Almost no one is evil, almost everything is broken.
Title creds go to Jaibot.
[epistemic status: mostly venting. Purposefully vague about some things for contractual reasons.]
So this is the end of my second week working at a job that, if I were slightly more naĂŻve, would be the dream job in terms of how fulfilling it would feel.
Iâm a research assistant working in the federal public service. The portfolio my team has at any given time is impressive - indigenous rights, empowering vulnerable people to get their children to postsec/jobs training, easing applications to programs like our retirement funds and making sure that less people fall through the cracks when it comes to program applications.
But the pull of Moloch is strong and I canât help but feel complicit in a system where -
Ok, you know that oft-repeated leftist truism, âall cops are corruptâ? Some people take it to mean that every worker in the police department is personally evil, corrupt, and âdirtyâ. Obviously, this is not true. But I think this is the true thing that that phrase actually means: itâs impossible to not be corrupt in a system that is intrinsically so. Here are some forms of evil that you can be in an evil system:
- person who is complicit within a rotten system
- person who takes full advantage of the corruptness to make themselves richer
- someone who brings the system further into degenerate territory
Me? Iâm the âperson who tries to modernize the system and inject compassion into it, enough that it sticks around for a longer time than it would have otherwise but not enough to make it not evilâ. How evil is this?
A regular experience I have: A new project is proposed. My first reaction is âwow, holy mother of neoliberalism. This is an awful thing to promote.â My second reaction is âok, but if we donât do that weâll be complicit in the suppression of upwards social mobility for poor people? Condemning them to a life in squalid conditions?â
Hereâs an example. A group in the department is concerned that not enough retirees are returning to the workforce, and theyâve asked to collaborate with us. Weâve been tasked with increasing the amount of returnees from the small amount that it is currently to an order of magnitude higher.
Doesnât this sound awful? Dragging poor sweet grandmothers out of retirement and sticking them into Amazon warehouses? But considering the amount of boomers that arenât financially equipped for retirement (a quarter of them have less than $3000 saved up), isnât the alternative - perpetuating a system where there is age discrimination in hiring practices, locking unprepared 65+ year olds into poverty - much, much worse? After all, that target wasnât just randomly made up - it was decided upon after interviewing people in our target population and realizing how many of them want to return to work but canât for systemic reasons beyond their control.
Weâre also finding new and innovating ways to dump money into tulip subsidies for vulnerable populations. In doing this, weâre making sure that degree inflation continues, and more and more of the generations that come after us are brought into societal docility and conservatism through debt. [h/t deleuze through 011] But whatâs the alternative? Letting these populations, historically and currently not privileged enough for university attendance to be a norm, suffer more instability because they canât get diplomas? When diplomas are more important than ever because of degree inflation?
What is the net impact that Iâll have on the world by doing this? Iâm not sure that it bends towards goodness. But if Iâm doing evil, Iâm doing it to help individuals and reduce their suffering. At the end of the day, I could be doing far worse work placements.