When buying stuff, consuming media and picking jobs - where do you draw the line of considering something too evil? Among my peers there’s a lot of people who will actively avoid Nestle products, or who don’t eat meat. But none of them bats an eye at using Facebook or X. Nobody cares about using products made in China under awful working conditions. I have worked as a freelancer translating greenwashing for a few doubtful megacorporations, others work as lawyers or programmers supporting them.
Especially when it comes to work I find myself between a rock and a hard place. I have tried doing blue collar jobs instead to avoid this. My body tells me very clearly that it’s not a full time option for me and I have been running into the same problems of having to consider working for people who either get their money from evil megacorporations or and/or having to do stuff that actively causes some kind of harm, and being forever poor while doing so.
Where do you draw the line? How do you live your life in such a way that it doesn’t support evil directly or indirectly while being able to bring food to the table and pay the rent?
You can’t, or at least, you can’t not support evil in some way and exist in anything approaching normal society.
Everyone has their own tolerance for ethical things, which changes with their daily circumstances. Some people literally can’t afford to pay the extra that some such choices cost, or don’t have the time to search them out, or just don’t have the desire or will. And there’s several levels of this too - at least their core inner belief, and what they tell the world they do.
Remember, it’s all or something, not all or nothing.
For me, I look at each major category of things in my life a few times a year and ask myself how I can improve the ethics of my participation.
So for food, I have been vegetarian for years now, which is good, but lately I have been trying to cut out most processed foods. I also have started shopping more and more local, getting as much of my food as I can from local co-ops, individual sellers, and small local grocery chains.
For software, I’m FOSS everything as much as I can be. 100% Linux on my computers and servers, and I have replaced almost all my programs with FOSS alternatives. Even my phone doesn’t run stock Android.
For work, try to find places to work that roughly align with good principles. For instance, try to get a job at a credit union vs a traditional bank, or try to find an employee-owned establishment vs a traditional top-down corporation.
If you have to work for a corpo, try to pick one that has a good reputation with unions and workers, like Costco, vs Starbucks or Walmart.
Capitalism is a machine that grinds us all down, so don’t feel guilty about not being perfect. But do the best you can to reject it, little steps at a time. Always be improving, bit by bit.
I think its less about precisely where you draw the line, because that would assume you will be able to perfectly practice your ethics.
More important is that you are imperfectly practising your ethics, rather than not at all. Do you consider nestle evil enough to boycott but you haven’t found a suitable replacement for 1 product? That’s fine, boycott the rest of the products you would have got from them.
The harder you try to define the line, the harder it gets to actually implement in practice, which is the most important part.
Where I draw my line is a gut feeling more than anything. I won’t support meta or amazon or any of Musk’s ventures, I try to avoid nestle but they own half the food industry so if a product isn’t from nestle or one of the subsidiaries that I’ve memorised, I’ll consider it fair game most of the time. I’d probably look for a job elsewhere if my company started being evil but I wouldn’t leave until I had a job lined up.
I wouldn’t want to work in a prison as a nurse. Most nurses are psychopathic removed anyway, but prison nurses have the nazi dimension.
