I’ve just finished re-typing out an anti-establishment play written by my friend. The issues brought up are familiar issues, questioning the practices of authorities. A tad bit angsty, but it hits the mark.

To administrate successfully is to inspire efficiency and productivity. But must efficiency and productivity come at the expense of what it means to be human? To be efficient and productive simply means to produce results at an accelerated pace. To be human is to experience – fear, hope, accomplishment, disappointment, joy, sorrow. Two seemingly separate issues, yet almost every anti-establishment book/play/novel seems to point its finger at efficiency in the de-humanizing of the masses, either as a cause or a symptom.

Let’s take the opposite of what efficiency means then. To be inefficient means to waste time away, to be unproductive means to fail to show results. It is possible to draw the link between idling time and emotions – after all, they say that a busy man is a happy man, and to be human means so much more than to be just happy. But my experience in the SAF has been far from that; I have a lot of idling time, but I feel like an empty vessel until I step past that green camp gate.

I don’t think the issue is as simple as cold efficiency versus warm emotion. On the contrary, I think efficiency can inspire emotion – the sense of achievement at the swift completion of a project, the cutting disappointment when a tried-and-tested measure fails, the joy in knowing that your team works cohesively, the (imagined?) similarities and sense of understanding one feels with one’s team in assessing their strengths and weaknesses. Efficiency itself can be an experience, a swift, explosive experience that can form and break human bonds, because efficiency manifests itself best when there is a bright, burning objective that everyone works towards.

Bright, burning objective.

An objective with no compromises, no shady edges. Bright, sharp, and burning. An objective that can fill one with the fire of idealism and hope, an objective that inspires altruism and decision that cuts through all doubt like a lance.

Authorities pervert this. They strive for efficiency without a purpose.

To produce something quickly without understanding the need to bears resemblance to that of a robot. An automaton does not feel accomplishment, satisfaction, or disappointment. Rather, an automaton takes delight in the processing of work rather than the outcome – he would rather the work continue on than to actually accomplish something, simply because he cannot envision what that end-objective is.

Most importantly, automatons are easy to control.

It is not because the automaton is coldly efficient, therefore he does not feel. It is because he cannot feel, cannot feel for the end objective, cannot feel for the partners he works with, cannot feel the altruism and determination of working, that is why he is coldly efficient. Cold efficiency is a symptom, a symptom of the perversion of the ideal that we were originally working towards.

And this is what any group seeking to retain control over its members does – it creates/perverts an ideal and forces its members to work towards it. The members try their best to believe in the ideal; after all, everyone seeks to be of some use to society in order to address the pangs of conformity. But such an ideal is not bright and burning, it does not have the fire of originality or urgency. It is synthetic, artificial, like flickering fluorescent lights.

To inspire faith without miracles, to create siege mentalities without battles.

God is to the Church, what War is to the SAF.