Am I Efficient? Nope.

Does that mean I should be terminated?

by

The whole DOGE thing is quite fascinating. Most agree that eliminating waste at any level is a good idea. Waste elimination is exceptionally positive when it comes to spending public funds since “public funds” means “the taxes you and I pay [unless you are outrageously wealthy, in which case you weasel out of paying any and still get government subsidies].”

But . . . is efficiency the proper word here to describe what needs preserving vs what needs eliminating in the US governmental world? As these decisions are made on a governmental level, we must acknowledge that they will also infect and influence the larger US culture.

One big caveat here: no matter what measuring stick people use to determine who continues to be employed and who does not, we really need to stop saying, “he/she has been terminated.”

Truly, to “terminate” someone is a genuinely chilling idea. Folks, firing people from their jobs is NOT terminating the person but their employment. If we were terminating them, we’d be killing them. Termination of all who think differently is, of course, the end goal of all who aspire to unaccountable dictatorship, so perhaps it is the proper terminology after all. But that’s another story.

And that brings me back to efficiency as the only measuring rod.

Measuring widgets to determine efficiency

The Oxford Dictionary describes efficiency “as achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.” It sounds great, but we must examine the contextual meaning of “productivity.”

When we measure productivity only by the number of widgets coming off the assembly line (and if you’ve never seen the classic movie The Wheeler Dealers, it’s a must-see now), numbers are all that matter.

For example, the most efficient factory will invest massive sums in robots. These robots, primarily run by overseas computer engineers, cost less to employ. This method eliminates as many US human beings as possible, efficiently reducing payroll and overhead. Everything is standardized, uniform, and devoid of creativity.

A “Survival of the Fittest” world

Let’s imagine how a highly efficient world might work. A good place to start is by examining the nature of evolutionary change. We’ve all heard the phrase “the survival of the fittest” to describe this process, which involves various forms of life adapting to fluctuating, generally uncontrollable outward realities.

Because all life forms we are familiar with exist on a planet that is itself alive, subject to outside forces and thus constantly altering, being adaptable and finding new ways to survive is necessary, even though it inevitably leaves the weakest and least adaptable behind.

With the development of agriculture, people achieved freedom from a nonstop search for adequate sustenance. They began to gather in larger groups. More free time led to significant advances in learning, understanding and prosperity. Especially in societies influenced by classical religious thought, the ethos grew that caring for the weakest and least adaptable would be the hallmarks of just and merciful societies.

In other words, the more sophisticated and socially oriented humans moved away from the “survival of the fittest” as the means to survival. Instead, we began to acknowledge other characteristics as equally or even more valuable than unusual strength, often coupled with unusual brutality.

These more valued characteristics included the willingness to put energy into art, music, literature and philosophy and the openness to new ideas. We became freer to love more deeply and offer care to the helpless, the vulnerable, and the outsider. We discovered the joy of recognizing strengths in different cultures and varying ways of perceiving the world.

This kind of society, one that recognizes the need for survival but also incorporates higher values, is not necessarily efficient but does move toward greater effectiveness.

An efficient society must kill off those weakest and more vulnerable or, at the very least, leave them behind as fodder for the ever-hungry predators.

An efficient society would eliminate nursing homes or NICU facilities. The frail elderly and others who are generally incapable of handling their daily tasks and unable to contribute to economic strength? Then, it's time to die. Here’s a bottle of pills for you. Or a supply of plastic bags if you prefer.

Infants born prematurely or with congenital disabilities needing expensive surgeries and extended care? Let them die—it costs too much to intervene, especially without an assured return on investment.

Efficient, numbers-only people will ration high-quality medical care to ensure its availability only for the proven producers. Efficiency mandates will eliminate educators and programs devoted to working with special needs children. Accommodations like wheelchair ramps, braille instructions in elevators, hearing-assist devices, special eye-glass prescriptions, extra-wide seats or seat-belt extenders, reserved parking spaces and options for artists, musicians, researchers, gardeners and philosophically oriented essay writers like me will disappear.

