Anyone who wanted to do a job he enjoyed, with plenty of autonomy, and was prepared to put up with less-than-stellar pay, might find himself in middle age trapped in employment where the pleasure and autonomy were all being stripped away.
I suppose one lesson is that one shouldn't try to make a career based on such tastes and should instead aim to make a mountain of moolah as soon as poss so that one can retire early.
23 September 2023 at 13:40
Epimetheus said...
Dr. Charlton, have you ever read the book "Drive" by Daniel H. Pink? It's not an especially ground-breaking book, but it's remarkable that the most effective way to motivate adult humans is to give them the space to develop their own competence, responsibility, and autonomy in response to the challenges of their jobs. In short, to treat adults like adults.
The human adult should be trusted and encouraged to generate their own procedures and solutions to problems - this is how men can be made to feel like men and women to feel like women. This is where true self-esteem and self-confidence come from (in part).
It can't be a mere accident that the totalitarian bureaucracy is expressly designed to snuff all this out, to obliterate all individualized adult human decision-making from the entire planet. A war against all the little lessons of life that the Creator would teach us. A war against the natural human quest for inner wisdom.
@Epi - I don't know the book. It sounds sensible as general advice. But in a modern secular society; what is best in the longer term doesn't seem to have any traction against short term expediency.
People need to defend their own autonomy against the selfish interests of others - and academics and scientists in the UK did not lift a finger... Although the earlier generation of majority male doctors put up a fight, for a while.
It's amazing how fast it has happened. The very concept of what a job is has changed. This level of bureaucratic micromanagement is something new: for pretty much all of human history it meant one thing (except for slaves) and now it means something else.
And yet, many people seem to not even notice or pretend they don't notice.
@NLR I think it is in the interest of doctors, scientists etc to pretend that they are still doing the same job as their (genuinely) great predecessors - some people call it 'wearing a skin suit'.
This happens because it maintains some residue of self-esteem for the ex-professionals, and disguises the massive socio-political-demonic work of civilizational destruction that is afoot.
I recently found my copy of Christopher Hobhouse's "Oxford: As it was and as it is today" (Batsford, 1939). Towards the end, Hobhouse prophesies no good coming of the universities' accepting government funding for the first time (after WW1). It was indeed the thin end of the wedge.
Towards the end of his career, my father used to shrug his shoulders when faced with another bureaucratic demand from the university's "senior management team", and say "Let's face it -- I'm just a civil servant."
@william a - It took a few decades before the bureaucrats took over, I've often wondered why. There was certainly a change of intent at the top. The old civil service regarded themselves as 'administrators', and refrained from trying to take-over core functions.
But from the 80s and 90s, they became 'managers' who desired to control every aspect of every function - only using the professionals to soak up responsibility.
Thus managers now tell doctors which patients to treat and how to treat them, how much time to spend on each etc. At university, academics are told what to teach and how to spend every hour of each day (making up harmful tasks so as to fill all the time) - and so on throughout.
In the generation before mine, professionals mostly did not want to retire in their sixties, and often worked on for no money. By my generation almost everybody retired ASAP, in their fifties or earlier if possible.
And, so far as I can tell, almost all managers hate their work - and would never dream of working without pay!
So there has been a massive degradation of middle class work satisfaction all round; which looks to be irreversible, and was certainly strategically implemented - *despite* the new systems having increased costs and reduced effectiveness.
That's what evil does!
25 September 2023 at 17:16
The three professions of which I was member have, in reality, long since ceased to exist; but this can now be seen objectively since they are perpetually "on strike".Striking means hurting the general public (i.e. patients and students - because nearly all scientists are employed by educational establishments) - ostensibly as a (stupid, self-destructive) way of trying to persuade monopoly employers to give them more pay and better conditions. But in actuality, most as a futile way of venting general frustration at their meaningless and purposeless existence. Professionals don't go on strike because it hurts the people who they (supposedly) exist to serve. So that the endemic state of strike demonstrates that doctors and academics/ scientists no longer think of themselves as professionals - and are making a public demonstration of that established fact. They think of themselves as they actually are: bureaucratic functionaries whose core responsibility is to improve their position within their particular bureaucracy...Current 'industrial action' is invariably directed against the public, rather than the managers! The strikers always cooperate, never resist and refuse, whatever bureaucratic nonsense the managers currently are imposing. While patients and students suffer; these medical/ academic/ scientific employees don't really want to hurt the managers, or alienate them - because it is managerial favour they are seeking. And the particular bureaucracies of the National Health Service and UK universities are merely sub-departments of the single, cross-linked global-bureaucracy - The System, The Matrix - so most people are in exactly the same situation, and behave with identical servile, short-termist, stupid selfishness as the ex-professionals - so lets not hear any arguing from assumed superiority! Whatever apparent superiority currently exists in other jobs is merely temporary and situational. In other words - because of multiple laws and regulations relating to employment, taxes, subsidies, 'safety', racism/ feminism/ sexual-stuff/ disability, sanctions, 'climate'-drivel and so on, and on, and ever-increasing; all large employers are de facto a single employer; and all those who work for them are generic functionaries - whose job is to do: whatever the managers tell them. Therefore, except temporarily, there is no difference between a doctor and anyone else who works for the NHS (nurse, therapist, cleaner, porter, shop assistant etc); and no difference between someone who works for the NHS and someone who works for any other large government department, multinational corporation, NGO - or whatever. And therefore the doctors 'job' is to do - whatever his bosses currently tell him is his job. Same with academics: same with scientists. There is no essence to their work - only obedience. Very-nearly-all of the ex-professions that I was a member of, now actually do jobs that have almost (or actually) zero overlap with what these professions did fifty years ago. They are all doingdifferent things; because they are doing what managers tell them to do.And the managers do what the politicians (and media moguls) tell them to do; and the politicians do what the real rulers tell them.This is how the world wags... Such is life - such it has been for a couple of decades at least - and, although officially denied, such reality is becoming clearer with each passing year.
