Our Purpose Isn't Efficiency

Last week was a statement of purpose for The Reframe the next however many weeks or months, to wit: supremacist fascists have taken over the government of the United States, and we'll have to pay attention to them in the same way that hostages have to watch their kidnappers, and for the exact same reasons. But the truth is that supremacist fascists have taken over in large part because the traditional lies that animate supremacy are so deeply embedded in the American psyche that they took most of us hostage in our own minds long before this latest gang of murderous goons and bullies took oaths of office they had no intention of honoring. These traditional embedded supremacist lies caused (and cause) so many of us to extend limitless grace and benefit of the doubt to supremacists who have shown they deserve none of either; they've caused so many of us to fail to see supremacist bullies as a danger; they've caused so many of us to seek points of agreement with those who only want to kill and steal and destroy. And so, aided by the national spirit, supremacists fascists rose to the top of the national soda like so many poisonous bubbles.

It's time for us to reframe the American spirit by renewing our own minds. It's time to demolish the foolish notions we picked up along the way. So today I'm thinking about one way we can do that. I'm thinking about what we talk about when we talk about efficiency.

We're going to talk about dishwashers, and slave prisons, and the U.S. Postal Service, and (unfortunately) Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

And then I want to discuss our damn fool notions around efficiency—a phrase I enjoy because it is both accurate and because one can imagine Mark Twain saying it from a porch as he sips a mint julep in a crisp white suit.

Let's talk about efficiency.

We talk about efficiency a lot these days, if you haven't noticed. A lot of times the word is deployed without much care to what it means, so let's not make that mistake here.

Simplified, "efficiency" is when a machine or system of some sort produces the same output with less energy or less waste, or both. You get more for less. Nice, right? Who wouldn't want efficiency? Efficiency is a great big deal, and a good thing too, maybe, as long as it helps us. In fact we have a whole (fake) federal department that (we're told) was made specifically (and illegally) to monitor and foster efficiency, so surely efficiency must be on the rise in this young and foolish country of mine. Good times!

And of course, American workers have been getting more and more efficient, too, while real wages have remained flat for decades. So employers are getting more for less. Isn't that nice?

Like American workers, dishwashers have been getting more efficient over the years. Your dishwasher, which is a machine, uses less water, and less electricity, which burns less energy at the plant that creates your electricity, and therefore less toxins are pumped into the atmosphere. Meanwhile maybe your factory, which is a system of machines, stops using inefficient and unsustainable forms of generating energy, like coal or gas, and switches to sustainable modes, like solar or wind. This makes the atmosphere, which is a system that is part of a system called "the environment," do what it does, which includes creating a mixture of gasses that are just right for humans to breathe, and venting heat in a way that makes summer nice and pleasantly toasty for human bodies, rather than an unsurvivable oven, and many other things that makes your human body, which is itself a system, more efficient at a very convenient process that we humans call "living."

Me, I'm a fan of living. Perhaps you're the same. We all have our hobbies.

And many other appliances have been getting more efficient, too. Electronics and refrigerators and oh god no end to it. A big reason for this increase in efficiency is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its broad focus on regulating energy efficiency in the name of protecting that environment I just mentioned. And the EPA has a program called Energy Star, which has been very effective at making appliances more efficient. If you click through the link in the next paragraph, you'll learn that "the program has reduced energy costs by more than $500 billion and prevented about 4 billion metric tons of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions," so efficiency aficionados can and should rejoice.

Well you'll never guess what, but our Federal Branch of Sabotage Destruction and Punishment (the FBSDP is known more commonly as "the executive branch," but I prefer calling things what they are) is getting ready to shut the EnergyStar program down.

I can hear you now: What? Shut it down? Even though they love efficiency? I don't believe you. It's true, though. And it's not just the Energy Star program, either: if you listen to the cosmically ignorant head of FBSDP, you'll learn that he and his thuggish gang of stooges are opposed to pretty much all such programs, and regulations in general, and anything that fosters efficiency of our systems, whether as small as a toilet or a range stove or as big as the planetary ecology. They're even opposed to report of catastrophic inefficiencies within our global systems. They're almost reflexively opposed to more efficient and replaceable forms of energy, too, far preferring to artificially prop up and favor the less efficient less replaceable ones.

It seems as if this gang of fascist bullies have a different idea of what "efficiency" is, and what it is for.

Appliances have been getting less efficient, too, by the way. They break far more quickly. They are designed to break more quickly. It's called "planned obsolescence," and it came about because corporations learned that if appliances last a long time, then you can't sell as many of them, and profit gets harder to achieve. So we have more efficient machines in the micro that are less durably made, making them less efficient in the macro, yet our allegedly efficiency-obsessed government does not attack at the point of inefficiency, but specifically and aggressively at the point of efficiency.

