Efficiency has many healthy applications when it is not treated as an ultimate good. But according to Ellul, technique does not easily abide other values. Efficiency tends to push out other considerations, or at least subjugate them. For example, it’s a wonderful thing to develop a more efficient way to farm so that you can provide more food for your neighbors, but when your concern for efficiency leads you to ignore the way a farming technique harms your neighbors or the environment, you are under the spell of technique.
