Cretin of the Week: John Gray

It is ironic that the subjects I detested most at school – Latin, Mathematics and Modern Languages – are those I’d now find most useful had I mastered them. Of the three, it was for Latin that I reserved the most highly refined species of loathing, distilled drop-by-drop from the deep fractionating column of my hatred. I literally burned my books the day I was permitted, aged 14, to drop it.

It’s all PO’s fault. PO was my first Latin teacher. Were he still alive I should think he’d be about 130 but I suspect the world contains one fewer tyrants than it did in his too-long lifetime. PO was driven into a puericidal rage by anyone incapable of declining Latin verbs to order. Since I tended to lose my way after amo, amas… I was on the receiving end of at least half of each lesson’s quota of sarcasm.

‘You little cretin!’ was PO’s favourite insult and he invested the two syllables of the final word in that sentence with more venom than a tobacco-chewing cobra could spit. Why a word that caused me so much childhood trauma has become my own insult of choice is mysterious but its deployment is up there with orgasm and the first glass of red wine of an evening in my personal hierarchy of stress-busting devices. Since sex and booze are off the menu for now, I make no apology for abusing the C-word on Alphatuosity, a blog that owes its existence to a superabundance of CRETINS and a dearth of cretin-hunters.

There, I feel better already.

John Gray: Cretin of the Week

Many religionists hold their beliefs sacred. That is to say, criticism of their religious beliefs is felt not intellectually but viscerally. What is more, a propensity to sacralize objects, totems and beliefs is a human universal and, probably an adaptation. This is why blasphemy, which ought to be a concept as antiquated as alchemy, was illegal in England and Wales until 2008 and remains a crime in Scotland. And also why referring to Muslims as goat-fuckers got Theo van Gogh murdered (by a goat-fucker).

John Gray doesn't understand this and so he thinks that beliefs don’t matter much to theists and that, in attacking the foundations of those beliefs, atheists are not just fighting on the wrong front, they are fighting in the wrong war (see here). Had he said that the war cannot be won, I’d have reluctantly agreed with him (because it is futile to try to reason someone out of a belief he was not reasoned into). But Gray's current preoccupation is with showing that atheism (which he seems to equate with humanism) is just another religion, science just another myth and myth just another prop, holding open the echoing spaces in our animal minds. His modus operandi involves stringing together a series of half-truths, apparently in the hope that enough of them will make a whole truth. But Gray's series departs further from sense with every term he adds.

'We tend to assume that religion is a question of what we believe or don't believe. It's an assumption with a long history in western philosophy...'

'When they attack religion [atheists] are assuming that religion is what this Western tradition says it is - a body of beliefs that needs to be given a rational justification.

'In most religions...belief has never been particularly important. Practice - ritual, meditation, a way of life - is what counts.'

'Myths [are] stories that tell us something about ourselves that can't be captured in scientific theories.'

'Myths can't be verified or falsified in the way theories can be.'

'I've no doubt that some of the ancient myths we inherit from religion are far more truthful than the stories the modern world tells about itself.'

'The idea that science can enable us to live without myths is one of these silly modern stories.'

'If Darwin's theory of evolution is even roughly right, humans aren't built to understand how the universe works.'

'Science has given us many vital benefits, so many that they would be hard to sum up. But it can't save the human species from itself.'

'Unbelievers in religion who think science can save the world are possessed by a fantasy that's far more childish than any myth.'

'[It's] only religious fundamentalists and ignorant rationalists who think the myths we live by are literal truths.'

'Evangelical atheists who want to convert the world to unbelief are copying religion at its dogmatic worst.'

'We'd all be better off if we stopped believing in belief.'

'What we believe doesn't in the end matter very much. What matters is how we live.'

Res ipsa loquitur, as PO might have said. I rest my case.

John Gray's ideas first came to my attention when I bought a copy of his book Straw Dogs, an analysis of the human condition that makes Schopenhauer's seem all coyly optimistic. I bought the book because I’d read a review by Will Self, in which he described Gray as possibly the cleverest man in the world. Like many reviews, this one turned out to say more about its author than its subject (see below). The article from which the statements above are taken is essentially a summary of Straw Dogs and to see why Gray deserves my inaugural Cretin of the Week award it is necessary to look more closely at the argument in that book.

The central claim of Straw Dogs is that humans are 'just' animals and that therefore belief in either progress or in our ability to manage our species' inevitable exit from life's stage represents not so much hubris as a hilarious category error. The book was widely reviewed and much praised. It was nominated as book of the year by J.G. Ballard, George Walden, Will Self, Joan Bakewell, Jason Cowley, David Marquand, Andrew Marr, Hugh Lawson Tancred, Richard Holloway and Sue Cook. 

