Is it because they don't get results that China forbids most voluntary social groups, forming with an eye to faith or citizenship? If our Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of assembly, is that mainly so we can form profitable ventures? Having lost a sense of the body politic, or the commonweal, or of neighborliness, and having construed all realities under the aegis of the market ("investing," "owning," "consuming," "getting results," "growing to scale"), we no longer even know how to name what we have lost. We consult therapists, take drugs, drink, maintain a positive attitude, tweet wise quotations, but we are still lonely and empty - anomie, as Durkheim called it in in a book on suicide. Even the most useless activity, like making paper flowers, planting a tree, playing hide and seek with a child, volunteering would do more to cure us than anything we can buy. Yet the organizations that provide these engagement opportunities are said to be "inefficient and ineffective" by the very dead souls most in need of resurrection.
When we become effective and efficient, most often we have done so by instrumentalizing one another. We don't cure that moral fault, that "necessary evil," by scaling it across the voluntary sector.
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