Your principles end where the discount begins
You can loudly condemn a system and happily use it when it pays. What does a principle you're willing to pay for actually look like?
You have very firm convictions. As long as they don't cost you anything.
In conversation, you're against corruption, exploitation, and every other kind of nastiness. In the comments, you're uncompromising. But then someone you know offers to sort things out through a contact, and suddenly life turns out to be more complicated than black and white.
Especially when you're the one who needs to skip the queue.
I like watching how quickly the vocabulary changes. Someone else's bribe is corruption. Yours is a token of gratitude. Someone else's connections are nepotism. Yours are normal human relationships. Someone else's silence was bought. You're just being professional and keeping work separate from politics.
Every convenience gets its own tidy name. So you never have to put two sentences next to each other: “I condemn this” and “I benefit from this.”
Together, they look pretty fucking bad. Separately, they fit perfectly well into the same biography.
I don't believe in spotless purity. You can live inside a system you didn't choose. Use infrastructure you can't do without. Work somewhere you can't yet afford to leave.
The world doesn't give everyone the same set of alternatives. A refusal that costs one person a minor inconvenience might leave another without food or medical care. Pretending those are the same decisions is the convenient cruelty of a comfortable observer.
But somehow necessity often keeps going long after the nice little perks have begun.
You won't lose your home without this deal. You won't be left without a means of supporting yourself. It just pays more. Or gets your paperwork processed faster. Or buys you an exception nobody else is entitled to.
And now you've got a speech ready about how you can't live in a society and be free of it.
Mate, you're using philosophy to cover for a discount. Let's at least not turn your savings into a tragedy of the human condition.
The most uncomfortable test starts with a question: what have you already turned down because of your convictions?
Not what you posted. Not who you blocked. What opportunity did you pass up? What money didn't you take? What convenience did you decide to go without?
This isn't a mandatory public report. Nobody needs to post receipts for their morality. But if you can't answer that question when you're alone with yourself, maybe your principles have simply happened to align with your interests so far.
It happens. It's just not yet the strength of character you're so proud of.
Next usually comes the hunt for someone else's imperfections. Where do you shop, then? What phone do you have? Who do you pay taxes to? You're desperate to find some compromise the other person has made that will let you stop discussing your own decisions altogether.
But someone else's inconsistency doesn't make your deal a good one. They might have a problem of their own. Now there are two. Congratulations: your investigation added more questions instead of answering the first one.
You don't have to become a saint to refuse one specific piece of bullshit you're capable of refusing right now.
I think it helps to know in advance exactly what you won't do. Before they've shown you the number. Because once you've seen the number, your brain suddenly becomes a very talented lawyer.
And if the boundary does move, you can at least call it your choice. I agreed. It benefited me. I didn't want to lose the opportunity. Without the story about how the universe itself cornered you into this premium package of perks.
Then decide whether you're happy with the person who made that choice.
Your principles don't have to cause you the maximum possible pain. Suffering by itself doesn't make anyone more honest. But sometimes a principle really does cost you something, and that's when you find out whether you have it at all.
As long as the choice is free, you can be very loud.
Then someone offers you a discount. And suddenly the room gets remarkably quiet.