The Rage of Virginia Woolf

Theodore Dalrymple, a now-retired prison psychiatrist has a chapter in his recent book Our Culture, What's Left Of It entitled "The Rage of Virginia Woolf. A quote from that essay seems appropriate in view of our cultural discussions in the psychosphere.

It comes as no surprise that a thinker (or perhaps I should say a feeler) such as Mrs. Woolf, with her emotional and intellectual dishonesty, should collapse all relevant moral distinctions, a technique vital to all schools of resentment. Time and again we find her misappropriating the connotation of one thing and attaching it to another, by insinuating a false analogy: that since both the British policeman and the Nazi stormtrooper wore a uniform, the British policeman was a brute. It is one of the chief characteristics of modern rhetoric, designed not so much to find truth as (in the words of former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam) to "maintain your rage."