I totally feel the sentiment of this post but it raises an interesting question. Pretty much every job, especially nowadays, is linked up in some causal chain with helping a horrible company and/or horrible people do horrible things. At what point does it become acceptable? Is it about having more elaborate steps in between? What constitutes being further removed from doing harm?

I dropped the bomb I built the bomb I designed the bomb I funded the bomb I bought products from the company that funded the bomb I gave a discount to a friend who buys products from the company that built the bomb Etc.

Where do we start to consider employment ethical vs unethical? And to what extent? It seems like nothing will ever be 100% pure, but when do I get to stop feeling horrible about myself?

Not an abstract question, am job hunting

I have been thinking about something very similar for the last year or two now. Almost every white collar job I can think of has large portions of its workforce twisted into contributing to some fucked up aspect of the capitalist machine. The one that I think is really pernicious is the medical industry. I actually think it’s worse than defense in a way.

With defense there is kind of an upper limit to how much a company can probably charge for their product because how much more dead can the device make someone? On the medical side of things though, their products save or prolong people’s lives and the people in charge know that. They know that even if the improvement is only marginal, as long as there is one (and sometimes even if there isn’t one), they can probably extract as much money from people as they have.