“Human life was so cheap. It was the most expendable of all military equipment. A horse or a mule had much more consideration paid to it than a soldier.”
Recollections of Lieutenant Ken Goodyear
Newfoundland Regiment, 1950s
This picture caught my attention at a Museum in St. John’s, NFL. It was how soldiers were viewed during the First World War.
Today, across high-risk industries, we are discussing human-centred designs and human factors. But in all of this, our view of the human being as the ‘most expendable of all equipment’ hasn’t changed much from the First World War.
An offshore vendor who flew with me from Aberdeen said, ‘you can have all the technology to improve safety, but you know what worries me, the first question they ask you when you get onboard is ‘how long will it take to get this job done.’
I’m not against measurement, we need to be efficient. The pressure is real. But in all of this, we remain completely silent about the ethics of the human person. When someone is hurt, or at the start of a high-risk activity, the first thing that preoccupies us is forms, checklists and time clocks. We can’t see the anxiety, nervousness and pain of the people. And what is more, this is not even part of our imagination.
In reviewing an accident report, I once spotted this sentence, ‘the able seaman was damaged, and so he was offloaded ashore.’
When I brought it to the investigator’s attention, guess what he said. ’That must have been a typo, I will get it sorted.’
???
The most heinous crimes of our society are not the ones that affect us. It is the ones that we have stopped noticing at all.
What ancient wisdom can teach us about managing talent
While Brahma creates the Cosmos and Shiva destroys it, Vishnu
