We Don't Do That Thing We Do

A while back a job ad floated across my Linkedin feed and it got me thinking. Behind almost every thing in the world, everything you see as you look around your home, there are organisations and people who work for them. If we think about organisations, we might consider there's a generally-accepted range of maliganance the general population will regard them as falling into.

There are some organisations that are seen as almost purely benign: my dad, for instance, works for the RNLI, the UK's biggest lifeboat service. Most people, with the exception of a few fringe weirdos, would be of the opinion that the RNLI is pretty much wholly a good thing: maybe pinkos like me would suggest it should be a state-run service but ultimately if you work for them you'd feel proud of it; you'd be happy to mention it at a party.

There are organisations that are generally benign-to-neutral (or generally seem to be, at least). They mostly just do things that are of use to people—they're not overtly morally good but mostly they're fine. The recent New Yorker story about 3M, who make Post-Its (amongst other things) would indicate it certainly has a capacity for malign action, perhaps a surprisingly substantial one, but the majority of what they do is make useful things. You probably wouldn't be ashamed to tell someone at a party you worked for e.g. 3M, but you might end up making a laughing reference working in a different department to the one mentioned in the article if anyone brought it up.

Then there are organisations that are seen as generally malign: oil companies, weapons manufacturers: whose core business is doing some kind of bad thing, but for a reason you might be able to justify to yourself if you worked there. People who work for oil companies might argue that they're creating resources for a green transition or forming a still-crucial part of the world's energy mix or something like that. I've known people who've worked for BAE Systems who felt they were doing work that supports the UK's defence. You might be a bit reticent to talk about your job at a party, but you'd be able to develop a few pat lines to laugh it off if no-one really went for you on it.

Right at the end of the line, you have cigarette manufacturers. Big Tobacco are about as close to a group of purely malign entities you can get: nothing else I can think of matches harm-to-consumer with complete societal disbenefit. Maybe gambling companies? I've turned down offers of work from gambling companies before on moral grounds, but at least some people have fun gambling y'know?

That job as I menitoned at the beginning was for a data engineer job at Phillip Morris and thought: man, even if I had no other options, I don't think I could work for these guys. I'm not sure I know anyone who would, and if I did, I cannot imagine how they would justify it, so I had a look at Phillip Morris' website to see how they justify their continuing existence.

The answer appears to be "by talking about they don't do the thing they do". You notice immediately that the homepage of one of the world's biggest tobacco companies bears the subtitle "Delivering A Smoke-Free Future" and its content is largely about quitting smoking, or transitioning toward a "smoke-free future":

The homepage If you look at their 'Business' page, you'll see the carefully-worded sentence: "As of March 31, 2024,  39 percent of our total net revenues came from our smoke-free products." This presumably means 61% of it came from cigs (or vapes), which combined with some other numbers they present there looks like they're selling somewhere in the region of 450 billion units of smoking items a year.

This is a really weird thing to be doing if, as you keep insisting, you're trying not to. I feel like rhetoricians should use this website as a case study. I just can't imagine what it must be like working for a business that spends so much of its time talking about how bad the main thing it does is, and how much it's trying so hard not to do it any more? (Well, 2/3rds by 2030 or whatever) Even if they don't actually believe it, that just seems a bit nuts.

Contrast this with BP—sorry, bp—somewhere you might well expect to see a similar level of cringe from their core business of destroying the environment, but nope: front-and-centre on their homepage is a whacking great picture of a natural gas platform.

You'll have to scroll down a fair old way until you find something talking about the environment. The quality of the food sold in their petrols stations is more front-and-centre than their greenwashing. They don't give a toss!

David Graeber once said "The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently". It feels as though there are a good many people working for large companies whose job appears to be insisting until they're (Sovereign) blue^[1] in the face that they really are trying to make it differently, honest, while the rest of their coworkers merrily continue to churn out cigs.