More, pregnancy and child-rearing are notoriously inefficient operations that suck time and energy out of women, except we can’t use the word “women” in this efficient world now, so perhaps “breeding units” would work better.

Frankly, the very act of offering one’s body for the creation of another human life and then devoting untold [sleepless] hours toward the care and nurture of helpless offspring may be the least efficient possible use of time and energy.

Efficient child-bearing/rearing methods will move to artificial insemination, carefully selecting for needed types of productive workers. Gestation will occur in artificial wombs, and robot caregivers can take over from there. However, since this would mean the end of any mentally or physically healthy human beings—see here and here for some information on what happens to children raised without love and human voice/touch—an efficient society will set aside a subset of otherwise useless former breeding units (Thank you, J.D. Vance!) to handle those unsavory and energy-draining tasks.

Hmmm . . . it seems to me that this world was first imagined nearly one hundred years ago by Aldous Huxley. Is it time to bring this to reality?

In other words, shall we destroy humanity or embrace inefficiency?

The creative process: inherently inefficient

The creative process is, by nature, anything but efficient. This movement toward making efficiency the highest goal is ultimately destructive to everything that makes us human. Instead, the energy expended in creating art, music, philosophy, religious thought, and literature all combine effectively to help nurture healthy and productive humans.

Scientific research leads to far more dead ends than glorious “eureka” moments, but true breakthroughs cannot occur without those “inefficient” dead ends.

Developing new and innovative ways to do business, construct buildings, manufacture and transport goods, feed humanity, fight diseases, and promote peace and justice demands inefficiency in methodology, for it is from inefficiency that creativity springs.

I garden for pleasure, for mental, spiritual and physical health, and for the sake of creating beauty. It’s a slow, often painstaking process. Unexpected weather events, plant viruses, or pest invasions can, and frequently do, destroy days, even months of work.

It would be more efficient to pave our yard or cover it with artificial turf and plant bundles of plastic flowers and shrubs in pots, all equally efficiently manufactured by robot-led processes that increasingly poison our environment.

But those hours in the garden both feed my soul and provide shelter and space for insects, birds and other forms of life. As the natural world around me grows in health, my soul savors its fullness and reconnection with the Holy One.

All this frees me so I can, and I do, offer that goodness to all around me.

In an efficient world, nothing I have ever done matters. Those years of being pregnant, of offering my body for the sake of those new lives, for child-rearing, for loving my large and growing family so much it often hurts, for study, for teaching and pastoring (you want to talk about a non-efficient profession!), for caring for my elderly parents through their dying processes, and sitting at the bedsides of many others helping them through the end-of-life decisions, of writing about my life issues to help others make sense of theirs, of being the beloved wife to my adorable husband who, as I readily acknowledge, efficiently manages our financial life, while I effectively manage most everything else so he can do his work: none of this has value in an efficiency-only world.

In other words, by that measurement, I should indeed be “terminated,” and I mean that word to the fullest extent.

But I will stand toe-to-toe with anyone who declares that my life, my family, my loves, my work, and my service, all utterly inefficient, have not had an effective impact.

Clean up the government? By all means. But let’s use a far more accurate measurement: We must determine our purpose as a nation and, slowly, with much debate on all sides of the arguments, determine the most effective means to achieve it. In the process, we must forgive our mistakes and learn from them.

And if we genuinely want to do this right, quit going after the little guy and concentrate on the big criminals who have the money to buy the politicians, members of Congress and the Presidency and to milk the US government, i.e., the money the rest of us have paid in taxes, to pad their pockets further.

Let us get our collective heads out of the sand and find the real waste.

Author and columnist, the Rev. Dr. Christy Thomas is a retired clergy member of the former North Texas Annual Conference, now the Horizon Texas Conference of The United Methodist Church.