And I can't help but notice that the point of inefficiency helps grow corporate profit, while the point of efficiency does not. So it seems that this different idea of "efficiency" might have something to do with efficiency of profit over any other efficiency, including the efficiency of preserving and enhancing human lives. On the other hand, the Federal Branch of Sabotage Destruction and Punishment is engaged in all sorts of policies right now seemingly designed to demolish and sabotage the national economy as fast as possible, which probably will eat into corporate profit. So, while corporate profit is observably more valuable than human life, our gang of fascist thugs may have a different idea of what "efficiency" is, and what it is for.

Let's talk about our slave prisons. I call them "slave prisons" because the prisoners are put to work there and for their services are paid a pittance—a slave wage—if anything. Slave prisons have been growing exponentially over the last several decades, as more and more crimes have been described to make it illegal to be a person in desperate situations, while also passing policies designed to put more and more people into increasingly desperate situations that make committing those crimes an inevitable part of existing. This has swelled the populations of our nation's proud for-profit prisons, which enough sure do profit from imprisonment, and sure do offer the closest thing to free labor the market can offer—or did, anyway, because these days we've opened some new offshore franchises in El Salvador, and our nation's Kidnapping & Enslavement squads have been hard at work kidnapping away in our churches, courtrooms, hospitals, and schools, filling these new offshore slave camps at a furious speed intended to make a certain kind of white person called "a conservative" feel safe and glad.

I should note that our nation's Kidnapping & Enslavement squads are more commonly called "law enforcement" or "police" in our media and popular culture, but since kidnapping & enslavement is what the police were formed for in the first place, and kidnapping & enslavement is what they are doing, we'll just call them the K&E. We have a federal force known as ICE, which appears to answer exclusively to the FBSDP/national president, and they do most of the kidnapping (or at least that's the claim; they cover their faces and don't show identification). The police are local municipal hostile occupation squads, and mostly don't do a ton of kidnapping these days, but if you interfere with an ICE kidnapping, they'll sure enough interfere with you, because the people being kidnapped are bad, according to the kidnappers, and being bad means you deserve to be kidnapped and enslaved, and the kidnappers' word is good enough for our law enforcement branch.

So anyway, there's a fellow named Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He was kidnapped and enslaved earlier this year, but then it came out that he wasn't a bad guy, and the courts told the FBSDP president he had to return Garcia specifically, and also stop all this kidnapping and enslaving on the grounds that human trafficking is against the law, but it turns out the Federal Branch of Sabotage Destruction and Punishment is just as interested in sabotage and destruction of the law as they are in the sabotage and destruction of the economy and everything else, and so all they did was move Garcia to another slightly less concentration-camp-looking foreign prison, because while the white conservative is fully on board with kidnapping and enslavement on general principle, there are other types of white people among the American public, like the "moderate." The moderate has become very comfortable kidnapping and enslaving bad guys, but kidnapping and enslaving guys who aren't so bad is a bit less popular, particularly without due process.

And so Garcia was moved, and there came stories about the new slave camp to which Garcia was kidnapped, and about how pleasant it is, and how free of really bad people it is.

An inside look at the El Salvador prison where Kilmar Abrego Garcia was moved after supermax site

Gang members aren’t allowed at the penitentiary. The U.S. government has been ordered to facilitate the return of the man who the Trump administration has alleged is a member of MS-13.

NBC NewsDavid Noriega

And it all seems to be designed to make white moderates (and maybe even white liberals, many of whom have made themselves quite comfortable with our domestic kidnapping and enslavement gangs and our domestic slave prisons) more and more comfortable with the idea of prison camps, and more and more comfortable with filling them with kidnapped people who are not really bad. It's almost as if the story is designed to make the whole kidnapping and enslavement process, which currently makes white moderates feel endangered, make white moderates start to feel safe.

But wait, I can hear you asking. This is disturbing enough, but the topic is efficiency. What does this have to do with efficiency?

I'm glad you asked! What's interesting is that putting people into desperate situations and then imprisoning them for it is far less efficient than just taking care of people, in terms of money spent. The only thing that our corporate for-profit domestic prisons are efficient at is creating nearly free labor and getting a lot of money for it. And the only inefficiency in the free-labor-creating system that a for-profit domestic prison contains, it seems, would be this thing called due process—trials and evidence and juries and judges and sentences and so forth. So it would appear that whatever the definition of "efficiency" our goonish fascist leaders are working with, it doesn't involve the care for and thriving of human life and natural systems, but it does involve corporate profit, and demolition and sabotage, and kidnapping and enslavement. Which is interesting to a guy like like me, who enjoys living but is not so interested in being kidnapped or enslaved.

Let's wrap up by talking about the post office and (unfortunately) Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. We'll get Lutnick out of the way first. How to describe him? Think of a rich asshole, then change nothing about that picture. Got it? Good.

