Happy New Year to one and all! In the January issue of New English Review, our favorite doctor contemplates death, expanding his vast library, the gambling habits of his uncle (the best man he ever knew), and the value of playing the lottery.

But in the face of the inevitability of death, what hope is not illusory, or at least not of fleeting duration? And yet, who would, or can, live without hope? Better a false hope than a realistic despair. La Rochefoucauld said that we can stare for long neither at the sun nor death; T.S. Eliot said that humankind cannot stand very much reality. Illusion is essential to human existence.

In this week’s Takimag column, our playful doctor admits to taking delight in the Harvard University president’s plagiarism kerfuffle while scolding the modern bureaucratic state’s ever-expanding power.

The more cowed people are by regulations of their speech and conduct, the more microaggressions remain to be discovered and adjudicated. The task of securing diversity, equity, and inclusion is like the task of Sisyphus, with this difference: that in its very impossibility lies an assurance of a job, a pension, and a gratifying sense of doing the world’s work.

In the January issue of New Criterion, the dubious doctor takes aim at his two long-time bête noires: tattoos and modernist architecture.

Sometimes I think (or is it feel?) that we are living in a propaganda state, not like that of North Korea, of course, in which the source of a univocal doctrine is clear and unmistakable, but one in which we are constantly under bombardment by an opinion-forming class that wants to make us believe, or be enthusiastic about, something to which we were previously indifferent or even hostile. There is no identifiable single source of the propaganda, and yet there seems also to be coordination: for how else to explain its sudden ubiquity?

In his latest Takimag article, Theodore Dalrymple recounts lying in bed one morning, absorbed in an Agatha Christie mystery, as he battles a persistently obnoxious fly.

In fact, a publisher once asked me to write a book about Mrs. Christie’s philosophical, social, and psychological ideas. The prospect tempted me because I could lie abed all day reading her and imagine that I was working. I also had a grand theory to propound, namely that Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple were actually themselves serial killers.

The good doctor pens a generally favorable review of the interesting philosopher John Gray’s latest book back at City Journal.

It is his contention that liberal democracy contains within itself the seeds of its own decay—what Marxists would once have called its internal contradictions—because it is not moored to any substantive belief system, such as that which Christianity once supplied. Under what he calls hyperliberalism, the individual is left, and in fact is enjoined, to find his own identity and purpose, free of the barnacle-like accretions of intellectual, moral, and political history.

In his City Journal column, Dr. Dalrymple examines the rise in importance of psychology in tandem with the increase in mental problems related to the many ills of post-war modernity in the West.

Unknowingly, though, we were at the onset of what one might call the therapeutic turn. The dissatisfactions of life, rather than being understood as the inherent imperfectability of sublunary existence, came to be viewed as psychological, or even psychiatric, problems—with psychological or psychiatric solutions.

On behalf of the team here at The Skeptical Doctor, I would like to wish all of our readers around the world a peaceful, joyous, and blessed Christmas.

Over at Quadrant, the critical doctor sets his sights on Britain’s corrupt and self-serving bureaucratic class and the ongoing moral and spiritual corruption of the British people.

In the last analysis, it is also financial, insofar as it is the means by which an incompetent and greedy nomenklatura class has been created, with a much larger class of apparatchiks as hangers-on. The worst of it is that the corruption wrought by the nomenklatura and its associated apparatchiks is entirely legalised: indeed, it is often legally required.

In this week’s Takimag column, the skeptical doctor excoriates the latest overpaid, fashionably ‘woke’ CEO spouting her racist ‘diversity’ drivel, this time in Britain.

One might naively have supposed, or hoped, that companies nominally answerable to their shareholders chose senior staff according to their ability to do their job, not according to some ideologically preconceived demographic pattern, supposedly reflecting the demographic pattern of the population as a whole.

In the Christmas issue of The Lamp, Theodore Dalrymple reviews a highly recommended book on the Marshal Pétain and his Vichy regime, written by British history professor Julian Jackson.

Thank you to our reader from Portugal, António S., for bringing this to my attention. I will be posting the two other previously published Dalrymple essays at The Lamp in due course.

I cannot praise this book highly enough. It reads like a drama, and the writer is a model of impartiality. He does not simplify the labyrinthine complexities of history, only a few of which I have touched upon, to assume an easy moral superiority.