The Evils of Efficiency

People are the greatest treasure of great men.

A fundamental feature of most ancient civilizations was the supreme value placed on good servants. When one empire conquered another, only the titular rival was killed or imprisoned, along with anyone who resisted the take-over. The court officials and imperial staff were always kept on as the rich resource of those who really understood how to make the most of the domain’s resources. Yes, it meant allowing them to conduct a little intrigue for their personal benefit, but only outright spying against the new regime would be punished.

Business managers who have lived a long time have learned a 10% loss from waste and petty graft is the cost of doing business, and will not harass their employees over it. This plane of existence is irreparably broken, and there is a built-in ratio of friction when handling material goods and services. In the context of this life the numbers may vary, but corruption is not inherently harmful against the opposing force of enslavement. The best we can hope for includes some loss of efficiency, and demanding more is inhumane.

Without apology I clothe discussions of “the best we can hope for in this world” in terms of God’s Laws and the moral nature of Creation. It is not necessary to buy my parable to understand the truth. Balaam told Balak you can’t always get what you want. Balaam did not worship Jehovah (by any other name), but knew what He required, knew how things worked, because he was acquainted with the nature and power of the higher realms. While the Exodus narrative does not tell us, we learn later Balaam did give Balak something he could use against Israel, a way to get them in trouble with their own God. It involved tempting them to transgress the moral order of things.

The ancient world in which those men lived understood the necessity of valuing people, if not human life in general, over inanimate property. Our modern Western obsession with squeezing the last inhuman drop of efficiency from our contrived systems for material profit is the very thing which will destroy us. I taught Economics long enough to know the entire intellectual frame of reference is flawed, in that we naturally assume any economic decision which does not maximize the measurable economic efficiency is somehow wrong. Economic choices driven by non-material considerations are regarded as superstition, something less than the best wisdom of logical reasoning. Yet outside this brief flash of time we call Western Civilization, everyone else knew better than that. Those other civilizations were not primitive or ignorant; we are.

If all you have for your reference point is this plane of existence, you have nothing in the first place. When Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judah, he wisely conscripted the best and brightest of Judean nobility for his own court staff. Daniel was not merely a prophet who occasionally got some useful secret whispers from God; he was incredibly wise and discerning. He lived on that higher plane, and his superiors knew it. When the Medo-Persian Empire managed to oust the Babylonian imperial family, they kept Daniel on staff. They knew a good servant when they saw one.

And down to the smallest petty nomad sheik of that region of the world, they always valued people over tangible assets. When Abraham defeated the Mesopotamian alliance and rescued the plunder and people of Sodom and Gomorrah, the rulers were content to simply have their people returned. The property could be replaced by people who knew the area and how to profit from the resources. Abraham could have neatly rescued only his relatives, or simply bartered for them. No one in that land would blame him. But Abraham lived on a higher plane, and even the wicked residents of the Dead Sea Pentapolis were people who deserved a chance to turn away from their evil until moral considerations from the higher plane said otherwise — God alone gets to choose such things. It was not as if the Sodomites were ignorant of the moral laws of this plane, because they knew people were more important than property.

The business of the 8th and 10th Commandments was not about property rights, but a matter of respect for other people and their prerogatives. In case you were wondering, the ancient Hebrews would snicker at the notion of intellectual property. God’s Laws reject the concept. The temporary advantage of the Philistines over Israel, keeping the secrets of iron-working at the beginning of the Iron Age, was regarded as unjust oppression. Even the business of owning real estate was in the context of “mine to use for some purposes,” not an absolute control with denial of passage and such. Those “NO TRESPASSING” signs are an offense to God. Such total ownership would be offensive, because it’s unfair to other humans, as God defines fairness.

Efficiency as commonly understood in our modern times is an offense to God, a rejection of His values. In other terms, it an offense against the moral order of this universe.