This week’s Dalrymple Takimag column shows our favorite doctor taking stock of his (and our) good fortune despite this dreadful past year.

Thanks to my pessimism, I am generally quite cheerful (it is optimists who, because of their illusions, are most prey to misery). I do not expect that all the difficulties of life will suddenly be resolved, and am not even sure that, if they were, life would not become intolerable. Man, after all, is a problem-creating animal, possibly to keep his natural boredom at bay.

The good doctor’s first article criticizing the newly installed Harris administration in the White House appears in The Epoch Times. I am fairly certain that the next four years will offer many such savory opportunities for Dr. Dalrymple.

To ensure equality of outcome of groups (measured, say, by household income) would require endless and very intrusive government interference with the lives of all citizens; it would also be incompatible with the social and cultural diversity that the very same sentence goes on to claim to be one of the America’s greatest strengths.

Over at Law & Liberty, our favorite doctor tackles some of the COVID pandemic conspiracy theories and the role of governments during the crisis.

The wilder conspiracy theorists believe it was all planned from the outset, even that governments created the offending virus expressly for their nefarious purposes; the more moderate conspiracy theorists believe that governments have merely been opportunist. But the end result is the same: an inexorable slide into totalitarianism, all in the name of public health.

The skeptical doctor starts off this week’s Takimag column with reference to an old cricket match before weaving his way through the topics of volunteerism, professional managerialism, and bureaucratic incompetence.

Even the very rich now feel a psychological or social pressure to do something for money, even without any economic imperative. I leave it to others to decide whether the disappearance of a leisure class is a good or a bad thing, though viscerally I feel that, overall, it is bad, inasmuch as a leisure class is able in theory to devote itself to the higher activities of a civilization. When the rich (of whom there are more than ever) involve themselves nowadays in conspicuous consumption, it is usually in bad taste. Good taste requires discipline and knowledge, which few are either able or prepared to exercise or acquire.

Theodore Dalrymple returns with a vengeance after a few days off with his The Epoch Times column condemning the entire pointless, corrupt Olympic enterprise. Well said, Doctor.

Naturally, events like the Olympic Games are also a gift to the tinsel-brained political class of western democracies. There remains, of course, the even more disturbing question: why does anyone interest himself in the Olympic Games? Mr. Perelman tells us that they are, in effect, the meaning of a life that is in desperate search of a meaning.

Our dubious doctor reviews an interesting book dealing with the awful, brutalist architectural style in the January edition of New English Review.

Once they have fulfilled their particular purpose, which has now ceased, they can simply be demolished and replaced by others for other purposes, the buildings themselves never having evoked any affection because they never had any virtue in the first place, were identical to untold numbers of others and were more likely to have been hated than loved. For modern Man, the present and the immediate future, at most, is all that there is, so it is hardly surprising that his architecture so often has the look of the temporary about it.

In this week’s Takimag column, the good doctor gets nostalgic thinking about following football in the England of his youth. Those were the days, my friend…

The tickets were cheap and the crowds were large, much more proletarian than they are today, and on the whole better behaved, almost even genteel. Expletives were far fewer, and when the referee made a decision against the home team, the crowd would exclaim, “Referee!” When you look at pictures of the crowds of those days, you see people much more civilized than they are today, though the wealth of crowds has increased enormously.

Which vices of well-known persons are acceptable and which are strictly forbidden in our relativistic, post-modern age? Dr. Dalrymple explores this question in his latest The Epoch Times column.

And this omission in the book suggests to me that the penny still has not fully dropped in the minds even of clever and otherwise decent intellectuals (Sapiro is an eminent academic, a specialist in the relation between literature and the political engagements of authors) that communism was evil root and branch, intrinsically as it were, from the very first, and not merely an ideal that went a little haywire in its application.

Our favorite doctor considers some of the possible economic and social consequences of the post-COVID world in his Quadrant column.

In summary we may say that unfunded government and personal expenditure, which creates the illusion of wealth and social security, necessitates low interest rates, low interest rates favour asset inflation, asset inflation favours the already possessing classes, which in turn leads to social rigidity and frustration down below in the lower reaches of society. Social classes rigidify into castes, and many people become fatalistic without contentment. But fatalism without contentment can undergo a sudden change, the emotional equivalent of a gestalt-switch, and become insensate rage.