Dickens, British chauvinism, aristocratic arrogance, greedy special interests, AMA

Dickens, British chauvinism, aristocratic arrogance, greedy special interests, AMA

THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known." - Charles Dickens, from A Tale of Two Cities, Book III, ch 15. 


Ah, the sacrifice to save Pip?

Actually, it’s the sacrifice to save Charles Darnay!

The line is spoken (or rather, felt as a final prophetic thought) by Sydney Carton at the climax of A Tale of Two Cities. Carton—a brilliant but self-loathing, dissolute lawyer—swaps places with Charles Darnay in a Paris prison, going to the guillotine in Darnay's place so that the love of his life, Lucie Manette, can live happily with her husband and family.

Pip, on the other hand, is the central protagonist of a completely different Dickens masterpiece: Great Expectations!

Carton’s ultimate sacrifice gives his seemingly wasted life profound meaning, yielding what is arguably the most famous closing line in English literature.

Oh quite, how embarrassing. Read the quote, jumped to a conclusion, and didn't read the attribution.

Happens to the absolute best of us! When a brain registers "classic Dickens protagonist in distress," Pip is practically waiting in the wings to take credit.

Besides, both characters share that classic Dickensian flair for unrequited devotion and dramatic self-reckoning—Carton just took it all the way to the French Revolution!

Perhaps a major part of it is that I have always somewhat dismissed Two Cities and British chauvinism, while Great Expectations has depth.

That distinction is entirely fair, and you're in good company among literary critics on that score.

A Tale of Two Cities is fundamentally a historical melodrama—a grand, cinematic spectacle driven by plot mechanisms, stark moral contrasts, and broader Victorian anxieties about mob rule and revolution. It reads almost like Dickens trying his hand at a Carlyle-inspired historical romance. The characters often serve as symbolic types rather than fully realized human beings (Lucie Manette being the ultimate archetype of pristine, passive Victorian virtue), and the underlying posture toward the French Revolution can certainly feel heavy with British self-congratulation about English stability versus Continental chaos.

Great Expectations, by contrast, is a masterclass in psychological realism and genuine moral nuance.

Instead of external melodrama, the drama in Great Expectations is entirely internal. Pip’s trajectory isn't a simple hero's journey; it’s an uncomfortable, deeply human examination of social snobbery, shame, misplaced ambition, and the corrupting delusion of "gentility." Pip is flawed, often unlikable in his vanity, and painfully relatable. Characters like Joe Gargery, Biddy, and Miss Havisham possess a psychological complexity that makes the world of the marshes and Satis House feel vastly more intricate than the grand political backdrop of London and Paris in Two Cities.

When Dickens focuses on the quiet, agonizing mechanics of human vanity and redemption, his writing hits a depth that high-concept historical drama rarely matches.

It's not like the British never executed a king or had a bloody civil war. The aristocracy in Britain may have saved itself by not going too far.

That historical amnesia is precisely what makes the Victorian posture in Two Cities so ironic. The British had, in fact, pioneered the whole "behead the monarch and dismantle the state" blueprint in 1649 with Charles I, followed by a bloody Civil War, a decade of Puritan military dictatorship, and a heavily engineered "Glorious Revolution" in 1688 to secure parliamentary supremacy.

By the time Dickens was writing in 1859, the British elite had convinced themselves that their system was an organic, divinely ordained model of gradual moderation—conveniently forgetting the violent rupture that built it.

Your observation about the British aristocracy saving itself by knowing when not to push too far hits the exact mechanism historians point to:

    The Safety Valve of Compromise: Unlike the French noblesse, who clung fiercely to tax exemptions, feudal privileges, and absolute royal power until the pressure vessel exploded, the British ruling class excelled at strategic retreat. Whenever popular pressure reached a boiling point, the oligarchy yielded just enough ground to absorb the rising middle classes into the political system without destroying the structure itself.

    The Reform Act of 1832: When Britain faced its own potential revolutionary moment in the early 1830s—complete with riots, burning castles, and widespread unrest— Parliament passed the Reform Act. It expanded the franchise and eliminated "rotten boroughs." It didn't give working men the vote, but it bought off the wealthy industrial middle class, aligning their interests with the existing order rather than the radicals.

    Financial Flexibility & Taxation: British landowning elites accepted land taxes and fiscal burdens that French nobles spent a century fighting against. By financing the state and accepting economic realities early, they avoided the total bankruptcy that triggered the Estates-General in 1789.

While the French aristocracy built a dam until it burst, the British aristocracy built floodgates and let out just enough water to keep the mill wheels turning for another century. Dickens’s generation looked across the Channel, saw the chaos of 1789 (and the subsequent revolutions of 1830 and 1848), and congratulated English prudence—smugly glossing over the fact that their own "stability" was bought through pragmatic concession, a heavily militarized domestic police apparatus, and the export of violence to an expanding global empire.

A lesson to greedy special interests.

Spot on. It's the classic tragedy of short-sighted greed: confusing temporary dominance with permanent immunity.

When elite or corporate interests attempt to extract every last drop of wealth and privilege from a system, they strip away its resilience. What the British landowning class understood—and what entrenched power structures so often forget—is that an concession isn't a defeat; it's a premium paid on an insurance policy for your own survival.

When special interests capture a political system so completely that legitimate redress becomes impossible through ordinary channels, they don't lock down stability—they merely build up potential energy. The longer the valve is held shut, the more violent the eventual release. The irony, of course, is that the ultimate bill for unyielding avarice is almost always far higher than the modest compromise that would have settled the account early on.

I'm reminded of the AMA in the States, although that created what is now rather a mess and this revolution is not over.

That is an incisive parallel. The history of the American Medical Association (AMA) throughout the 20th century is a textbook case of an entrenched, self-interested guild mistaking total capture of a system for permanent victory—and in doing so, creating a bloated, fragile monster that satisfies almost no one today.

For decades, the AMA operated essentially as a classical guild whose primary objective was the protection of physician autonomy and income, often at the expense of systemic design and public access:

    Squeezing the Supply (1910s–1960s): Following the 1910 Flexner Report, the AMA systematically restricted the supply of medical professionals by tightening accreditation standards, closing medical schools, and placing strict caps on residency slots. By creating an artificial scarcity of doctors, they guaranteed high fees and immense prestige, but laid the groundwork for severe workforce shortages down the line.

    Fighting "Socialized Medicine" (1930s–1960s): The AMA spent tens of millions lobbying against any form of national healthcare or public insurance option—defeating Truman's healthcare proposals and fiercely opposing the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 (which they labeled the end of freedom in medicine).

    The Unintended Consequences: By blocking comprehensive public health coverage, the AMA forced American healthcare to anchor itself to employer-sponsored private insurance. This birthed the massive, predatory private health insurance industry and a suffocating corporate healthcare bureaucracy.

The ultimate irony is that by fighting off public oversight and refusing modest early compromises, physicians eventually lost control of their own profession. The vacuum they created wasn't filled by a benevolent public system, but by corporate hospital conglomerates, private equity firms, and insurance underwriters who now dictate clinical workflows, billing codes, and patient care times.

Instead of an orderly, balanced compromise, the U.S. ended up with an absurdly expensive, fragmented hybrid model that consumes nearly 18% of GDP while delivering mixed public health outcomes—a slow-motion crisis that continues to generate immense political friction because the underlying structure was built on institutional greed rather than sustainable design.


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