Anyway. Lutnick went out on the television airwaves to describe the Federal Branch of Sabotage Destruction and Punishment's new vision of jobs, where he said this:

"It's time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future. This is the new model where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life and your kids work here and your grandkids work here."

Howard Lutnick’s vision of ‘great jobs of the future’ looks a lot like the past

“The new model” that the commerce secretary is excited about looks an awful lot like the factory jobs that existed in the 19th century.

MSNBCSteve Benen

And if you are like me, you think to yourself, this is the grand vision, huh? Generation after generation performing manual labor in factories? No advancement for our children, no advancement for our grandchildren, just wave after wave us us.

And so I think we can name the white conservative/fascist/supremacist definition of efficiency.

The thing they want efficient is not machines, nor systems, nor anything else.

The thing they want efficient is us. Human beings. Us. They want to get more from us and they want to pay less. They want to pay us nothing, if they can, and when you combine that realization with awareness of all the systems of kidnapping and enslavement they are building, and the deliberate sabotage and destruction of our economy, you might start to realize that they're paving the road to get us for nothing, too.

From the perspective of capital, enslaved is the most efficient thing a person can be. And, since our Federal Branch of Sabotage Destruction and Punishment is actively opposed to all other kinds of efficiency imaginable, I'd have to conclude that it is enslavement that it means when it talks about efficiency.

Who gets the benefit of all that efficiency? It's not us, that's for sure. I'd say it's probably the owners of the factory prisons, wouldn't you? And maybe the people who get kickbacks for filling them up? Yes, I think it's them.

They want to use us for as long as they can, and then dispose of us when we break. This makes the concept of planned obsolescence feel a lot grimmer, to me anyway. Think of that one next time you have to toss a dishwasher after five years' use, or three.

If you're like me, you ask: how did we get here?

The answer isn't that comfortable, I think. The answer is that we have believed the damn fool notion that we exist for efficiency, rather than efficiency existing for us.

Let's talk about the post office.

Another quick interruption to scroll quickly past before you continue the essay.

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This came across the old Bluesky feed yesterday. I'm not singling it out. It's as common as waves at a beach. There'll be another one along in a minute.

When I hear that the post office lost money, I think this: Good. We paid for it. Why on earth should it make even more money from us? Who would keep the money? Would we see it?

Somewhere along the line the idea took hold that every part of public life needs to be efficient, an efficiency exclusively expressed in terms of whether or not it makes money. "Makes money for who, exactly?" is a question that is never asked. If some government service doesn't make money, the notion goes, then it shouldn't exist. It should be shut down or given to somebody else who can make money with it. "Who exactly will give that person the money they make from it, and why should that person get more money for something we've already paid for?" are questions that are not explored, in case you haven't noticed.

Cousins: the money the Post Office spent came from us already. It is used to provide an insanely valuable service to us. And we could say that about any number of other things that provide massive value that we already paid for: libraries, schools, parks, fire departments, roads. And it could be true of any number of other things that would provide massive value: health care, housing, colleges, universities, more schools, more parks, more libraries. Why would we not want that? Why would we want to sell all of that off to create profit for somebody else?

Meanwhile, I don't know who gets value from a stealth bombers, or from kidnapping and enslavement squads, but I know it isn't you or me or any the rest of us.

Government is about the organization of society, and society is just all of us. It's a way of harnessing all of the sustaining and exponentially generative value that we humans create just by living in proximity to one another.

Somewhere along the line we let the fool notion take hold that our society is a corporation and everything it does must generate profit for a group of shareholders, and I think this fool notion needs to be demolished forever; the government is us and it is ours. We own it and the services are the profit it generates for us, if we demolish the services somebody else is getting the dough and sure as hell ain't us, and they sure as hell don't have our best interests at heart.

Listen to me:

Our profit from the post office is the post office.

Our profit from a library is the library.

Our profit from a school is the school.

And our profit from our lives is life. Our life. Ours. Think of how hard we work, and how proud we've made ourselves of working that hard. Think of proudly we proclaim that we've given so much of our precious energy and value to somebody else, and how proudly we announce that we're giving more and more of it for less and less. Think of the ways we've been told to make machines of ourselves, and all the ways we do it as if that's the way it should be.

And think of Mark Twain, sitting on the porch. What a damn fool notion, he snorts from beneath the snowy thatch of his magnificent mustache, which he then drenches with a nice long soak in brisk and minty julep.

It's time to un-kidnap our minds. It's time to become something other than efficient, which is a wonderful thing for a machine or a system to be, and can be a wonderful tool for a human to harness, but is a terrible and enslaving purpose for a life. It's time to realize that efficiency is a property for humans to use, humans are not for it to use. It's time to realize that human society is not a corporation, and we are not its employees, and that its profits are ours.

The question that rises for me is if our purpose isn't efficiency, then what is it?

See you next time.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the essay collection Very Fine People. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He wants to know if you've ever seen the rain.