What fascinates me about this is that, by implication, it came as news to these critics that humans are 'just' animals. Why else would an insight that has been blindingly obvious for 150 years to anyone with a passing acquaintance with evolutionary biology be heralded as revolutionary? What really pissed me off about the book and its fawning fans, though, is that he gets Darwin almost completely wrong. A self-confessed bookish man, Gray has clearly read The Origin of Species but, like the Nietzche-reading imbecile played by Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda, he hasn't understood it. 

'Darwin teaches that species are only assemblies of genes, interacting at random with each other and their shifting environments.'

No he doesn't. Darwin had no knowledge of genes and famously made a dog's breakfast of attempting to rescue his theory of natural selection from the apparently fatal flaw of blending inheritance. Species are not 'assemblies of genes'. Species are notoriously difficult to define in a way that captures every example of the concept because 'species' is not a natural category. The units of which they are comprised, however, are organisms, not genes. Genes do not interact at random; in fact almost nothing (save creationism) could be further from the truth. Genes that get copied do so because they are exquisitely adapted to their environment, which consists mainly in other genes, with which they interact in a highly restricted fashion that has been shaped by eons of co-evolution. As an example of alphatuosity, this sentence is probably unbeatable. Except by the next three.

'Species cannot control their fates. Species do not exist. This applies equally to humans.'

Complete bollocks, to be blunt. Having (wrongly) informed us a few paragraphs earlier that species are assemblies of genes, Gray now says that they don't exist. This statement suits his argument but it is nonsense. The reason that 'species' is not a natural category is that lineages of organisms split, fragment and merge over time. A river delta is a more apt metaphor than a tree (which Darwin used) in picturing evolutionary history. The trouble is that where we draw the lines that demarcate a species is a matter of taste not biology. That is not at all to say, however, that species do not exist. It is a very unusual human being who is sexually attracted to chimpanzees and vice-versa. Some cichlid fish literally have eyes only for other members of the same species, which preserves distinct lineages ('species') until the lakes in which cichlids live become too murky for the fish to discriminate (here).

What Gray probably means is that natural selection does not act for the good of the species (naive group selection is still a common misunderstanding of Darwinism). The entity that is selected in natural selection is the gene. It is genes - not individuals, populations or species - that persist through generations and wax and wane in relative abundance. Because it is only in special circumstances, in highly social, intelligent animals that genes 'for' identifying with conspecifics can spread, Gray is right to argue that most species do not control their fates. Humans, of course, manifestly do influence the fate of the groups with which they identify, including all members of their own species.

Admittedly I have picked two particularly stupid excerpts from Straw Dogs to analyse but they illustrate that you'd be unwise to take seriously anything its author has to say on the consequences of Darwinism. In fact, as a result of his misreading of Darwinism, the whole of Gray's thesis is grounded in a non-sequitur. Not unlike the last Pope, Gray has woken up to the fact that humans are animals and he has broken this alarming news to the rest of the intelligentsia. In his excitement he has gone on to conclude, falsely, that fluctuating gene frequencies - aka evolution - somehow rule out the possibility of 'progress', a concept that itself is coherent only by reference to evolved human values. For good measure he declares culture incapable of altering the trajectory of its own evolution.

Bizarrely, having declared that the reification of species is a philosophical error, Gray has embraced the reification of a genuine myth: Gaia. I think it may be his enthusiasm for Gaia that has earned him the adoration of the chattering classes. Consider the following from Self's review of Straw Dogs.

'Gray doesn't provide a blow-by-blow account of how exactly Gaia will shrug our troublesome species off of her broad back, but shrug he certainly believes she will...'

Oh, well that's alright then. If the professor believes that Gaia will shrug us off, it must be true.

If all philosophical lives are a journey then Gray is a Wandering Albatross, drifting the oceans of thought, alighting occasionally on a speck of idealogically solid ground but never for long. For this, at least, I admire him. The inability to change one’s mind in light of new evidence is perhaps the greatest obstacle – bar stupidity – to attaining wisdom with which our evolved psychologies burden us. You’d have thought, however, that having moved from leftist to Thatcherite to Blairite to anti-capitalist to Gaian in about thirty years he’d have a healthy disregard for the value of his own opinion by now.

Press '1' if you're suicidal. Press '2' if you're just thinking about it.

