I hardly ever even glance at obituaries in the newspaper.
If a popular celebrity has died, then by the time I get to the obit section I’ve usually already had my fill of TV eulogies, gushing tributes, and outpourings of fake/real emotion from the dead celebrity’s fake/real showbiz friends.
And I’m already tired of seeing regular people posting photos of the recently deceased on Instagram. Or worst of all, someone posting a photo of themselves with the recently deceased on Instagram.
‘Look at me’, they say. ‘Basking in the stolen glamour of a dead celebrity. Pretty cool right? Also, #sad.’
Of course if the freshly departed isn’t a celebrity, then I’m probably not interested in them anyway.
I know that’s shallow but at least I’m being upfront about it. There-something for my own obit, should I ever get one, (I won’t get one)
‘He was a shallow human being, but at least he was upfront about it’.
Having said all that, something drew me to the obituary of a man called Norman Rose in the Telegraph a few days ago. Maybe it was the incongruity, of this headline description.
‘Nuclear physicist, who as a young commando had landed on Gold Beach on D-Day.’
That’s quite the one line epitaph.
On D Day (that’s 6 June 1944, for younger readers) a teenage Norman Rose went ashore on Gold Beach with 420 fellow commandos. Within three days their strength had been reduced to 259.
Rose was wounded in the fighting and that was the end of his war. He was appointed to the Legion d’Honneur for his troubles. Ten months, and a lot of bodies later, Adolf Hitler shot himself.
As with all murder suicides, Hitler could have saved everyone a lot of time and trouble if he’d just decided to reverse the order. Done the suicide first, and then, committed all his murders afterwards.
He didn’t of course. That’s the thing with Hitler. Selfish.
After the war, Rose read chemistry at King’s College London and went on to become one of the country’s most senior nuclear physicists. According to his obituary. He oversaw the building of fourteen gas cooled nuclear reactors.
Impressive stuff.
What struck me while reading about the life of Norman Rose was first, the realisation of how common, common soldiers used to be.
They’re not now of course, for some unaccountable reason it’s become increasingly difficult to get working class men to fight for a country that seems to hate them, their values and their history, but that wasn’t the case in 1944.
And secondly, just how rare it is, to find people smart enough, to become nuclear physicists. It’s a very specialist job.
In fact, apart from Norman Rose, the only other nuclear physicist I could name with any confidence, is Cillian Murphy.
And with this ratio in mind; lots of soldiers, hardly any nuclear physicists, I pondered what a loss to the specialised field of nuclear science it would have been if, like so many others, Norman Rose had perished on the Normandy beaches.
And then I thought of all those men and women who were lost to violence during those long, destructive years.
How much talent was sacrificed to that conflagration? How many brilliant world changing people, in all manner of disciplines and all walks of life, have we had to do without, because eighty years ago, Germany’s National Socialists decided they wanted to impose their broken ideology on the world?
Obviously, this isn’t exactly a Hot Take. I’m not the first person to consider armed conflict and think,
‘That’s the thing with war, right? A lot of wastage.’
But it did make think of the parallels with today.
We may not be involved in a war right now. Apart of course from all the wars we are involved in right now, which the government pretends we’re not involved in right now.
And I would not want to equate the sacrifices of the Greatest Generation with anything we are experiencing today. But nonetheless our society is wasting people, squandering potential, and throwing away talent, on a truly epic scale.
How can it be otherwise, when so many are employed to do so little, but push paper around the impenetrable labyrinth of our ossified, sclerotic, risk averse, do-nothing state?
Condemned to spend their entire working lives, simply feeding the insatiable bureaucratic machine, of modern technocratic government.
I don’t want to employ an accountant, it’s expensive, fiddly, and annoying. But I’m a self employed person with a teeny tiny company, so I need one to navigate the treacherous quicksand of the UK tax code.
Accountants are clever people, and at the top levels they are super clever people. Maybe not nuclear physicist level, but certainly Big Brains.
They need to be. The British tax code is perhaps the most complex piece of bureaucracy ever created. Full to the brim with trips wires, exceptions, loop holes, requirements, sub sections, statutes, regulations, and directives.
Just imagine the opportunity cost of employing all those incredibly smart, clued up and switched on people, to translate, negotiate, and navigate all 21,000 pages of it.
That’s twenty times as long as the entire Lord of the Rings saga. But still only one third as tedious. (Sorry Hobbit fans, but it is.)
Consider for a second what else these clever clogs people could be doing, making, building or creating, if we didn’t need to bash their talents to destruction, against the impenetrable rocks of the HMRC.
And it’s not just tax. Look at the size of our government. Since 2016 the civil service has grown by one hundred thousand people. That means the machinery of the state has grown by 25% in just seven years. Has it become 25% more efficient? Are 25% more problems being solved? Are public services 25% better?
Of course not.
Imagine how much more usefully employed these talented people could be.
It’s easy, (and fun) to sometimes dismiss civil servants as mere pointless pen pushers, talentless drudges, tiny cogs in the machine. But while their tasks might sometimes be mindless, it doesn’t follow that the people performing them also lack merit.
After all. It must be really hard to be a NHS DEI Officer.
And no, I’m not being sarcastic.
Just think about it. You have to be imaginative. Creating a problem where there isn’t one.
You have to be committed. Forcing your ideology on everyone around you, even when most would rather, I suspect, just get on with the job of treating patients for, you know, illnesses.
And you have to be super smart. It can’t be easy finding ways to continuously justify your existence as a member of the highly paid racism police in one of the most diverse, progressive, left wing and woke institutions in the country, and I would suggest, on the planet.
Being a NHS DEI Officer is a highly specialised, difficult and challenging job. Dumbos need not apply.
Imagine if we could find a way to harness that talent to solve some of the myriad genuine problems befouling the NHS.
