Principle #5: Radical Self-Expression

"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." - Henry Ford

It was three or four days into Burning Man 2012. In 2013, the smoke from the California fires would insulate the air over the Black Rock desert in northern Nevada, making the nights frigid and the days sweltering. This year the air was cool and crisp. I sat at the hand-made wooden bar under our camp's (the Laughing Monkeys from Santa Cruz, CA) beloved awnings, letting the pre-nighttime bustle settle in around me. I’m still not sure if this guy next to me was an SC native or just a fellow BRC citizen, but the whiskey’s got us chattin’ it up. 2012's theme was Fertility, and September of that year was steeped in Occupy fervor. Turns out, bathing in anti-establishment sentiment is a potent catalyst in this culture, and yes, as surely as the sun, they had created a full-scale life-size model of the Wall Street high rises, embroidered hatefully with the names (now all having attained unequivocal Bernie Bro buzz-phrase status) of the real big ones: Chase, Fargo, Stanley, Sachs, B of A, etc. Then they burned it, of course. I wasn’t there, but I heard stories about people going absolutely nuts during the wall street burn, like running through the flames and shit. Going crazy. Anyways, the next thing I hear from the mouth of the guy next to me is “Oh, yeah, I’m a banker at Goldman Sachs” and then with a chuckle, “my employer's name is up there with the rest of them. Hey, I’m saving money, it looks great on a resumé, I’m happy, gonna keep doing it.” Then I immediately thought to myself, ‘It’s gonna be a fucking miracle if I can manage not to judge this guy.’

So here is my question: do we owe it to people who work for companies that do horrible things not to judge them for their jobs (excluding those who truly don’t have a choice)? That’s not to say ‘judge' in the sense of making an assumption about someone’s character, but drawing only from the truth that their daily energy is spent in service to (albeit indirectly) ethically dubious actions and behaviors. (To keep it simple, let’s just say stealing, lying, spying, or cheating in some other obviously explicit way.) How much do you think you know about the guy under the awning at Burning Man 2012 because of the name on the paycheck he gets?