The NHS (that's the National Health Service for non-natives - a medical care system that contrives to be simultaneously both free at the point of service and poor value for money). You couldn't make it up. Several weeks ago, in search of a free detox, I rang the number my GP had given me for our local NHS addiction treatment provider. There was nobody there. Now I'm neither paranoid nor delusional but, if I were, I suspect this would have been enough to push me over the edge. When I rang back later, a nice lady asked me some questions about my drinking, which I answered honestly.

'Right, then,' she said, 'we'll be in touch'.

'About what?' I asked.

'About making an appointment for you to come in for an assessment.' Shit-for-brains, she didn't add.

'But you've just assessed me.'

'No, that was the pre-assessment.'

'So, when will you contact me?'

'Oh, about two weeks, I should think. There's a bit of a waiting list.'

I hung up. So you have to get in a waiting list to receive a phone call to make an appointment to go to Trowbridge to get assessed to determine whether you need admission and this is after you've just told someone you drink two bottles of wine a night. After some reflection I realised that this is in fact a brilliant stratagem for meeting targets. Make your drug addicted patients wait long enough for help that they've requested shortly after hitting rock bottom and they mysteriously disappear from the waiting list. Often under the wheels of a train. Problem solved. Ingenious!

As some of you know, I've been through two pyschiatrists, hell, a clinical psychologist, a course of Chlordiazepoxide and several dozen Baclofen tablets since this farcical phone call. So when I received the follow up call yesterday (the one about making an appointment to get assessed) I had to exercise all my self-restraint not to unleash my formidable arsenal of the lowest form of wit.

'It's OK.' I said. 'I went private.'

'So we can close your file?'

'Yes.'

'Oh good. Well done.'

I'm not sure whether the nurse was addressing this closing remark to me or to herself. Either way, I'm in the statistics as another triumph for the NHS.

Some of my best friends are American: taking pride in prejudice

Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-Semitic/a racist/homophobic/a misogynist. Some of my best friends are Jewish/black/gay/women. Who are you kidding? The minute you utter the sentence 'some of my best friends are...[enter despised group of choice]', you are identifying your unfortunate friends as the exceptions that prove what you take to be a rule. Moreover you are identifying an individual with a group and applying all manner of conscious and unconscious labels that you associate with the group to the individual. You are saying, in effect, that you like your friend, in spite of his membership of the group.

There are two distinct errors here. The first is that the labels are likely to be prejudices - opinions formed on the basis of insufficient evidence or none at all. The second is that you are unconsciously assuming that all the labels apply to every individual in a group. I see that you are nodding sagely, agreeing that prejudice is a very bad thing and noting that you yourself have never uttered The Sentence. I'll bet you have, though, unless you belong to a particularly maligned minority: Americans.

'Fucking Americans!' Are you really telling me you've never uttered or muttered these words? Everyone I know has a story that illustrates the alleged stupidity, parochialism and inflated sense of worth that characterizes Americans. My own favourite was told to me by an Australian guy who'd chatted up a pretty student at a bus stop in Harvard. After a while, she said she didn't recognise his accent. 'Oh, I'm Australian' he said. Her brow furrowed. 'Australia? West or East Coast?'

The thing is, some of my best friends are American. What's more, most of them live in Dumbfuckistan (aka the Republican voting States, aka Jesusland), as distinct from the Democrat States (aka the United States of Canada). See here. In fact, I have a nasty feeling that not only did some of them vote for George Bush, they actually have no regrets about doing so.

What disturbs me about this is that I sometimes feel the urge to apologise for this lamentable lapse of taste (liking some Americans) and that this urge is often strongest when my interlocutor is highly educated. The thing is, it's fashionable to hate Americans and has been for as long as I can remember.

How 'we' (educated, Western Europeans) chortle over polls suggesting that one third of Americans believe that aliens have visited earth (here) or that 24% of Republicans think that Barack Obama might be the antichrist (here) or that 55% of them believe that creationism and Intelligent Design should be taught alongside evolution in public schools (here).

We tend to forget that a clear majority of the world's top scientists are based in the USA (63% of the top 1% most highly cited scientific publications are written by scientists in the USA), that it boasts 15 of the top 20 universities in the world (the previous two statistics here) and that philanthropy levels in the USA are more than double those in the UK, Germany or the Netherlands (here).