"Doctors, academics and scientists have objectively ceased to exist in the UK - we are all generic bureaucratic functionaries now"
7 Comments -
Anyone who wanted to do a job he enjoyed, with plenty of autonomy, and was prepared to put up with less-than-stellar pay, might find himself in middle age trapped in employment where the pleasure and autonomy were all being stripped away.
I suppose one lesson is that one shouldn't try to make a career based on such tastes and should instead aim to make a mountain of moolah as soon as poss so that one can retire early.
23 September 2023 at 13:40
Dr. Charlton, have you ever read the book "Drive" by Daniel H. Pink? It's not an especially ground-breaking book, but it's remarkable that the most effective way to motivate adult humans is to give them the space to develop their own competence, responsibility, and autonomy in response to the challenges of their jobs. In short, to treat adults like adults.
The human adult should be trusted and encouraged to generate their own procedures and solutions to problems - this is how men can be made to feel like men and women to feel like women. This is where true self-esteem and self-confidence come from (in part).
It can't be a mere accident that the totalitarian bureaucracy is expressly designed to snuff all this out, to obliterate all individualized adult human decision-making from the entire planet. A war against all the little lessons of life that the Creator would teach us. A war against the natural human quest for inner wisdom.
24 September 2023 at 05:54
@Epi - I don't know the book. It sounds sensible as general advice. But in a modern secular society; what is best in the longer term doesn't seem to have any traction against short term expediency.
People need to defend their own autonomy against the selfish interests of others - and academics and scientists in the UK did not lift a finger... Although the earlier generation of majority male doctors put up a fight, for a while.
24 September 2023 at 07:12
It's amazing how fast it has happened. The very concept of what a job is has changed. This level of bureaucratic micromanagement is something new: for pretty much all of human history it meant one thing (except for slaves) and now it means something else.
And yet, many people seem to not even notice or pretend they don't notice.
24 September 2023 at 13:10
@NLR I think it is in the interest of doctors, scientists etc to pretend that they are still doing the same job as their (genuinely) great predecessors - some people call it 'wearing a skin suit'.
This happens because it maintains some residue of self-esteem for the ex-professionals, and disguises the massive socio-political-demonic work of civilizational destruction that is afoot.
24 September 2023 at 18:52
I recently found my copy of Christopher Hobhouse's "Oxford: As it was and as it is today" (Batsford, 1939). Towards the end, Hobhouse prophesies no good coming of the universities' accepting government funding for the first time (after WW1). It was indeed the thin end of the wedge.
Towards the end of his career, my father used to shrug his shoulders when faced with another bureaucratic demand from the university's "senior management team", and say "Let's face it -- I'm just a civil servant."
25 September 2023 at 15:10
@william a - It took a few decades before the bureaucrats took over, I've often wondered why. There was certainly a change of intent at the top. The old civil service regarded themselves as 'administrators', and refrained from trying to take-over core functions.
But from the 80s and 90s, they became 'managers' who desired to control every aspect of every function - only using the professionals to soak up responsibility.
Thus managers now tell doctors which patients to treat and how to treat them, how much time to spend on each etc. At university, academics are told what to teach and how to spend every hour of each day (making up harmful tasks so as to fill all the time) - and so on throughout.
In the generation before mine, professionals mostly did not want to retire in their sixties, and often worked on for no money. By my generation almost everybody retired ASAP, in their fifties or earlier if possible.
And, so far as I can tell, almost all managers hate their work - and would never dream of working without pay!
So there has been a massive degradation of middle class work satisfaction all round; which looks to be irreversible, and was certainly strategically implemented - *despite* the new systems having increased costs and reduced effectiveness.
That's what evil does!
25 September 2023 at 17:16