‘Inefficiency’ is an interesting word that gets used so often that we have stopped seeing what it is doing. From my perspective, ‘inefficiency’ is the name given to an unasked for departure from some norm or standard whose value the name giver is unable or unwilling to see.
An ‘efficient’ person is a person who has learned how to accommodate themselves to a system that has been created by human beings. A perfectly efficient person would know how to devote every last ounce of their energy to following the system’s rules, to doing what they’re told. A person who is inefficient is a person who either tries and fails or who just refuses to accommodate themselves to a system, whose energy, perhaps despite their best efforts to conform, is not entirely spent on following the system’s rules.
A number of problems with efficiency as a concept can be derived from this definition:
- There is no such thing as a perfectly efficient human being.
- Even if there were such a thing, that human being would essentially be unconscious because their sole occupation would be the unquestioning application of rules and if there is to be absolute efficiency there can be no role for consciousness because consciousness does nothing to expedite the process of rule following. Consciousness is inefficient, an unnecessary witness to what is going on.
- Even if there were such a thing as a perfectly efficient human being, that human being could never have created the system to which they have learned to accommodate themselves. The creation of a new system requires inefficiency because it requires us to stop following the old rules and to start doing something new. Even a very unsophisticated reading of human history would find it difficult to argue that there have not been any rule changes along the way.
- Efficiency is only efficiency from the perspective of the already existing system; that is to say efficiency and inefficiency are defined according to the values of whatever the system in question is. From the perspective of a capitalist system, a human being is ‘efficient’ to the extent that their actions contribute to the accumulation of capital. If it were possible to ask the capitalist system itself what it would prefer – a conscious human being or an unconscious robot – the system would choose a robot every time.
- The concept of efficiency has arisen as a way of describing the phenomenon of human beings failing to accommodate themselves to machine-like systems because they are not machines themselves. If the aim of the game were to serve the appetites of the system, as if it were some kind of rapacious god, then our job as human beings would indeed be to become robots. Those, like Ray Kurzweil, who believe that ‘technology will save us’ talk as though this is indeed the inevitable and desirable direction of travel. This view is entirely tied to a capitalistic definition of efficiency and growth. What is being saved here? Not the potential of the planet and its inhabitants for meaningful growth. What is being saved is the capitalistic system. Technology is going to help liberate us from our humiliating dependency on mother nature, so that we can live some kind of disembodied existence inside a computer network, continuing to consume things we do not need that leave us perennially dissatisfied.
If the aim of the game is not to accommodate ourselves to systems that we have created, it arguably is to accommodate ourselves to nature understood not as opposed to man-made systems but as including them and everything else. To this way of thinking the capitalistic system is a natural phenomenon in the same way as a tree or a flower or a cancer or the Roman Empire is natural. What all of these natural phenomena share is that they come into existence and then pass away. It’s worth pointing out in this regard that there are many trees whose lifespan predate capitalism by millennia; in Eastern California, a great basin bristlecone pine known as Methuselah is considered to be earth’s oldest living thing at 4,853 years old. Capitalism is generally considered to have emerged in its modern form about 500 years ago. So, if it is in the nature of all living systems, including ourselves, to come into existence and then pass away, like waves in the ocean, or clouds in the sky, then maybe at least part of our job is to accommodate ourselves to transitoriness and to enable to others to do the same.
‘To accommodate ourselves’ does not feel quite right because this rather suggests a closed system that pre-exists individuals and with which we must merely fit in. But nature is not a closed system and does not comprise closed systems. Nature comprises the totality of everything that ever has and ever will exist and this necessarily includes us and is infinite. This does not mean that it does not contain individuals who want systems to be closed, to just keep going as they are without coming to an end. This wanting is perhaps in itself an entirely an intrinsic feature of bring a living thing. Turkeys do not vote for Christmas! There maybe a sense in which, at least to begin with, every living thing wants to carry on living and growing indefinitely. But with the passing of the years the painful realisation dawns that death is almost the only certainty. We come to know that life is temporary, and this leave us with an existential choice. Perhaps we should try to convince ourselves that we can control the uncontrollable, and hide from the truth that all of it passes, by hoarding up the treasure of life like a miser hoarding gold, building monuments to our own vanity, chasing a fantasy of immortality? This fantasy of controlling the uncontrollable is encouraged by capitalist consumerism: it offers us the fantasy of a pain free existence, guaranteed by accumulated wealth, extended forever in an underground bunker in a cryogenic cell. This is the rather lonely and sad world of the super-rich, those who, in the terms of capitalism, have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Surely, it doesn’t take another Charles Dickens to come along with another Christmas carol, to expose the hollowness of these dreams. The alternative to chasing after fools’ gold, is to embrace our transitoriness, fully experiencing the unique qualities of each passing moment, each interaction with the universe, cultivating our own bodies and minds and the bodies and minds of those around us like gardens which will have a season of blooming and whose fruits will then tumble to the ground, rotting into the soil to feed future forms of life that will never cease to arise long after our bodies and even this earth have ceased to exist. Our job is to learn to give ourselves freely to the world. To be born, to feed gratefully on nature’s many gifts, to grow to the absolute limit of our unique potential and, to the extent we are able, to enable others to do the same, to blossom, to ripen, to bear fruit, and then to give ourselves back to nature in the form of our creations, our offspring and our own decaying bodies. If we make this second choice, if we stop trying to limit our growth by trying to fit ourselves into imperfect systems that we have created, round pegs into square holes, then inefficiency is revealed for the mirage it always was.
Inefficiency is not a fault located inside lazy humans who just need to try harder.
Inefficiency is the word given to something whose purpose has not yet been understood.
Yes To All Of It 