Does your job contradict your beliefs?

As an employee your work is chosen by the owners and managers of the company: you choose the means, they choose the ends. Becoming an employee doesn’t mean abdicating your moral responsibility, however. Even if someone else has chosen the goals you are still responsible for your own actions.

As an employee you need to ask yourself if the goals you’re working for are worthwhile, and if the people you are working for deserve the power to direct your actions.

Let me tell you about the first time I was forced to ask myself this question.

The past is a different country

I grew up Israel, where as a Jewish citizen I was subject to the draft. The State of Israel is both Zionist and democratic, inherently contradictory ideals: a nation united by ethnicity, language and land versus the natural rights of individual human beings. Most Israeli citizens are indeed Jewish, but a large minority are Arab.

The contradiction is even more acute outside the borders of Israel, in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, where Israel’s Jewish military rules millions of Palestinian Arabs. Whatever their opinion of the Occupation, most Israeli Jews are Zionists. They believe Israel must remain a Jewish state with a Jewish army, a bulwark against Palestinian terrorism and Israel’s hostile Arab neighbors.

At age seventeen I had my first contact with the military: I was summoned to an initial screening at the Bakum, a military base that processes new recruits. The base was covered with asphalt, concrete, barbed wire and dirt, which turned to mud when it rained. The buildings were ugly concrete blocks and flimsy metal shacks that had seen better decades. Everything, inside and out, was painted in shades of khaki, gray and rust.

At the Bakum I was examined by a doctor. He gave me a physical profile of 97, the highest possible value; urban legend has it that the extra three points are taken off for circumcision. A profile of 97 meant I would be assigned combat duty, known in Israel as kravi.

As a kravi soldier I would have been required, as other Israeli soldiers have, to demolish homes, evict families, delay ambulances at checkpoints, threaten to shoot civilians for violating curfews. I didn’t believe these actions protected Israel from Palestinian terrorists.

So I took the easy way out: I signed up for the Academic Reserve. I would go to college as a civilian, studying computer science, then serve in the army as a programmer for six years.

In the summer of 1999, after my first year in college, I went through a month of unstrenuous basic training for non-combatants. I hated every minute of it, the half-hearted brainwashing and the petty sadism. The following year, bored and unmotivated, I dropped out of college and started a software company.

Sooner or later the Academic Reserve office would notice I’d stopped taking classes, and I would be drafted into a kravi unit. My mother suggested I write a letter to the army – via a distant relative who worked for the Department of Defense – explaining my qualifications as a programmer and requesting my skills be put to use. Perhaps I could reach an accommodation allowing me to work on my company in my spare time.

I was summoned to a number of interviews in the following months, at office buildings, anonymous houses in residential areas, even a war monument behind a military base. None of them went well. I thoughtlessly, in retrospect perhaps deliberately, wrecked my chances at getting a security clearance, telling an interviewer my political views: I did not believe in the leadership of the country or the military. It was unlikely I would be trusted with classified material.

My final interview was different: I actually liked the soldiers I met. They were intelligent and sympathetic and I was sure I’d enjoy working with them, but I left the interview feeling miserable. I reached not so much a decision as a self-diagnosis: I could never be a soldier, I could not give up my right and duty to make my own decisions.

In the present

I did manage to get out of military service, but that’s a longer story. But before that I spent literally years refusing to admit to myself that this was not a job I was willing to take, whatever the social expectations.

Being an employee is not quite the same as being a soldier. But these days when I’m looking for a job I try to be more aware of what I am willing to do. I won’t even bother applying to companies that do anything related to “defense” or the military, for example.

You will have your own criteria, of course, but I would urge you to consider whether your current employment matches your beliefs.