I have just been watching a current affairs programme that was asking a panel of what we love to refer to as experts, whether it was ethical for doctors to go on strike. What I found interesting was that none of the expert opponents of the doctor's case for strike action were themselves from the medical profession or had ever worked in ordinary jobs where they would meet with the working terms and conditions of service that ordinary working people must work under. The two most prominent opponents of the doctors were both journalists from right-wing Tory supporting newspapers who never fail to exhibit a visceral hatred of working people and of any form of industrial action that may make their cosy existence just that little bit more inconvenient than they consider it should be. It is programmes like this that never fail to remind me just how selfish the dominant free market ideology has made the British people and how we are no longer entitled to call ourselves a civilised nation.
I think I have written here before how I watched the most senior British television news commentators on the two most prominent British current affairs programmes, Channel Four News, and Newsnight, ask teachers representatives if there was ever any justification for teachers going on strike. Forgive me if I am repeating myself, but the same question applies to doctors. This is an age-old trick employed by the media where of course the blatant implication of such a question is that there is never any justification and the onus is now on the teacher or the doctor to prove that there is. It is now considered as morally wrong to have your life disrupted in any way, regardless of the circumstances. I was just sorry that they had never asked me.
You see, this is a powerful example of moral relativism and how our affective interests will cause us to act like imbeciles! In April 2011 all schools in the UK closed for a Royal wedding. No talk of disruption here, this was a celebration. So, closing a school for a royal wedding is good and to be welcomed, but closing it in the defence of people’s livelihoods and those same children’s standard of living is bad. A very close friend of mine had an important hospital appointment cancelled because of the aforementioned Royal wedding. His appointment was to discuss his diagnosis with cancer. The appointment was then delayed for four months, in other words, his cancer treatment was not only delayed for four months but his whole life was disrupted and suffered from the stress he and his family were living under by being placed in a medical and psychological limbo because of a royal wedding. However, he was expected to understand that this was not disruptive; it was a celebration for which he should have been patriotically grateful, and, if the delay in treating his cancer had caused him to die, then he could die happy in the knowledge that his death was in the service of his country and its magnificent royal family.
Now, had his appointment been disrupted by industrial action by the medical staff (or even worse, by the ancillary staff, because after all they are genuine working class) that would have been an unpardonable crime. That is an example of the moral sickness that prevails in modern Britain and the utter garbage I had to listen to this morning that made me switch off after ten minutes. Almost all schools in the UK are utilised as polling stations for elections. As a result, schools are regularly closed for local, parliamentary and European elections. That of course is not disruption either, disruption only occurs when teachers close the school for selfish reasons such as attempting to protect their jobs, which is not a justifiable activity. As far as Britain’s ruling class and its political and chattering classes are concerned, a royal wedding or an election is obviously justifiable disruption in both schools and hospitals; protecting your interests and the long term interests of your profession is obviously not. This anti-strike position is the coarsest form of moral blackmail, but based on very dodgy morals. As David Hume showed, it is morality based on feeling, on emotion rather than reason, which as Sigmund Freud tells us, causes us to act like imbeciles. We feel that as one of the participants in the issue is an adult (the teacher) then it is morally wrong to involve the other participant (the pupil) because that participant is a child, or in the doctor's case, one of them is ill and the other responsible for effecting treatment and/or a cure. Any rational look at the problem may well show that the action by the adult or the doctor may be in the child’s and the patient's best interest in both the short and the long term, but that is never addressed because our affective interests take control of our thinking and rationality goes out the window. We must ask the question, if the commentator was correct and it is morally and socially indefensible for teachers and doctors to go on strike, what are the teachers and doctors to do? Are they simply to accept whatever employers and the government wish to do to them and lay foundations of terms and conditions of work that the child and future generations of patients will eventually inherit should it enter the teaching or medical profession? What about the children of the families affected by such attacks on their living standards, and with reference to medicine, for the future of our health services as well as the conditions of employment for doctors? Finally, what about the morality of a ruling elite who will utilise children and patients as weapons in their never ending pursuit of their own wealth and interests? This is what is meant by a free market, if you have an ethical problem simply redefine it on your own terms and propagandise it through your control of the media until it becomes the accepted wisdom and damn the consequences. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
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