2023-12-15
I hesitated over the wording of this title - should I use "Employees" or "Public Servants"?
The distinction matters, because the former are primarily there to obey their masters in the (not inconsiderable) hierarchy of control, and the latter are primarily there to serve the people who turn up requesting help.
“No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon” - Matthew 6:24
Nor can you serve both the client and your employer unless their requirements are strictly aligned.
We must each form our own opinion on whether that alignment exists within today's NHS (now subsumed within the UKHSA - or maybe not, since it's not clear why a "non-departmental public body" is "sponsored by the Department of Health and Social Care", but let that pass).
So I chose to use "Employees" because it is they who are addressed by Dr David Bell in this article in the Daily Sceptic. I find his analysis interesting because it addresses the perceived failings of the global public health hierarchy (within which the NHS is effectively obliged to operate) in essentially spiritual/psychological terms which go some way toward explaining (but not excusing) the events of recent years.
We may be an employee, but as persons of independent spirit not subject to military discipline we are all responsible for our actions, and we don't have to remain within a system that flouts our personal spiritual guidance. To bow to its every diktat is to become knowingly complicit, and the Nuremberg Trials established that to simply follow orders is not a sufficient defence in court.
