Is it Evil to Work for Anyone?
I know, what a ridiculous question.
After all, we all need to eat, clothe ourselves, and fund our gem habit in Clash of Clans right?
Sure, I’d be unable to find sustenance, be unable to give wings to my voice across the great digital expanse, or play Pokémon Go if not for all the pawns turning the gears of the vast corporate machine so it can clear the path for more profits by way of its puppet states.
What a foolish ascetic I must be to ever question our lord and savior, the almighty dollar-dollar-bill y’all!
So what is a “good job”, exactly?
If you say its path of the pursuit of happiness, then congratulations, your immeasurable hours of lifetime indoctrination were successful, and the student has now become the teacher.
In truth, the people do not work for their own happiness, even though they are taught to believe a good job, a luxury automobile, a white picket fence, a dog, 2.5 children, and a healthy 401(k) are the dream to aspire to. A corporation is nothing more than a parasitic, amoral, ethically-vapid entity sucking on the IV line feeding on the life force of every employee-slave it's captured and broken into a domesticated work horse. Congratulations on the new job! Lets groom you for middle management!
Still even while their only resource to barter, their own time on this planet, grows ever more scarce and valuable, they sell it just the same for the infinitely increasing volume and diminishing value of fiat paper chasing that corporate job and bucket-list American dream.
"The job of the Korean military is to point their guns at whomever the Korean politicians tell them to, and the job of the U.S. Military is to point their guns at whomever the U.S. politicians tell them to." - @jakemccauley
And the job of the politicians is to point their military at whoever corporations tell them to. And the job of the corporations is to point their politicians at whoever their stock price tells them too. And the job of the stock price is to go up, up, and away because the shareholders demand it!
We’ve made the CEOs the slaves of the shareholders… they must do whatever makes the shareholders money, morals or ethics need not enter the equation. And the employee’s job is to turn those gears and pull those levers to make it allllll possible. Work hard enough and climb that ladder and maybe the employee gets some nice 401(k) matching, or who knows, maybe some stock options. And so it goes...
CEOLivesMatter…
People loathe the chief executive officer (CEO). Oh how they loath the CEO...
How dare they make so much money. They just sit there in they corner penthouse office while everyone else does the work. They must be evil to make decisions that put the shareholders’ profit above the moral and ethical option. The CEOs know they make decisions that are morally reprehensible… ethically unsound. Maybe they give a fuck. Maybe they don’t. It doesn’t matter you see…
We the people get quite angry when our pensions and 401(k)’s and IRA’s and financial assets suffered when a CEO makes a decision that costs us money… so we formed our pitchfork and torch gangs, enacted laws to ensure we shareholders have protection of our investments, and ultimately have control over the corporation's board of directors.
Now a CEO's failure to uphold the responsibilities of his office can result in personal liability for the company's debt and legal actions from shareholders. The CEOs’ duty of loyalty requires that a CEO always acts in the best interest of a business's shareholders, and that the CEO places that interest above their own in business decisions. We made them immoral and unethical through our own greed.
No wonder they negotiate “golden parachutes” if they get fired. It's fair. When you fuck up at work you just get fired! When a corporate executive fucks up, he gets fired and likely sued or even jailed! No one has ever gone to jail for not submitting their TPS reports I bet.
So you see it matters not if a given corporate officer finds a decision personally immoral. The officer is your slave to do as you command as a shareholder.
This isn’t my fault
Sure, the extra layers of abstraction between you and the trigger puller or law maker make it a bit easier to look the other way and avoid any unpleasant responsibility on your part. How could you have known that multinationals like Bayer, Chase bank, Coca-Cola, Ford, Hugo Boss, IBM, Kodak, Random House Publishing, Siemens, Standard Oil (now doing business as ExxonMobil, Cheveron, BP, Marathon, Shell, and others), and Volkswagen have all did business with Nazi Germany or played both sides of the allies/axis fence? They’ve changed, they swear it, just give them one more chance...
After all, you didn’t pull the trigger in that far off land to clear the way for a new oil pipeline.
Those nets at Foxconn are just for aesthetics I’d bet.
You didn’t have anything to do with that ruptured pipeline that spilled over 1 million gallons of oil into the Niger delta.
You couldn’t have foreseen that a leak of methyl isocyanate might sicken some half a million people and kill over 15,000 in Bhopal, India.
Besides, most of that stuff is happening far over there not here. Oh wait…
Ok... that happened here. But you’re no doctor or scientist so how can you be held accountable for that drug that made 6.5 million people experience heart disease and other pulmonary problems here.
Then there's that 11 million gallons of oil in the pristine Alaskan water. It was that captain guy’s fault though.
And those tires probably just came apart b/c of aggressive drivers or stingy right-wingers not wanting to cough up some tax money to invest in infrastructure. Think about the potholes people!
