Timothy Snyder's most recent book, On Freedom (NY: Crown, 2024) is at once insightfully philosophic and prophetic. If there's a single American census, it's probably that freedom is a core American value, if not our first core value, no matter how one defines America or themselves as an American. The other census, possibly, is that not everyone understand freedom the same way.
For these and a host of additional reasons, I highly recommend getting a copy and diving right in. Particularly if you think you have a good understanding of what freedom means -- as I did, you'll be enlightened into a deeper, clearer, and better understanding of freedom -- as I have been.
In explaining the kind of freedom that empowers and unites humans, while distinguishing the constructs that diminish and divide humans (especially when those are falsely labeled "freedom"), Professor Snyder provides a short section titled EFFICIENCY (p. 213-4). That section especially took me by surprise as I read and was compelled to reread it. Probably because it was published prior to the launch of the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) while it prophetically foreshadows the impact of DOGE actions that we are now watching unfold.
Give this short section a careful read. I suspect you'll appreciate Professor Snyder's insights.
EFFICIENCY
"Freedom requires care with words. When we are not careful, we drift along with familiar solecisms until we flounder on the shores of cliché. In conceding a word, we concede a concept, and in conceding a concept, we give up the thing itself. A key example is the concession of the word free before we even begin, as in free market.
A different example is our embrace of efficiency, a nonvalue that poses as the highest value. The word resets the conversation. It places why out of bounds, offering an endless how. Efficiency talk distracts us from thinking about purposes and hastens us instead toward a calculation regarding how quickly something is being done. Commercial medicine, for example, is efficient in extracting money from the sick. And that is how hospitals are judged by those who own them. Accepting profit as the goal, however, means forgetting about life and health.
Efficiency talk is dismissive of virtues, which are presented as hindrances to getting things done. Efficiency mavens sneer at values as “irrational,” a waste of time. Accepting this means supplanting the manifold commitments of people with the hidden purposes of those who hold power. Those who deploy efficiency jargon are actually demanding that you work for their purposes, which you are to accept as a matter of course. In this way, efficiency talk generates submission: we do not choose our end, but race to realize those of others.
History confirms that efficiency talk can lead a people away from freedom. Efficiency was the argument for shifting American manufacturing to China in the 1980s and 1990s. The result was the decline of freedom in the United States, and the rise of China as the superpower of oppression. In repressive conditions, workers in China make our cell phones and much else. They are instruments in a political project that has no purpose beyond the pleasure of their rulers, who (for example) find it efficient to sell the organs of murdered political dissenters and the hair of ethnic minorities imprisoned in concentration camps. Today's China, with its communist ideology and capitalist practice, is about efficiency.
There is nothing new about dehumanizing efficiency jargon. Efficiency was an argument for American slavery in the nineteenth century and for Nazi and Soviet concentration camps in the twentieth. Julius Margolin, in his memoir of five years in the Gulag, defined it as a place where no one would ask why? “Here there is no why,” said an Auschwitz camp guard to Primo Levi.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, Jews labored until the food they consumed was regarded as more valuable than the labor that could be extracted from them. Then they were sent to Treblinka to be gassed. The clearing of the ghetto was timed according to efficiency.
If efficiency is the only measure, then values evaporate and solidarity is impossible. Leib becomes Körper, to be used and cast away."
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Professor Snyder uses different German words for 'body' -- Leib and Körper -- to put a finer point on different states of existence. Leib can be understood as a living being in his or her sovereign or independent body. (This is how many Americans view ourselves. Whether we are correct in our view of ourselves is a different inquiry that Snyder artfully navigates throughout the book). Körper can be understood as simply being an object, whether the body is indifferently dead or alive.
Given humankind's long history of manufacturing enemies out of each other, Leib and Körper are important social and psychological distinctions to make and use when we consider whether our government is creating or destroying freedom. With these distinctions in mind, skim back over Snyder's insights about the historical ethic of efficiency when used by governments, and going forward keep this ethic in mind as you watch DOGE at work.
Reported logo of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)
Why? Because its our governments that create or destroy our freedoms. Also because capitalism done well needs the right kind of freedom to properly function. The right kind of freedom is the kind that empowers and unites us, as opposed to constructs we mislabel 'freedom' when in fact these diminish and divide us.
I wonder, what are your views? Is DOGE working with a Leib perspective or a Körper perspective? What do you think this mean for your freedom? What do you think this means for capitalism? What do you think this mean for your version of the American Dream?
Not sure? Let's schedule a call and talk.
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"This book merits close, sustained attention as a compelling move beyond both careless thinking and easy ideology."—Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary
"Better Capitalism is a sincere search for a better world."—Cato Institute
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