First, props for backing a bonafide unpopular opinion so unflinchingly. (A) discusses your argument. (B) challenges it.
A. I liked your direct approach to this position, and think you raise some important points. In particular…
It’s important to acknowledge that we all serve this machine in some capacity by our engagement with the free market. But why?
Economists call these markets efficient (i.e., pareto efficient) because of how quickly they achieve equilibrium/zero-sum states in response to change.
That efficiency is the curse no participant can outrun, because anything short of complete absence from the market necessarily furthers its result, which always includes violence. In other words, no one’s hands are clean.
Appearing closer to acts of violence often has little to do with magnitude of influence or actual violence produced. How so?
Suppose we define violence quotient (VQ) for the roles of market participants, some formula to rate the lockheed engineers and steel workers of small arms manufacture, etc.
We could measure VQ in lots of ways — e.g., by the count of people hurt, the severity of suffering, the degrees of causal separation between the violent act and the role behind it, etc.
For each case, it seems we can always find a role further from the violence with higher VQ — a much greater hand in the violence — to the extent that we have old tropes contrasting the direct-but-limited violence of the simple-minded goon and the detached yet far-reaching avarice of the ruthless kingpin.
So it’s true that working on a small piece of an incremental improvement to some military technology isn’t technically going to be easily traced to much bloodshed, comparatively.
B. But each of these observations correspond to a problem with the idea that the roles we choose don’t matter…
While the principle of efficiency makes all of us morally culpable — again, because we drive the market onward by merely living in it — by the same token this machine tells us what it wants most, and does so quite unambiguously: by naming a price.
Concretely, for any two roles considered, you can bet that whichever offers greater personal benefit is the choice that further maximizes overall productivity, accumulation of capital, and ultimately violence.
This heuristic is mostly useless to the individual (since a strategy of deliberately minimizing personal benefit is like trying to use your body to slow a speeding train… you’ll only slow it down about one human’s-worth).
But when many individuals coordinate to decommission machines like ours by agreeing to make small survivable sacrifices, they achieve collective action, which has halted many a train.
What delays collective action, however, is choosing instead to look out for number one, to defect against the social contract.
And that is the social problem OP describes. So one might then ask why is it a breach of the social contract?
Ultimately it’s the symbolic value of the choice that’s so disappointing.
It’s obviously not the “VQ” of your military-industrial job, how close to the violence you work, or any such utilitarian metric.
It’s not even the individual intent. Most Americans still at least pay lip service to the individual “pursuit of happiness” idea.
In the end, it’s simply that a person chose the money in spite of everyone’s misgivings about what these contractors represent and purvey in our world, because each defection, however minor, makes the victory of collective action feel just a bit further away than they once hoped.
To bring it home, and to disclose my stake in this issue, I was forced to think hard about this several years ago.
At the time, my research was mostly focused on assistive technologies and enabling people with disabilities, especially those with difficult cases of ASD and people who were either blind or visually impaired. My work was largely funded by the US dept of defense.
That’s unremarkable in my field, since the DoD has a big research budget, but there came a point where their best opportunities for continued funding repurposed my human-enablement work for military applications. (Basically instead of helping a blind person navigate the busy interior of a building, including mobile human obstacles, I would instead provide operatives in the field live intel to clear a building, including mobile human obstacles.)
I had self-righteously turned down some of the big-bad firms like palantir but this opportunity hit different because it was a direct extension of my work and a multi-year grant with easy milestones. It was pitched by ego-stroking military lifers, and offered an admittedly interesting challenge. And of course, as they kept reminding me, the tech would save lives. (Just the American lives.)
But I didn’t take the grant, and I’m so glad I didn’t. because I don’t know when or if I would have changed course. Would I have backed out early or would I have rationalized it so thoroughly that I wouldn’t even recognize myself today? It felt like a loss at the time, but good opportunities came later anyway. It wasn’t even that much of a sacrifice, ultimately, but I remember the siren song.
First, props for backing a bonafide unpopular opinion so unflinchingly. (A) discusses your argument. (B) challenges it.
A. I liked your direct approach to this position, and think you raise some important points. In particular…
B. But each of these observations correspond to a problem with the idea that the roles we choose don’t matter…
To bring it home, and to disclose my stake in this issue, I was forced to think hard about this several years ago.
At the time, my research was mostly focused on assistive technologies and enabling people with disabilities, especially those with difficult cases of ASD and people who were either blind or visually impaired. My work was largely funded by the US dept of defense.
That’s unremarkable in my field, since the DoD has a big research budget, but there came a point where their best opportunities for continued funding repurposed my human-enablement work for military applications. (Basically instead of helping a blind person navigate the busy interior of a building, including mobile human obstacles, I would instead provide operatives in the field live intel to clear a building, including mobile human obstacles.)
I had self-righteously turned down some of the big-bad firms like palantir but this opportunity hit different because it was a direct extension of my work and a multi-year grant with easy milestones. It was pitched by ego-stroking military lifers, and offered an admittedly interesting challenge. And of course, as they kept reminding me, the tech would save lives. (Just the American lives.)
But I didn’t take the grant, and I’m so glad I didn’t. because I don’t know when or if I would have changed course. Would I have backed out early or would I have rationalized it so thoroughly that I wouldn’t even recognize myself today? It felt like a loss at the time, but good opportunities came later anyway. It wasn’t even that much of a sacrifice, ultimately, but I remember the siren song.
The compensation is just not worth the price.