You are in pain. It’s something internal. Could be your gall bladder. Or liver. Or kidney. Or appendicitis. You don’t know what, you’re not a doctor.
That’s why you must urgently see one, but that’s easier said than done. At least seven million Britons are on the NHS waiting list, and some of them are hurting as badly as you are. Or worse.
They (and you) will have to bear it with characteristic British stoicism. For the NHS is desperately short of frontline medical professionals – and that was the case even before nurses and ambulance paramedics went on strike.
But not to worry – help is on its way, even though almost half (47 per cent, to be exact) of the NHS staff aren’t medics. Yet they have other vital functions to perform, which is reflected in their job descriptions: director of diversity, facilitator of optimisation, optimiser of facilitation – and “director of lived experience”.
It’s this last job that’s currently advertised on the NHS website, with an annual salary of up to £115,000 on offer. That’s enough to pay four newly qualified nurses, but let’s face it: directors of lived experience are much more valuable.
In case you wonder what constitutes “lived experience”, the NHS is happy to clarify. It’s having experienced racism or discrimination, and thereby learned to recognise “white privilege” when you see it.
The ad identifies the job’s priorities as seeking out “seldom heard” minority groups “who may experience health inequalities.” And health inequality is a serious problem, much more so than the pain driving you up the wall.
That’s why the successful candidate must be “interpersonally talented” and a “strategic bridge-builder”. He may not know his appendicitis from his haemorrhoids, but he knows how to create “brave spaces”, presumably helping you to brave your agony with a nonchalant smile.
“The director will broker psychologically safe environments that allow people to co-produce and become equal partners in their care,” says the ad.
You can almost feel your pain go away, can’t you? You may not be able to see a doctor, but you can become an equal partner in your care. Even if you get no care at all.
Please don’t throw your hands up in horror and lament that the NHS is diverting funds and resources from its core business. It isn’t. All those directors of lived experience and diversity (the NHS advertised £700,000 worth of such jobs in October alone) are in charge of the NHS core business: serving its paymaster, the state.
Such is the ineluctable law of all giant socialist concerns: whatever their ostensible remit, they pursue what ultimately is a political – and socialist – objective. And while their remits vary, the objective never does: ensuring the growth and power of the state.
It so happens that inculcating wokery happens to advance the current interests of the state, as it defines them. This makes it the core business of the NHS, to which doctors and nurses are extraneous.
So what if they have to toil round the clock trying to make up for the chronic shortages of clinical professionals? So what if millions of patients continue to writhe in pain, checking their progress through those endless waiting lists?
Their physical agony may be ignored, but at least directors of diversity will make sure it’s ignored equally and without prejudice.
One can only remember wistfully those unsophisticated times in the past, when a hospital was run by the head doctor and the head matron. And the only non-medical employee was the accountant keeping the books.
Nor is it just the NHS. It’s another ineluctable law that the dominant institution, in this case the state acting as the conduit of the zeitgeist, corrupts all other institutions, shaping them in its image. Including institutions not under its immediate aegis.
It used to be that bridge-building companies were run by people who knew how to build bridges, car-making companies by people who made cars and, well, hospitals by doctors and nurses. No longer – and so much for the line that separates the public and private sectors.
Sooner or later, parasites had to move in and take over, just as they have done in the NHS. At first, production people were ousted by those in sales and marketing. That wasn’t so bad, because such chaps usually had some production experience. They knew exactly what they were selling and marketing.
Then they too had to give way to another breed: accountants and financial managers. Those professionals came from a totally different background, and they knew nothing about their company’s output. They knew how to count beans, and they didn’t care whether the beans were fava, lima or haricot.
Yet even that group didn’t hold sway for long. Taking over instead were professional managers with MBA certificates on their wall – and in their minds.
This sounds downright sinister to anyone who had the misfortune of observing the Soviet nomenklatura in action. That was the managerial, bureaucratic class offering membership for life. Its members could be shifted up, down or sideways, but they never lost their privileges.
A nomenklatura chap could run a factory today, a department store tomorrow, a symphony orchestra the day after – it didn’t matter. As long as he knew how to run things for the benefit of the state, he stayed in.
In a spooky parallel, the MBA class is similar. Its members spend years learning recondite mumbo-jumbo that’s supposed to equip them for whatever task life throws their way. They too can manage anything – often into the ground.
The core of MBAs comes surrounded with other parasites, not dissimilar to all those directors of diversity in the NHS. The bigger the company, the larger, proportionally, is its parasitic class – and the greater the damage it does to the core business, if only by diverting its resources into unproductive areas.
One can only marvel at James Burnham’s prophetic powers. In his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution, he foresaw the arrival of a new class that managed and controlled the capital it didn’t own and in which it therefore had no vested interest.
One good thing about modernity is that it reliably makes dystopic prophesies come true. That’s a constant source of headache for me, and it’s getting worse. Perhaps I should call for an appointment with a director of diversity.
The revolting equivalent of this principle of ‘correcting’ racial injustice in healthcare was put to practice by the CDC, to determine vaccine prioritization during the COVID crisis . The three priority groups were identified as the elderly, essential workers, and adults with underlying conditions. To further prioritize between these groups the following ethical principles were applied: “Promotion of justice”, and “Mitigation of health inequities”. An ethical conflict ensued: Racial/ethnic minorities were under represented among the elderly, and therefore the essential workers would move ahead of them on the priority list, at the supposed extra cost of 50’000 lives a month. The ethical experts justified, “older populations are white, society is structured in such a way that they are made to live longer, and instead of giving additional treatments to those who already have, we should level the playing field.”
I’m indebted to D. Murray’s War On The West for these facts.
I remember in the 1980s when an MBA or even an undergraduate degree in Business Adminstration become vogue. I recognized it for the con it was because I also remember the 1970s when while watchigngcollege football bowl games during the Christmans and New Year holidays we were introduced to athlete after athlete who was majoring in “binniss aministrashun”. My mother used to compare it to a degree in “underwater basket weaving.”
While we have so far been able to fight off the American version of the NHS (for how much longer?) , the advent of Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) has seriously hampered medical care. The largest provider in southern California, Kaiser Permanente, no soner builds a new facilty than they close it down and build another. There must be a position for facilitators of useless construction.
It’s an interesting thing about modernity: whichever country pioneers a perverse policy or institution, others follow suit sooner or later. I first realised that when moving from the US to Britain in 1988. America was already in the grip of quite nauseating political correctness, and suddenly I found myself with a breath of fresh air filling my grateful lungs. No political correctness, no racial awkwardness, no identitiy poliitcs – I had arrived. And what do you know, within five years Britain got to be as bad, if not worse. The same goes for medicine. As a sickly sort, I had plenty of experience with doctors and hospitls in the US, and it was uniformaly positive. Instant service, highly qualified clinicians, private rooms – and at a fraction of the cost of British ‘free’ healthcare (we pay a 12 per cent tax for it). Talking to my American friends now, they all tell me the same horror stories I observe – and live – in Britian. Waiting for week to get an appointment, shortage of highly qualified staff, general degradation. It’s a form of tropism, I suppose, with the sun shining out of any abomination consonant with the zeitgeist.