And who’d have thunk drilling an ultra-deepwater, dynamically positioned, semi-submersible offshore oil drilling rig down to 35,050ft to suck out some of that sweet profitable texas gold would be risky. Seems no different than the post hole digger I used to install my fence.
Anyway, who wants to live in squalor when they retire
With social security going the way it is, my portfolio has got to perform man! I’m only making so much climbing that corporate ladder… maybe one day I’ll get an executive position and make some of that CEO money!
I atleast need enough cash to be able to support my weed habit. After all, weed has never harmed anyone, and its natural man!
So what happens when you feed that corporate machine with your time and money?
As a peon in the corporate you swear an oath. You swear to trade your finite units of time, of which you cannot know the remaining balance in the account by the way, for depreciating units of currency… you swear you don’t care where they’re getting it from or what harm is done in the process… you don’t wanna know. You swear you’ll suck the corporate dick for some of that green.
As a shareholder, you swear an oath. “I swear you better make me some money or so help me God every three letter acronym’ed officer will be held accountable and punished accordingly!”. Furthermore, you recommit the corporation to their oath. An oath to uphold and defend a piece of parchment, these days more of a digitial blip… which advocates the corporation should rob everybody else in order to support its own shareholder value to the greatest extent the law allows (and beyond if the juice is worth the squeeze).
I mean... if dumping our toxic aging ship, full of nasty chemicals and asbestos and who knows what, in Chittagong, Bangladesh to be cut apart by the untouchables keeps that dividend flowing, as the CEO how can I not do that? Its expeeensive to take those things apart the safe, responsible, moral and ethical way. Sounds like an India-problem to me.
You swear if the FDA doesn’t let that new drug to make me happy again pass phase 3 clinical trials you’re gonna be pissed… so get to greasing those wheels Mr. CEO!
Daddy’s got a 60 hr work week, 9% health insurance premium growth, and a bad set of the “I don’t see the whole point of my life” blues…
You swear that you can’t afford to make it to work and back when my wages aren’t growing and the damn gasoline just hit $4 per gallon. PER GALLON! DRILL, BOMB, SHOOT, NUKE, I DON’T CARE, JUST GET ME $2 GAS AGAIN!!!
But I digress…
The people that join the corporate machine are certainly not inherently evil, “they are normal people deceived into signing up to do evil things. Whether they're painting the streets of Iraq with the blood of children, burning Vietnamese people alive with Napalm, or filling Native American families with musket balls” - @jakemccauley. Whether they are funding, through their labor, dollars and insatiable consumption, the corporate machine to enable the lobbying and building of pipelines in war-torn-to-shreds corners of the world; whether their desire to skip the hard earned money and sweat equity for some quick and easy Wall St. money leads the corporations to bring their slave-states to bear on the sweeter fruits of the few remaining sovereign states of the earth... the people that carry out the will of their own selfish wants and desires, are complicit participants of a mob mentality culture designed to serve the interests of evil.
We are all part of the machine, whether we want to accept the unpalatable truth or not
There is only one way out.
- Practice the non-aggression principle and accept that your greed is the drug of choice for the corporate machine orchestrating and executing the aggression worldwide. Yes, including military action. Don’t worry though, private military corporations are rapidly making the use of nation-state militarys a thing of the past!
- Work for yourself. Don’t feed the machine with your labor.
- Invest in yourself and your own future. Don’t invest in the corporate machine that will make you money, whatever it takes…
- Grow your own food.
- Seek happiness from within and not from a bottle, bag, or needle.
- If pot is legal in your local, grow your own. Yeah it will suck compared to a professional grower. If it is illegal, then don’t smoke pot. Or fuck it, grow it anyway if you want it so bad… but take responsibility for your actions. Either way what you absolutely won’t do, is feed the cycle of violence and death that is the drug trade.
- Stop pointing the finger of blame until you accept your piece of the blame pie and atone for it.
- Never tear down a stranger willing to lay down their own life, fight and die, in exchange for yours so that you don’t have to. They represent the pinnacle of selflessness, the zenith of generosity, a “necessary evil” if you wish to think of it that way. What do you care what their underlying motivations are.
What will you do for the rest of us at the expense of yourself?
Great rebuttal to jakemccauley. Taking it to its logical conclusion.
Thanks! I like to think of it less as a "rebuttal"
and more as a "completion"
Unpleasant as it is to think about, I think you it on the head with this article. It took courage to write this. Thank you.
Thanks! We humans thrive on passing the buck on to someone else, dodging the responsibilities of our own actions, and kicking the can down the road.
I try to identify, acknowledge, and own my sins. Its certainly the first step to doing something about it. I accept the in-borne instincts I am a slave to as a result of being just another animal. Everyone has to decide for themselves where they draw the line. I can't claim to being an off-grid hermit myself after all. I take from society what I must while doing as little harm as possible, with a dose of good deeds to offset the damage I cannot avoid doing.
One of the things I love about dogs... they are honest about what they want and what they'll do to get it.