Maybe stop using these people to scan for imaginary racism in the radiology department, or to diagnose micro aggressions on orthopaedic wards, and instead put their big brains together to somehow find ways to bring our Health Service up to the much higher standards of places like France and Germany, countries which spend just a little more than us as share of GDP, on healthcare.
Similarly, how much talent, brainpower and head space are we wasting on Net Zero? Sure, we all want to save the planet, of course we do, we live here.
But we seem to be expending an awful lot of energy, finding expensive ways, to avoid generating, an awful lot of energy.
Net Zero is too big a subject to really explore here. So let’s just consider one tiny corner. Electric vehicles.
Profit motive, and consumer preference, has made the modern petrol motor car infinitely cleaner, cheaper, more reliable, energy efficient and useful than its equivalent from thirty, let alone sixty, or one hundred, years ago.
But who cares?
The sky is on fire, or something, so they have got to go. So now we’re spending our engineering expertise, literally reinventing the wheel. It’s not a productive use of human capital. Swapping our efficient ICE cars for inferior electric versions benefits no one.
Except maybe Elon Musk, and increasingly the forward thinking CCP, which spies an opportunity to destroy yet another Western industry by effectively dumping cheap, subsidised products onto the world market. Just as it did with manufacturing, through cheap labour, and heavy industry, with cheap steel.
The Chinese aren’t squandering their brain cells on pointless self flagellation.
They are putting effort into moving forward not backward. Their goal isn’t to rail against the weather, it’s to grow their economy, and make their people richer.
While we seem intent of racing in the other direction. Enfeebling ourselves with the unworkable fantasy vision of a de-growth, post industrial, post capitalist, agrarian, windmill powered future.
And besides, if we had produced a few more nuclear physicists like Norman Rose, and fewer angry school children like Greta Thunberg, we might even have that carbon emissions thing sorted by now.
Instead of harnessing our best and brightest to solve our real and pressing problems, our government tinkers at the edges, busybodying about, ever constructing new laws, rules and layers of regulation, in panicked response to our knee jerk ‘something must be done’ culture.
Which brings me onto Michael Gove’s latest spot of meddling. The Communities Minister is introducing a new definition of ‘extremism ’ and will use that definition to decide which groups should in future be excluded
‘from meetings or any engagement with ministers, senior civil servants, government advisory boards and funding’.
I’ve never really understood the point of Michael Gove. Apart perhaps to answer the question, ‘What would have happened to Harry Potter, if he’d stayed with the Dursleys, and never made it to Hogwarts?’
This new definition might seem to make sense at first blush. But on closer inspection it’s a perfect example of the self defeating inefficiency of our ouroboros government.
A circle jerk of pointlessness, we now have one arm of the state proudly declaring that it is finally instructing a different branch of the state, that the state should no longer be funding terrorists and extremists.
Well done everyone. I feel safer already.
But will this new definition be used to curtail genuine extremism or simply outlaw dissent? Hmm. It could go either way. (It will obviously only go one way.)
Maybe I’m being too cynical. Let’s take a look at the wording of Michael Gove’s new definition for clues.
It describes extremism as “the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance”.
OK. That’s a pretty big umbrella.
It’s a big leap from ‘violence’, which some of us were under the mistaken impression was already outlawed, to ‘intolerance’. A wholly subjective term which is obviously open to interpretation, and can be made, by bad faith actors, to mean pretty much anything.
It’s easy to imagine how our increasingly authoritarian masters will use such a definition to further marginalise, delegitimise, and even outlaw heterodox opinion.
This might seem like scaremongering. An exaggeration of the danger this new definition poses to our free speech rights.
But when it comes to overreach, there’s already a chilling precedent.
The government’s anti-terrorism task force Prevent has already put such ‘far right’ and potential insurgents as Jacob Rees Mogg, Douglas Murray and Rod Liddle on their watchlist.
You don’t have to be a fan any of them, but whatever you think of Tory Lord Snooty, Rees Mogg, he’s hardly Mohamed Atta.
Meanwhile familiarity with works by such seditionists as CS Lewis, Adam Smith, and Peter Hitchens marked you out for suspicion. As did possession of books by gremliny tree bore J.R.R. Tolkien.
‘The new tighter definition of non-violent extremism will be used by civil servants and academics to identify and publish a list of both Islamist and far-Right groups.’
Oh that’s fine then. Civil servants and academics are well known for their open and fair minded consideration of Conservative, and anti-establishment views.
As the Overton Window moves ever leftward, more and more hitherto mainstream views are deemed ‘far right’, and if not exactly ‘extremist’ then certainly questionable, suspect, beyond the pale.
It’s like the cultural equivalent of ‘fiscal drag’. A slow destructive process, which will inevitably end up purging society of some pretty run of the mill opinions, and ensure that only unquestioning orthodoxy remains.
We are throwing away our human capital, racing to make our economy smaller, our horizons narrower, and opportunities fewer. While we misallocate our limited resources, frittering them away in order to expand our bureaucracy, our rule books and our state.
Our best and brightest are busy squandering their talents, working out ways to divide, redistribute, jealously horde, and police an ever shrinking pie.
Rather than considering for a moment that a better solution might be to stop, put their big brains together, and build a pie factory.
Norman Rose, commando and nuclear physicist, died in March 2024. He was 98.
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LSO.
So good (because it's all true).
Pre rabbit-hole, when I read the DT, I always read the obituaries, because they were full of stories of the extraordinary lives of people you'd never heard of. They filled me with hope for humanity, that marvellous people were walking around unacknowledged; that what the predator class see as an anthill of 'useless eaters' was actually a treasure trove of human potential.
“the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance”
Could be an own goal - I reckon climate change / net zero fits the bill, or any criticism thereof :)