And when did I decide to grow this beard and gut?
Well, I may be white but I don't like my people much
But I want to raise with you and watch our younglings hatch
Fuckin' make the first letters of their first names match…
The morality of labor performance consists of two parts: how the labor is done and how the labor is applied. Both these aspects must be considered in any coherent moral calculus of labor. Keep in mind that while strict Kantians might object to this claim, American Oneironautics has long ago asserted Kant into irrelevancy. Thus, Kant need not concern us.
The first aspect of labor morality is the aspect most people intuitively understand. Everyone knows what constitutes "morally performed" labor. Someone who does accounting work could claim that they are doing moral labor. After all, numbers are neutral. All they are doing is calculating costs and expenditures, balancing books. There is certainly nothing morally objectionable about sitting at a desk and clacking a calculator all day, right? Unless they are performing the calculations using blood-ink they've personally harvested from local orphan children, most people would not raise objections to the way they perform their labor. Some jobs, of course, are more difficult to make truly moral than others. Some are impossible. But many, such as accounting, are inherently neutral. Thus, an accountant easily passes the morality test as far as the performance of their labor is concerned. The accountant can go home and sleep well knowing that they are a good person.
Now, if that same accountant is calculating numbers under Franz Xaver Schwarz of the Reich Treasury Office, we might feel a different way. It isn't necessarily the work itself, after all, the work hasn't changed, but how the work is being applied. The numbers the accountant calculates go towards smoothing the operations of the Reich Treasury Office and, thus, the Third Reich as a whole. The accountant would probably plead that they are not, themselves, doing anything wrong, and that they cannot be responsible for the actions of those higher up. They are still just performing arithmetic, the same neutral job we previously agreed was morally acceptable. Herein lies the rub. While a good number of people (Americans especially) accept this argument, American Oneironautics completely rejects it. A person is not only morally responsible for the performance of their labor, but also, to a reasonable degree, for how that labor is applied. This moral calculus allows for exceptions based on certain extreme circumstances. For instance, someone performing accounting work in good faith for an organization while genuinely having no knowledge of that organization's sinister deeds is exempt from wrongdoing. However, this individual must also recognize that, upon discovering the wrongdoings of their organization, they become morally culpable if they continue to perform that labor. It is also the case that an individual should not purposefully bury their head in the sand out of fear of discovering their organization's sinister deeds. Let us say that you accept a job manufacturing GPS for a swanky company. The job pays well and is enjoyable. Now, if you aren't told what these GPS are used for and you make no attempt to find out, you cannot plead ignorance when you learn that (shockingly!) they are being used to guide missiles that annihilate some poor sap from twenty miles away.
While the worker is not solely responsible for the application of their labor, they are responsible for monitoring its application to the best of their ability. Now, some will protest this mindset. They will argue that under the modern American capitalist system the worker is kept in a constant state of uncertainty in order to entice them to get and vigorously hold onto whatever job they can. If the question is between manufacturing GPS and not eating, most people would choose to manufacture GPS. This is a fair and important point. The ones most morally culpable for the actions of the organization are the leaders of the organization. The people at the top of the American food chain conspire to make it untenable for anyone, even the lowliest worker, to live an actually moral lifestyle. Thus, everyone shares a part in the guilt. The entire system operates similarly to a backstreet gang in which, as part of the initiation, you have to rape or kill someone. Once you've done so, you share the same guilt as the other members, and cannot as easily betray them. If, in order to exist within a society, you have to swallow your morality and commit abhorrent acts, then you become less likely to call others, even if they are acting even worse, out on their acts. The entire system becomes a giant game of "see nothing, say nothing."
These are critiques of an entire social system. To be clear, the social system itself is toxic beyond belief, and wholesale reform, perhaps even to the point of complete annihilation and reconstruction, is the only prescription. But to throw up one's hands at the toxicity of the social system and decry individual moral action/improvement as impossible is exactly what the system is designed to cause. The system believes itself invincible. More than that, it believes itself self-evident. It simply does not see wide scale systemic change as possible. Any minor reforms it can easily absorb. Any movements or revolutions it feels confident that it can suck up, repackage, and spit back out. Therefore, it doesn't care that it is toxic. In fact, it wants you to see it as toxic. That way you feel culpable. You feel guilty. You become initiated into the gang. And since you believe that widespread change is impossible (after all, the system is self-evident), you never pursue it. And since you feel morally tainted (which, technically, you are) then you don't bother with individual improvement. After all, you're already morally reprehensible, you might as well accept it and enjoy the burning hedonism while you can.
This is the trap of the system. You must resist it. Yes, you're bad. If you've paid your taxes, bought a Coke, own electronics, drive a car, gone to Disney, own a house, order from Amazon, eat meat, voted to invade Iraq, invested in funny-money stocks, use electricity, or just sat passively by while all manner of atrocities were committed in your name, then you're bad. But you can't become worse. To believe that just because you are bad means that individual improvement is impossible is to fall for the system's trap. Even if you truly don't care about bothersome things like morality or human rights, you should try to improve simply to stick it to a cocky system fueled by a bunch of slimy fuckers who think they're self-evident. Commit yourself to individual action, make yourself better, even just in small ways. Don't play right into the hands of the DoD and the cigarette companies and the freaking oil oligarchs. Imagine how good it would feel if, in fifty years, nobody under the age of thirty knew what an iPhone was. Imagine if Microsoft took after explorer.exe's example and crashed hard, never to reemerge. Bezos would just be a typo you make when writing about psychoactive drugs. And maybe we wouldn't all feel so toxic and tired.
Let the dream fuel you. Nothing else is going to.