When we mutter 'fucking Americans', what we really mean is 'fucking ignorant Americans' and educated Americans could and do justly mutter the same thing about the ignorant elsewhere in the world. Especially in France (here). What is particularly characteristic of ignorance in America is that it goes hand-in-hand with being a Christian (see this delicious article, which describes the National Academy of Sciences - 93% of whose members are atheists - as 'one of the most poisonous organizations in America' and 'a nest of atheists', thus neatly refuting the point it sets out to make). I shall expand on this point in another post. A lot.

Of course it is not very nice to be dismissive of the opinions of the ignorant but it is not prejudiced. By definition, the opinions of ignoramuses are uninformed and therefore worthless, except as anthropological curiosities.

Prejudice ought to be a matter for shame not pride, exactly in proportion to how educated you believe yourself to be. It also behoves us to learn to recognise our own prejudices before they come back to bite us. One man's prejudice is another man's clear-thinking analysis of the facts. How you react, for example, to the research suggesting that Askenazi Jews are more intelligent than other races (here) or that Africans are less intelligent than Caucasians (here) says a great deal more about your prejudices than it does about your lack of them.

'Prejudiced' is the pejorative adjective of choice of the terminally prejudiced.

There's an old joke about a regimental sergeant major, tried beyond reason by a lippy cadet, shaking his swagger stick at the cadet and bellowing 'Smith, there's a SHIT at the end of this stick!' To which Smith replies 'Yes sir! Not this end sir!' Show me an accusation of prejudice and nine times out of ten I'll show you a stick with a shit on the end of it. Not the pointy end.

Uncommon sense

The Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft (see his website here) writes about the existence of god and has a large following. Google returns about 470,000 results from a search on his name. His writings are a splendid example of alphatuosity and as good a place as anywhere to start my crusade.

Most arguments for the existence of God turn out to be variants of one of three ideas: the argument from first cause, the argument from design and the argument from natural law. In this post I am going to discuss only the first of these, which Aquinas was the first to articulate. The argument says that all effects have causes in a chain that extends back into history until we arrive at the First Cause. The first cause is declared to be itself uncaused. It is a brute fact, stated as a premise of the argument. That's all there is to it. Aquinas was simply saying that there must have been a first cause, which we call God.

Aquinas's reasons for thinking the premise reasonable are subtle and ingenious, especially when viewed in the context of what passed for an argument elsewhere in the 13th century. He didn't know about atoms and quarks and quantum mechanics and therefore couldn't have realised that it is very far from clear that all effects have antecedent causes or, at any rate, that these effects are independent of observation. The reason the argument fails, however, even if one allows Aquinas's unbroken chain of cause and effect, is that the premise - that there must be a first cause and we might as well call it god - is silly. For it begs the question that every thoughtful child eventually asks. Who made god? In Why I am not a Christian, Bertrand Russell disarms the idea with an analogy. 

'It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindus view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the ele­phant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, How about the tortoise? the Indian said, Suppose we change the subject.' 

1. All effects have tomatoes.
2. The first tomato was a turnip.
3. Therefore turnips are ultimately responsible for all effects.


In this argument, 1 and 2 are premises. They are stated as facts, not to be disputed within the bounds of the argument. Point 3, the conclusion, is logically inescapable if the premises are accepted.


1. All effects have causes.
2. The first cause was God.
3. Therefore God is ultimately responsible for all effects.


Hopefully it is now clear that the difficulty with these arguments is not in the internal logic, which is inescapable, but with the soundness of the premises.

As an aside, it is worth noting that the fact that smart children spontaneously appreciate this flaw in Aquinas's great argument is sometimes taken as a reason to doubt that the flaw exists (what, that old argument?). This objection is truly feeble. If a fatal flaw in an argument is so obvious that untutored children appreciate it, surely that should be cause to doubt the argument, not the children?


I am not especially concerned here to establish the validity or falsity of the argument from first cause. So far as I am concerned, Russell's question about what the tortoise is standing on demolishes the argument. If you disagree with me and agree with Kreeft that it's tortoises all the way down, we are just going to have to park that disagreement for a time, while you go away and think about it.


What I am interested in is showing how alphatuists fool others, and perhaps themselves.

At the end of his essay, Kreeft approvingly quotes C.S. Lewis:

'I felt in my bones that this universe does not explain itself'.

There are two curious things about this quotation.

The first is that these words were written by G.K. Chesterton, not C.S. Lewis. Perhaps Kreeft felt in his bones that it was the sort of thing that CS Lewis might have written. Perhaps the error doesn't matter very much because C.S. Lewis certainly did have such intuitions about the universe. He wrote, for example, in Encounter With Light, the unanswerable and moronic question:

'If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there?'

and, in Miracles,

'How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?'

