Existentially and economically speaking, shit is fucked up and bullshit and I know that to be true.
Shit is not fucked up cataclysmically just yet, but naggingly so nonetheless. I was trained to be good, to be fair, to do no harm, to help the less fortunate, and conserve natural resources, but society has made being bad just so EASY. Not in a seductively evil way, of course, I'm not sold on being overtly evil, I'm sold on being sold. I'm encouraged to make the purchases right for ME, and not ask any pesky questions about what happens behind the scenes to make such bargains possible. For the most part, because I don't have the time to comprehensively research the business practices of every corporation I buy from (in other words, I am lazy), I choose not to know.
Except I do know, don't I? A bunch of earnest, persistent reporters have taken great pains to point out for many years that the phone I bought so cheaply was made possible by work conditions in another country that I would consider immoral in mine. Because when we told corporations that they couldn't treat workers as slave labor, they simply took production to a country where the slave labor would be done by people less like us, whose plight would be less immediate, using workers with less recourse and fewer champions to fight for them. And not just my phone, but all of my electronics. And not just my electronics but my clothes. And not just my clothes, but my coffee. And not just my coffee, but my chocolate. And not just my chocolate, but much of my food. All relying in part, somewhere down the line, on cheap labor, with unsafe business practices, with some form of human misery meted out on the assumption that the #1 priority in the world today is to make sure the citizens of the western world get their goods as cheaply as possible. And if that leaves foreign children or undocumented workers minus a few fingers due to unsafe-but-cheap working conditions, so be it.
I don't really like where that leaves me ethically. I know I am perfectly in my rights to continue, as I always have, politely ignoring the dubious business ethics of the modern age, and just take my cheap crap and go home. It's what most everyone else does, after all. Ideally, my culture's expression of common will and priorities in the form of self-government would have watchdogs to prevent against those kinds of abuses, but I know corporations have been busy for many years defanging government oversight and have been otherwise successful in defining profit as the ultimate good, no matter the human cost for far too many people. I know there is much good mixed in with the bad, and that combined with the size of the problem, learned helplessness and general apathy means it's fairly unlikely that we'll rise up en masse against the injustices of the age, in a way that would effectively change anything. For one thing, where would we start? Nobody seems to care anymore if 100,000 are out in the streets protesting something. Occupy only got people's attention once they made a nuisance of themselves on public land. But even though I know all these things, I find this state of affairs a little soul-crushing. It is hard to think of myself as a good person, when I enable bad things, however structurally built into my daily existence, and however little direct responsibility I hold for any of it.
And, on top of all that, no matter who is president next year, my vote enables someone to use drones to kill innocent people, and I have no real choice in the matter. The "adults" have decided innocent people need to die to feed combat terrorism, and that's that. The problems in our political system is a whole other ball of wax of course. So much corruption, stagnation and stupidity it's hard to know where to start. All of which I am unable to separate my vote from. Which is not to say I cannot do some good with my vote, just that I can't keep it pure. I enable some bad along with some good. Which does not make me feel great either.
None of which is to say this registers very highly on a day-to-day basis. I am not constantly wracked with over-whelming guilt about the things I buy. But it's always there, and it always bothers me at least a little bit, and I wish I were smart enough to figure where one would even start to try and fix any of it. And it's not to say we're all monsters, or it's all hopeless, or we all should envision ourselves as constantly covered in the blood of a million small children. I know people taking advantage of other people is just a part of life and I can't be responsible for other people's bad behavior. I just wish going to the store didn't feel so much like enabling it. And I wish it didn't feel like I have to choose between fighting an endless war against unethical consumerism and living my life.
I will let you all know if I discover the magic bullet to the world's ethical problems and how to avoid the myriad systems that taint me by association. I am not optimistic about my chances of doing so. In the meantime, I may look here from time to time. It seems like a start.
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