Your peers in the business faculty love the word efficiency. When you sit in philosophy class and talk about Bildung—self-cultivation as the reason for education—they call it inefficient. When they take the short path to the lecture hall through the campus community gardens, they do so with Pythagorean expertise; they call it efficient. When their wives nag them for working late on Wall Street, they will call them inefficient. When they turn their backs to them in bed, your peers in the business faculty turn on their red-light facemasks and tape their own mouths shut. In the morning, they will take hammers to their faces and become both David and Michelangelo. They are perfectly symmetrical. Now, with modern medicine, it is more efficient than ever to be beautiful. It is supplemented in richly sweet collagen gummies. The testosterone your peers in the business faculty inject is the same testosterone polluting America’s children. They are saving America’s children from inefficiency.
Your peers in the business faculty will make great things. They will collaborate with brilliant developers and launch a fintech startup with a five-letter name, a vowel plucked from it, swindled away for your mind to fill the gap. They are so efficient they are stealing back the letters from language. They are in San Francisco, compressing it into “sf.” They are building a robust AI-integrated platform that will optimize your marriage. They are just a couple of guys trying to find actionable solutions to real-life problems. Their carefully-programmed algorithm will scrape through years of domestic life and develop measurable KPIs. This proprietary technology is being beta tested on everyone you know. Your grandmother is in on this. It’s doing wonders for her self-image in her old age. When you bury her, your mom will play a YouTube video of the call to prayer, which will be interrupted by a thirty-second unskippable life insurance ad. It will be magnificent, efficient.
Your peers in the business faculty are Effective Altruists. They accomplish everything with a measured and utilitarian approach. They are not technocrats, or morocrats, or accelerationists. They are efficient. They are going to crack open the trolley problem and save everyone all at once. They are thinking about you, about all of us, about the action that will help the greatest number of embittered and absent fathers. They are toiling against the societal sinking caused by our weakest. They are making babies and the elderly efficient. They are making the Experience Machine real, so that we can slough off our human selves with our feeble flesh and enjoy boundless pleasure. Indeed, the mere fact of suffering is not enough to necessitate that suffering gives life purpose; suffering is an inefficiency of the mind, as body fat is an inefficiency of the man. Your peers in the business faculty are on a Peloton bike. They are receiving their MR and MRS degrees, with a specialization in investment banking. They have found a way to read 200 books a year and extract the useful knowledge from them, doing away with the rest.
Your peers in the business faculty know how to finish things. They know how to close loops, fashion end-to-end processes, and manage B2B sales. They have written more for their Linkedin blog than you have written for yourself, than you have submitted to literary magazines. They can apologize to you without admitting fault, acknowledge and assure you they are doing everything they can to promptly resolve the situation. They will swiftly dodge your polemical questions, tell you to please hold while we retrieve your account details. Your peers in the business faculty are Nietzsche’s Übermensch, entirely self-made. They are paragons of the essential genders, transcendent, paradigmatic: True Adams/True Eves from the post-Biblical age. They are fundamentalist futurists. Their next project involves outsourcing the self into a field of pure energy. They will chip away the excess of identity and enter the realm of metaphorless forms. They will cultivate we strong few as soon as we are ripe enough. We will become orbs of angelic light, slipped behind the veil of ignorance, returned to the original position of our beings as stars, as fruiting bodies from slime molds, shaped like tiny, nacreous pearls.