A better question might have been 'How come natural selection didn't expel such idiotic alphatuists very early in its history?'

The second odd thing about Kreeft's use of the phrase is his evident approval of the notion that gut instincts are a good guide to the truth. He makes this point explicitly at the start of his essay when he says that the First Cause argument is 'basically very simple, natural, intuitive, and commonsensical'.

Appeals to intuition and common sense are frequent in alphatuosity. Practitioners regularly encourage their disciples to trust their intuitions even, or especially, when they conflict with reason. You do not have to be an evolutionist to see why intuition is a terrible guide to the truth, though it helps to have a grasp of how natural selection works.

Consider for a moment the theory of relativity. According to this theory, the faster you travel, the slower time passes, relative to an observer at rest. So if you get into your starship and whizz off to Mars at light speed, you'll have aged a little bit less than your friends back home when you return. If you spend decades rushing very fast around the galaxy, like Lieutenant Ripley in the Alien movies, you will return to find that your children have grown old and died before you get home. Does this make sense? If it does then perhaps you are a genius on a par with Einstein, whose counter-intuitive insight makes him one of the most revered figures in the history of science. Or what about quantum mechanics? Is Schrodinger's cat alive, dead or undead? Or, bringing the debate back down to earth, can a gene for tasting great to predators spread? Yes it can.

Common sense is in ordinary language the name for the rules of thumb we use to evaluate minute-to-minute decisions in life. It works really well because ancestors whose rules of thumb encouraged them to discuss vegetarianism with the saber-toothed tiger did not leave descendants. Our ancestors never faced situations in which they were traveling at warp factor nine, nor did their survival depend upon an appreciation of the quantum mechanical events 'occurring' in the subatomic particles of which they were composed, Common sense is therefore silent on these issues and it requires a huge intellectual effort to grasp, let alone manipulate the equations that govern these counter-intuitive truths.

The argument from first cause is a historical curiosity that gives us a glimpse into the frightening minds of our not-very-distant ancestors. Aquinas, enlightened by the standards of his day, also wrote 'Wherefore in order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned.' As Richard Dawkins put it succinctly in The God Delusion, 'nice man'.

Whereas Aquinas had an excuse for being a complete wanker, Peter Kreeft does not. Whereas G.K Chesterton (just about) had an excuse for thinking that feeling something in your bones is grounds for rejecting the entire post-enlightenment scientific enterprise, you have no such excuse. If you listen to the siren calls of alphatuists who command you to obey your intuitions, you are destined to founder on the unforgiving reefs of reason. The truth, as Fox Mulder so rightly said, is out there. Go find it. Or if you really still want to believe in God, here are 666 reasons to do so. Thanks again to R, the source of all interesting factoids and websites for directing me to the link.

High and dry

Another week, another mind-altering substance. This one is called Baclofen, an anti-spasticity agent that has been around for years and has been used primarily to control the symptoms of MS and cerebral palsy. A cardiologist, Olivier Amiesen wrote Le Dernier Verre, published in English as The End Of My Addiction, about how Baclofen 'cured' his alcoholism.

Baclofen is a GABA (gamma aminobutyric acid) receptor agonist, that works by binding with GABA receptors in the cell membranes of neurons, opening potassium channels via a series of intermediate metabolic steps and thereby inhibiting the release of certain neurotransmitters. Why that in turn reduces alcohol cravings remains in the realms of speculation.

I've finished my course of Chlordiazepozide, so the number of psychotropic substances I ingest each day is stable at four. Since three of these have anxiolytic properties, a pot-toking jellyfish probably suffers more anxiety in the course of a bad day in the plankton than I do in an average week. My new psychiatrist cheerfully told me that he is using me as 'a sort of a guinea pig' because the Medical Research Council has recently declined to fund a full scale clinical trial into the efficacy of Baclofen in addiction treatment so, for the moment, he must rely on anecdotal evidence from his patients.

Clutching his prescription in my sweaty hand, I paid another visit to Bliss (the pharmacy, not the state of mind), handed over £12 and swallowed my first dose. At this rate of expenditure on pharmaceuticals it will take me 32 years to spend as much as the Priory would have charged me for a month's stay. I may not be a financial analyst of the first water but I know a bargain when I see one and Baclofen is definitely up there with Sainsbury's own-label Chianti and the flame-haired masseuse at the Hotel Lipka in Montenegro.

