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?
Cutting down the Amazon rain forest, mistreating your workers, mistreating animals, perpetrating genocide, driving a country into fascism, to just name a few. There’s probably more stuff I’d consider evil.
Here’s a rather specific example of greenwashing I had to do with, of the kind that’s a bit silly and very wide spread and almost impossible to avoid, but has a huge impact on where I live: I was doing a translation for a paper producing company. Their brochure was describing how they were caring for the forests that produce their paper and how they were championing the protection of the environment. They made it sound like they were planting and caring for some kind of fairy tale forest full of wildlife and biodiversity. The reality: all they ever plant is eucalyptus monoculture that by now covers half of the country and is one of the main causes of wildfires getting worse every summer.
Another example that I do not have personal experience with but that I imagine must be very difficult to navigate is being a programmer and working on some tiny snippet of code for something that has the power of causing unimaginable harm to society - like most of financial and stock market stuff, or election winning manipulating algorithms.
Those are all good examples of the sort of thing you mean, but it’s not a definition. I think if you want to be able to put into words where to draw the line, you’ll need to define this term more clearly. If that’s too difficult, then be satisfied with judging each situation as it comes, your instincts will help guide you. But go easy on yourself, you shouldn’t feel bad for doing what you need to do,
That’s really well put.
I’d add, if I may, a small piece of wisdom from Muhammad Ali: “A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.”
I take that as advice to have a willingness to re-evaluate one’s views on a daily basis.
What would count as a definition for you?