brendan halpin

I’ve been reading a fair number of posts on social media from people who feel that a vote for either presidential candidate is an endorsement of horrifying crimes they don’t want to be associated with. What these folks are wrestling with, I think, is a question that plagues everyone with a conscience: how do I live a moral life in a corrupt world?

And the answer, sadly, is that you can’t. You might refuse to vote for a candidate that endorses genocide, but if you continue to pay taxes, you’re funding the genocide anyway. If you refuse to pay taxes, you run the risk of being imprisoned, which means you’re not around for anyone who loves and depends on you.

But maybe you feel like depriving your loved ones of your presence is an acceptable price to pay for a clean conscience. Oh, but guess what? If you buy chocolate, or clothes, or anything with a lithium ion rechargeable battery, it’s likely that you’re directly benefiting from slave labor. Not to mention, if you’re imprisoned, you’ll have no choice but to support the terrible exploitative prison phone industry. And maybe you’ll be put to work in agricultural or livestock work, where you can work long hours under horrible conditions for pennies an hour just to make horrible rich people even richer!

Our society under capitalism is cruel and exploitative by design, and you really cannot help being part of it. Want to move to the woods and go off grid and grow your own flax and spin it into linen and make your own clothes and never use electricity? Congratulations on moving to land that was stolen in a genocide!

The moral rot of our society contributes to our pervasive soul sickness. Once you’re aware of how terrible the world is and how bound up in its horror you are, it’s very difficult to feel content. Because you know you’re living out of harmony with your values.

There are two responses to this: one is to essentially give up. It’s impossible to live a life in harmony with your values, so enjoy yourself as much as you can and try not to worry about the horror because even if you stop buying lithium batteries, that’s not going to free the slaves involved in their production. This is the most popular response.

Another thing you can do is to simply opt out of things that are easy for you to opt out of. Maybe this involves your career choice, or maybe it’s easier to modify your consumption habits. I, for example, stopped eating meat in 1991 and gave up other animal products in 2019.  Giving up meat was relatively easy for me because I never liked eating it all that much. Giving up cheese was harder but still not ultimately a terrible sacrifice for me. I have not singlehandedly ended factory farming. But neither am I actively supporting something I actively find abhorrent.

Of course, I still buy clothes and devices with lithium batteries. So I am not going to get on my high horse about how moral I am because I’m still enmeshed in the web of oppression that is global capitalism. But I’m doing something. I also live close to where I work and commute by bike or public transportation. Because I’m trying to lessen my use of fossil fuels. But I have an ancient oil burner in my basement that I can’t afford to replace. Oh yeah, and I can trace some of the economic good fortune I’ve had directly to the American colonization of the Philippines. (It’s a long story). So my high horse, were I to try and mount it, would turn out to be pretty low.

And people are very quick to point this stuff out. A-HA! You’re wearing leather shoes! A-HA! You drove to CVS that one time when you could have walked! A-HA! People are homeless, and you have an extra bedroom in your house! As soon as people find out you’re doing pretty much anything out of principle, they gleefully point out your lack of perfection in order to justify doing nothing.

But I think we have a responsibility to reduce the harm we’re inflicting, and the fact that we’re not able to eliminate the harm doesn’t mean we should stop trying to reduce it. Right now we’re faced with two candidates who will continue supporting the war crimes. One of them will also kill a lot of women in the United States and subject a lot of other people to terrible cruelty. I’m going to keep paying taxes. I cannot opt out of supporting the United States government without risking imprisonment. So even my choice were between a candidate who is going to cause 50,000 deaths and a candidate who is going to 50,001 deaths, I feel like I have an obligation to cast the vote that might keep one person alive.  (In our current case, I believe the death count differential is much higher than one, but you get my point.)

Because, ultimately, voting is one of those things that is easy for everyone. Not everyone can walk to work or make their own clothes or never eat chocolate. But everyone can vote. Now look. I’m not suggesting that voting is going to solve everything. If it’s all you do to try to reduce the amount of horror and cruelty in the world, it’s going to feel incredibly inadequate. But it’s something.

To give up entirely on the project of improving the world because the problems feel insurmountable is to hand victory to the most evil people in the world who, as we’ve seen, never ever stop trying to make the world an even crueler place. We can’t be perfect. We can’t even really be good. But we can be better.