I’ve been reading on average around two books a week since childhood. I started at age 3 with Enid Blyton novels, rose to Dostoievsky at 13, and have continued ever since. If I live out the average lifetime, though, I will have read only 7,500 books when I enter the pearly gates.

But will St Peter be impressed? If I were the old gatekeeper I’d point out that more that 100,000 new titles are published each year in Britain alone. Add on the rest of the world, and each year’s totals to date, plus the sum of all ancient manuscripts and codices, and you’ll probably arrive at an eight or nine-figure number.

A mere 7,500 is so piffling as to be almost worthless. Strip out the Enid Blyton’s and the Richmal Crompton’s of childhood reading, plus all the other useless tomes and trashy novels read since, and really, old boy, you have virtually no education at all!

I was set to musing on these depressing thoughts after a visit to Waterstones, the biggest bookshop in town yesterday. I was determined to buy a really great book to read over the weekend. After a quick survey of the latest pulp fiction, the newest sensational stuff from the Dan Brown brigade, the huge pile of “Jesus was a Married Martian” nonsense, I passed on with some relief to the non-fiction shelves.

First, history … well, what could possibly be new or fresh in that? Even Andrew Roberts has been reduced to rewriting Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Philosophy, the same — I’d read the latest Roger Scruton, so not much there. Science? Nah … same ole, same ole. Black ole, to be precise.

But technology, surely, must have something new to say? You are joking? All the computer books are way out of date. There was even a large, floppy volume on Microsoft Office 1997 — a bestseller still, apparently.

In the entire bookshop there wasn’t a single title that I hadn’t already flipped through or actually wanted passionately to read. I was bookless in Waterstones.

So despite the woe-begone state of my lifetime’s reading score and my determination to improve it, the world of print publishing couldn’t provide a single instance of something I wanted to read. How crazy is that?

The truth is, there are only so many subject areas you can write a saleable book about. In my years of avid consumption I had apparently exhausted all of them. So, my pifflingly small reading total compared to the billions of titles available is actually much better than old Peter might think. Some shrewd background selectivity has been driving it for years.

I’d obviously extracted the core of human knowledge and speculation and I’m now destined to go round in circles over the same ground for the rest of my days. There must be some Greek god who matches that description.

Where does that leave the content business? It reveals that content, both online and offline, is constantly repeating itself with massive overduplication of material and ideas. Sure, things get shifted round a lot, as in a kaleidoscope, but the central core of all types of content is just a dance of elements trying to present old material as new and original.

Of course, old principles need to be interpreted anew for succeeding generations, but the tidal waves of content we’re now faced with on a daily basis is largely fraudulent.

How often do you get that sinking feeling when viewing your feed reader? Deja vu always overwhelms me when I look at techmeme. Despite being the best snapshot of tech news on the internet, anything but short-term memory reveals the cyclical nature of so-called news.

The fact is, it doesn’t matter if you don’t read everything. It doesn’t matter if you don’t read 0.01% of everything. Education is choosing what to retain and making sense of it. The other 99.99% recurring is largely superfluous.

From an author’s point of view, the situation is not encouraging. Given the enormous duplication of effort, how much more can content expand, especially on the internet, while retaining value that can be collected by the creator?

We’re already seeing content come close to zero price in many areas. And with copyright laws getting ever looser, newer ways of digging gold from them tha’ mountains of content are urgently needed.

As I write, Valleywag is reporting that “AOL is closing down a slew of smaller blogs it bought from … Jason Calacanis”. Only three WeblogsInc titles are really profitable : Engadget, Autoblog and Joystiq. The rest are not profitable enough. Nick Denton, the writer of the piece remarks : “I also have an aesthetic aversion to those blog networks which measure success in the quantity of titles rather than the quality of the writing.”

I think we can all agree on that.

Warning : This is totally off-topic and is inspired by yesterday’s news of the rapidly disintegrating state of the British Home Office under Tony Blair’s pitiful administration.

It’s not a rant though. Promise. Just a look at the Panglossian fantasies that drive British policy nowadays : “Everything for the best, in the best of all possible worlds”.

The UK Home Secretary has said that the Home Office is “not fit for purpose”. It has lost control over almost every aspect of the criminal justice system, the prisons and immigration.

The root of the problem is the Blairite Human Rights Act, passed in jubilant self-congratulation in 1998, plus a delegation policy that places key people in post by political persuasion rather than competence. Both break the fundamental principles of Superdemocracy.

The idea of a Rights Society is all the rage in Labour-dominated Britain. It sounds good. We all have defined rights which mean we’re free, yes?

NO.

Freedom is not about giving everyone and anyone “rights” without checks and balances. Many of the rights we have we make for ourselves, through hard work and merit. Merit brings us wealth and allows us the freedom to enjoy the best things in life without too much worry or disturbance.

Basic rights, like equality before the law, God and the ballot box, are the rights of all citizens in any democratic country. Some of these rights should not be given to anybody who simply turns up on its shores. Civil liberties don’t travel beyond the jurisdiction that defines them.

Cast these rights liberally around to everyone on the planet and they will act as magnets for mass, unstoppable immigration of people who know only two words of English, “My rights”.

The so-called Human Rights Act allows anyone who enters Britain full rights to the treasure of its citizens, even as far as mandatory housing, health care, schooling, legal bills, and a “salary” for life. Since newcomers have not earned these “rights” they just impoverish the country’s citizens, without adding a jot to the nation’s well-being.

Of course, if you say that, you risk sounding rather mean-spirited. That’s the weapon of choice in destroying the truth in this case. The government has woven new taboos against challenging any of its equality agenda, even embedding them into statute law. Never mind that this kind of equality : equality of attributes, needs a totalitarian regime to enforce, you are stigmatized if you complain.

The reason for this Home Office-induced catastrophe is that decisions are taken by greenhorn, starry-eyed politicians and their political appointees, who see themselves as benefactors of mankind — albeit with other people’s money and lives. They have no idea of the complexities of the case, nor of the huge response they are initiating.

Moreover, nearly every agency in Britian is now run by knee-jerk Blairites who act according to political received opinion rather than careful, dispassionate, and expert consideration of the situation.

Merit is the way out of this morass of incompetence and waste. A common cry in England now is “Nothing works anymore”. That’s because the “All shall have prizes society” is run by dolts and slackers, as could be predicted before it was imposed on us.

When each critical decision, no matter how small, is taken at the point of maximum competence, near enough, everybody in the community benefits in an cumulative way. The small increments of improvement mount up over time, completely transforming the landscape and the way it operates. That’s Superdemocracy.

So-called Human Rights are a way of moving resources from the competent who have worked for them, to the incompetent who have not. It depletes a society’s level of expertise and tilts the slope of impoverishment ever more steeply downwards.

The Rights Society should be replaced with Superdemocracy, especially in the public sector where chaos finds its natural breeding ground. The Home Office is just one example that needs to be addressed in haste.

For our first Saturday treat we have a real corker. It’s Roger Scruton’s piece in today’s Times (London) about the need for conservation in politics. As a life-long Burkean, this article says it all for me :

Caring for one’s country – a naturally green aim for a conservative party

Roger Scruton’s new book, A Political Philosophy, has just been published by Continuum.