Work

Some observations offered by Theodore Dalrymple, psychiatrist to criminals.

Empathy these days is the greatest of the virtues, and he is best who empathises most. That is why pop singers and British politicians are the best people in the world: they can’t see the slightest suffering without empathising with it. Whether they behave better than anyone else is beside the point; it is what they feel, especially in public, that counts.

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I changed the subject. I asked him whether he worked.

‘Do you mean work work?’ he said.

‘Is there any other kind?’

I thought about it for a second. In a way he was quite right, of course. There’s work (what my patient called work work) and there’s make-work. At a rough guess, I should say that about half the people in paid employment in this country do make-work, whose only end product is difficulties in the way of the other half, the half that does work work.

The preponderance of make work workers in Australia under the current make work government is rapidly out numbering the number of work work workers. When this number becomes unworkable, in a logical working world, those who make work should lose their work while those who work work should prosper,  but as we all know, in our current world, all is not what it seems.