I mean working somewhere like Qualcomm or Microsoft when you care about FOSS, democracy, and the public commons, or a weapons manufacturer for a military that invades other countries and kills innocent people in their homes.
I mean working somewhere like Qualcomm or Microsoft when you care about FOSS, democracy, and the public commons, or a weapons manufacturer for a military that invades other countries and kills innocent people in their homes.
I suspect most of us have jobs that are adjacent to (or at best a few business connections removed) from what you’re talking about. Wealth concentration and corrupt governments tend to do that.
Millions of people are holding down useless and/or society-damaging jobs because they are living in countries ravaged by Late Stage Capitalism. They have kids to feed.
As for the people working in the most obviously “concentrated evil” types of jobs you’re talking about: some of them will be the type who delude themselves into thinking they are being patriotic, defending the nation, the usual BS rationalizations. Few villains realize they are villains.
Does anyone else remember the source of the phrase “concentrated evil”? I do.
“Mom, dad, don’t touch it!”
Hey, you know, maybe he got the good ending. It was pretty strongly implied he was adopted by the firefighter reincarnation of King Agamemnon/Sean Connery.
It’s like a corollary to the saying “there can be no ethical consumption under capitalism”.
No matter who you work for (even if you are self employed), some evil will result. I’m not going to sit on a high tower judging someone working in an Amazon warehouse just because that’s the way they are able to keep food on their table.
Like you said, it’s best to judge those who working on concentrated evil. If someone’s working on the AGM-114R-9X Hellfire Sword Missile, they really should be asking themselves if they are the baddies.
Unfortunately, our society does a really good job of minimizing the quantity of evil people needed to do evil aims. According to the US national park service, 500,000 people worked on the Manhattan project. It’s probably a fraction of a percent of those people who even had a clue they were working on a weapon. It’s probably a fraction of a percent of those people who actually knew what caliber of a weapon they were working on, and many of those people probably assumed such a destructive weapon would never need to be used (also what Gatling and Nobel told themselves).