Speaking of the Priory, a friend(1) has alerted me to the entertaining factoid that 'the Priory chain was sold to a bunch of US private equity sharks, Advent International, which specialize in “mid-cap growth companies” (addiction is a fine growth business, of course)'. I worked for a few years in the leveraged buyout group at JP Morgan and became accustomed to going on site visits, during the course of which we observed soon-to-be-made-redundant wage slaves going about their futile working lives. This activity was referred to as 'kicking the tyres'. Presumably Advent's executives got to kick the retards before they handed over the wonga to the Priory's previous owners...wait for it...RBS.

Boarding the train back to Chippenham my new drug was immediately put to a stern test by the bloke who sat next to me, sipping beer from a can all the way. I was trying to read a book by the wonderfully euphonious philosophical quartet Bennett, Dennett, Hacker and Searle, the first and third of whom argue that qualia (the 'what it is like' of sensations) do not exist. I can assure them that the beer quale not only exists, it has real effects in the brains of addicts like me.

But this blog is meant to be about alphatuosity, so let me present you with a fine example, taken from the Priory's leaflet on alcohol dependency, on display in the waiting room above the machine dispensing free coffee (an addictive substance on which, according to John Walsh of The Independent, the average Brit now spends more per annum than on utility bills - see here). 

Is alcohol dependency a disease?

It has a cause, a symptom and is treatable - so it has all the characteristics of a progressive disease. People who are dependent on alcohol lose control of how much and how often they drink. The only effective remedy to is to stop drinking completely. 

Alcohol dependency is described in medicine as a 'morbid process'. Put simply, it may kill you if it is left untreated.

Let's briefly but critically appraise this lovely example of complete horse shit.

It has a cause, a symptom and is treatable - so it has all the characteristics of a progressive disease.

Right. So love is a disease, is it? It has a cause (meeting someone with whom you experience mutual sexual attraction), a symptom (several actually, all mind-altering) and is treatable (by marriage). The non-sequitur (see this splendid cartoon series for daily illustrations of the concept) is an essential weapon in the armoury of alphatuists. The method involves making simple, inarguable claims, then drawing invalid but superficially plausible conclusions. I believe in God. I needed a parking space. I prayed that one would be available. There was a parking space just where I needed it. Therefore God exists.

People who are dependent on alcohol lose control of how much and how often they drink.

True but then people who are dependent on oxygen lose control of how much and how often they inhale. The true-by-definition statement is another hallmark of alphatuosity. The point of treatment for alcohol addiction ought to be to enable an addict to regain control. Telling an alcoholic that he cannot control his drinking is like telling an explorer he cannot head east from the North Pole. It is true but useless. The alcoholic, like the explorer, needs to know something that is true but not trivial. 


The only effective remedy to is to stop drinking completely. 

The argument from authority is very powerful. The above sentence is untrue. Many heavy drinkers and some (but very few - see here - alcoholics) learn to moderate their consumption without stopping completely. Presented to suggestible individuals, in a leaflet published by a respected psychiatric hospital, however, it is treated my most readers as being the gospel truth. Ordinary people will do truly appalling things if instructed to do them by an authority figure (see here for a description of a classic series of experiments by Stanley Milligram in which volunteers complied with instructions to administer fictitious electric shocks to a 'subject', who was in fact an associate of Milligram). Alphatuists know this and will often abuse positions of authority by asserting useful falsehoods as undeniable. The key to the gates of heaven are to be found beneath that bulge in my cassock, little boy.

Put simply, it may kill you if it is left untreated. 

Life is a morbid process. Metabolism leads inexorably to death. The point is not that alcoholism 'may' kill you if it is not treated. The point is whether or not the small quota of life each of us experiences is enhanced or diminished by alcohol. It's a moot point and one on which the Priory's leaflet is silent.

Because the Evening Standard is now free I picked up a copy at Marble Arch tube station yesterday, which is why I know that 'shopping mall bosses are shocked at staff who cannot read or write' (see here, if you must - the article is journalism at its most tawdry). Why the bosses are shocked is not explained but one sometimes wonders whether the illiterate are not the lucky ones.

No doubt Advent International will meet its IRR target for the Priory acquisition. My friend is right. Addiction treatment is a growth industry, one driven more by credulity than greed.

(1) It's odd but true that 95% of the interesting factoids I know have been vouchsafed to me by, at most, 5% of my acquaintances. I am not blowing smoke up the arse of this guy (although I suspect he'd enjoy it if I did) when I say that he is responsible for a clear majority of the 95%.