taboo word establishes one as being not merely behind the times, but a bad person.

Over at Law & Liberty, the skeptical doctor finds some reason for optimism when reviewing the candidates for the leadership of the British Conservative Party.

The second lesson of the ascent of ethnic minorities within the Conservative Party is that it has been almost noiseless. There has been comparatively little ideological song and dance about it, and it has therefore assumed a more spontaneous character than such diversity has done with its opponents (where it is in any case much less pronounced).

In the August edition of New English Review, our favorite doctor professes his admiration for toads and ponders the mystery of human life.

Nowadays when I find a toad, I am inclined to pick it up and place it on an outside table where I can contemplate it more closely. The toad, it seems to me, always has a melancholy rather than a terrified air, like someone who expects nothing good to come of this life. There is also something a bit self-important about him, like a banker lamenting the economic state of the world over a digestif and cigar after a copious dinner of the kind that will eventually kill him. The toad is a sad creature, perhaps aware that no one really likes it.

In his weekly Takimag column, the good doctor recounts an impromptu visit by two friendly dogs, while also explaining why most of us are better off not following current events too closely.

As usual, the solution is a happy medium, between indifference to public affairs and overconcern with them. You should never reach the stage at which, because you are so worried about public affairs, you cannot derive immediate pleasure from (say) two charming dogs who come uninvited to tea, but neither should you suppose that the availability of such pleasures (and there are many) means that you can safely disregard public affairs and leave them entirely to others to worry about.

Over at City Journal, Dr. Dalrymple questions the efficacy of antidepressants after reading a recent article that examined the scientific evidence supporting the serotonin hypothesis of depression.

All unhappiness became depression: indeed, the words unhappy and unhappiness almost disappeared from Western man’s lexicon. The bodily norm was bliss and deviation from it was illness. The solution was medication.

Theodore Dalrymple takes on the modern obsession with transparency in politics over at The Epoch Times.

Its corollary is that we are ruled by a pack of people who are only seekers after office, who don’t believe what they say, and use words only to advance their own careers. Any principle that they claim to espouse is but a cynical smokescreen or an instrument for their own petty ambition: Everything for them is but a means to the end, the end being their political ascent for its own sake. Presentation is all, substance nothing.

In this week’s Takimag column, the dubious doctor comes to learn what an influencer is after watching a thought-provoking film in Paris.

Moreover, the film tackles what is surely an important social, or antisocial, development, namely the replacement of human face-to-face relations by relations through electronic means. How serious a problem this really will prove can be known only in the future; no doubt people were once extremely concerned by the spread of the ability to read print, and worried that it might interfere with ordinary social relations.

Dr. Dalrymple censures the popular notions of mental health and Freudian psychoanalysis in his The Epoch Times piece.

When I read this, I thought of the famous (and brilliant) remark of Sigmund Freud’s Viennese contemporary, the satirist Karl Kraus: psychoanalysis, he said, is itself the disease it claims to cure.

Back at Law & Liberty, the skeptical doctor reviews the tendencies and contradictions of the various nationalist movements in Spain, Wales, Belgium, and Scotland.

The motive force for much of this nationalism is resentment, which is one of the few emotions that can become genuinely chronic and therefore an inexhaustible and invaluable source for achieving political power. This is not to say that there can be no justification for resentment.