By design it benefits only a few.
Oh my goodness have I loved efficiency. I drank the Koolaid early, and developed my own flavors of fast-to-faster to boot. Weren’t we all taught that efficiency was good? From figuring out the fewest steps to produce a complicated meal, to ‘killing two birds with one stone’ and making art while walking my dog, efficiency is what has gotten me great jobs with loads of kudos to boot. Hey who wouldn’t be happy getting twice the amount of work for the same dollar? Ain’t that the American Way?
Efficiency enables us humans to do so much “more” with our precious time… and to produce so much more too. Figuring out new ways to do more faster can be downright addictive – and the praise we get is great. Just look at proliferation of AI as an example of our capitalist priorities. Efficiency on top of efficiency. Woo Hoo!
And it can be weaponized against people.
Efficiency is also value that, by its nature, only benefits a few, and it’s no where near on par with humanist values like charity, diligence, generosity, or community. Efficiency means someone gets more for less. If it’s not you enjoying that value, then it’s worth noticing who is. So enter into this mindset cautiously, if at all. Especially now.
Service as a mode of employment needs conscious bolstering against the tyranny of Function, Cost-cutting and Efficiency, which benefit only the few.
In the days of high technology, efficiency doesn’t support the average person much, even though that was the promise of it. Technology can rob a person of a long, slow and deep dawning of realization, or a multi-layered, loving and full-bodied immersion in a task. In a simple example, efficiency in the form of an app can rob an individual of a pleasant talk with a barista. In another example the efficiency of home computers and remote work can impair the emotional connections of functional communities. And if a person, or organization is expected to perform efficiency, then it’s likely because of an edict or expectation to do more with less – not because the People in it are valued for bringing their gifts forth from within.
From the early days of the industrial factory work and innovators like Henry Ford, efficiency is what made titans of industry, well, titanic.
Sure, efficiency can also help a family of a dozen kids function like a team, like by smearing peanut butter on 12 sandwiches at once, but if you think about it, efficiency in organizations is all about making the machine work better. But who is the machine benefiting? This is what needs a careful look in every situation. And it needs a really good look right now, with the Republican Administration putting two cost-cutting, power- greedy folk in charge of your country and your institutions.
The extreme cost cutting, job-hacking, and institutional dismantling that is happening under the Republican Administration is the result of a mindset that efficiency is ‘better.’ And many who voted for an authoritarian take-down of our institutions bought the notion without question. Afterall, the efficiencies of centralizing data, finances, technology, and decision-making along with dramatically cutting the number of people that run our democratic institutions and programs is wildly efficient. But it is not democratic. And it is not good for People.
Institutions hire people, who all bring human gifts to the table, the most important among government workers is loyalty to our nation’s Constitution and ideals, along with their own natural individual gifts. And government worker execute the tasks that the People have made happen over time and set up via Congress. The institutions were made by us to exist and persist.
Service-oriented people run our government programs, and yes, make paperwork and meet, and discuss, and develop to move us closer to the promise of our Constitution. They serve US, and this is profoundly important. People working in tandem toward a better place for all people IS democracy. And, it is not always efficient. And this is the point.
Democracy keeps people employed in meaningful, service-based work for the collective good. Autocracies based around technology utilize people to centralize wealth with a few. Or try to minimize people to irrelvant, or worse, in service to the wealth-making machine. In technocratic authoritarian governments, if people aren’t players, they are pawns, and pawns are expendable.
Unfortunately these past few weeks, efficiency (and it’s ugly cousin, cost-cutting) have been held up as more important than people, or service, or the collective good. But if you really compared one to the other: efficiency to say, service, I think most people would choose the latter.
“More for less” mentality when embraced, wins (more) for a few, and the average workers get worn out, and replaced, or just worn out.
Application: Just like voting is an action necessary to participate in democracy, understanding is an act to participate in democracy too. And that understanding is complicated, and requires a free media, critical thinking, participation in law making, institution preservation and the ongoing work of enlightened discourse, over time. THIS is the way forward: not a “boss.”
Understanding what we are facing right now is a complicated thing. But one thing we know, is that the Republican Administration is valuing your efficiency over your contribution, service, input, support structures and well-being. The programs getting hit demonstrate this clearly (EPA, National Parks, HHS, Dept of Education, Dept of State, Law Enforcement/ FBI and so on). While taking these things apart will surely save money, that money is not likely to make it to you.
So what can you do to fight back against this destructive tide, and getting taken on an overly efficient, somewhat dis-empowered ride? You can go slowly in the tasks of your daily life with full alignment, and you can think for yourself. You can also employ your intuition and your critical thinking, you can use your creativity in service of your own well-being, your fellow citizens’ and you can choose and protect an institution1 that also protects you.
- If you haven’t read it yet, please pick up a copy of Timothy Synder’s “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, which you can read in about 2 hours and gives practical actions (like protecting institutions) to stem the tide against authoritarian regimes. ↩︎
