Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality
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Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality is a polemical 2010 work by the British writer and retired prison doctor and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple. The book attempts to reveal how, in the author's view, sentimentality has become culturally entrenched in British society, with seriously harmful effects. Dalrymple explores a range of social, educational, political, media and literary issues—including falling standards in education, the Make Poverty History campaign, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and the work and life of the poet Sylvia Plath—to illustrate what he views as the danger of abandoning logic in favour of sentimentality, which he describes in the book's introduction as "the progenitor, the godparent, the midwife of brutality".
See also
- Sentimentality
- Cognitive distortion
- Victimology
- Victim playing
- Compensation culture
- Media manipulation
- Sentimentalism (literature)
- Live Aid (criticisms and controversies)
- Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass
- Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses
