I was not born to be forced.

Thoughts on Civil Disobedience & Personal Ethics · October 12, 2026

It seems there's no lack of complicated things for me to contemplate lately, such is life sometimes. Fortunately some things I'm incredibly lucid about, and have spent decades of my life reasoning about and adhering to. This is one of those things. Despite that I still think it's difficult to write because it is deeply personal.

I am a conscientious objector.

Which I think to my friends is something that comes as no surprise. I have never been fond of war, or the economy that has been built around supporting it. Directly contributing to war efforts isn't something I'd personally ever do, but I also have no desire to profiteer off of something I find to be morally reprehensible. That's a personal opinion that I've carried for a very very long time. It is something that shapes who I am as a person, in my ethics and morality, but also in the career I've built for myself. I've turned down countless job opportunities and pursued somewhat of an oddball career because I've never once felt that I could justify taking a role that contributed to the military industrial complex, directly or indirectly. I would rather work a miserable job where I was treated poorly than do something I knew was wrong.

Henry David Thoreau puts the mentality aptly in his essay "Civil Disobedience". For me, personally, there is less suffering in doing the ethical thing even when I know it to be the harder of the two paths. Thoreau held the same line and happily spent his time in jail knowing that his ethics were more important than his comfort. Of course, I'm not quite as brave as Thoreau; I've not been jailed for my actions, and I wouldn't dare to equate rejecting job offers with heroism.

I can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey.

Civil Disobedience - Thoreau

No, the argument is a little more subtle than that. A little more existential. See there are things in life that we have control over and others that we cannot begin to even pretend we could ever control. I might wish for a utopia where I have no need for a job, but I have two young children who need a home, food, and comfort. I act professionally and comport myself to the career I've chosen in earnest for their sake. It helps that I sincerely enjoy what I do, but what do you do when your career conflicts with your ethics? Well, Martin Heidegger would point out that this is an instance of Gestell (enframing). I'm stuck between a set of existent conditions I can't control. My ethics will not change, my children will continue to have needs; such is the scenario I have found myself in recently.

See, the company I work for recently brushed up against work I've chosen not to take part in, nothing I touch directly, but close enough that I felt I had to draw a line somewhere. So I did, I asked to be recused from anything tied to the military industrial complex, and I was. I want to be careful here though, because it'd be easy, and a little flattering, to tell you my saying no is what killed the thing, and that just isn't what happened. The larger structure I'm part of makes its own calls for its own reasons, and I don't get to stand here and pretend I was the lever it all turned on. The honest, smaller truth is that my no only ever had teeth in the one place I actually stand, and not much of anywhere past it. I say all this plainly and right up front, because what follows isn't an accusation pointed at anyone I work for.

And yet I'm still Gestell. Certainly in this market I wouldn't exactly want to go wandering off looking for a new path. I'm also quite fond of the work I do, it not only allows but actively encourages and directly supports the open source work I care about. There are goods both internal and external to the execution of my job that I benefit from, that the company benefits from, but dare I say that anyone who uses Alpine, Salt, or any of the other open source projects I contribute to benefits from too. I still draw a salary from a structure that isn't wholly free of the thing I object to, and I still hand my work to a commons I know gets drawn from in ways I'd never choose myself. So that particular bit worked itself out, sure, but the larger condition didn't, and that's the real subject of this post.

So what do I do? Run, as far as possible, to preserve my ethics while torching the internal and external goods in the short term? How often do you find employment that supports Open Source in the way that mine does? Gestell from another angle, in a different light.

Of course, it's not an intentional antagonism. My personal beliefs shouldn't control or define a business. But neither should the execution of the business define my ethics. That's just the power dynamic at play.

Thus the state never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.

Civil Disobedience - Thoreau

But I also don't exist to be forced; I make my own decisions. I choose my own beliefs. See, that's sort of the point of ethics; they're only worth as much as we're willing to express. Thoreau's civil disobedience carried weight because he was willing to spend his time in jail, not because he wrote an essay. And he wrote the essay after the fact; so am I.

I am a counter-friction

Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

Civil Disobedience - Thoreau

At any rate, I can't control what my employer does. I don't want to, it's not my place. But I do want to act in an ethical manner, following my own definition of what ethical means. I want to be a counter-friction to something I cannot stomach. Not because it's a judgement on what others are doing, in fact, I am deathly certain that some portion of my open source work is being used to build systems for the US military industrial complex. But it's not by my choice, it is not because I have lent myself directly to the execution of that bloody work.

Open source work means freedom. Freedom to take, and use, and do with as you wish. When I make a contribution as an open source maintainer, I am performing a good, an Aristotelian virtue I would argue. I give my knowledge, talent, and time freely with no expectation of return or benefit. I give it to the world to do with as they please. I am aware that this will in turn have both good and bad effects, but I believe the good outweighs the bad.

I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.

Civil Disobedience - Thoreau

So there are two parts to me in this sense. The one that contributes to the commons in good faith, knowing there will be some bad faith. The other that shepherds the internal goods of a company he once thought had nothing to do with the work he has spent his life declining. However, in the same manner, I know that my employer contributes to the world. We create jobs, we care for our people, we do not unrelentingly pursue profit as the ultimate good. It is rare to find these things. I have a team that I feel responsible for, to shepherd their technical decisions and their personal career growth. Are not these things, in a way, living according to nature? Is there so much evil in contributing to the military industrial complex that it outweighs all the good? Is this uneasy, precarious position between rejection and contribution sustainable for a person?

And that's really the bind, isn't it? Caught between Aristotle and Thoreau the whole thing wants to collapse into a binary, either the good outweighs the bad so you absorb it and move on, or you denounce it outright and accept whatever that costs you.

Gelassenheit.

Heidegger's recommendation for Gestell is Gelassenheit (releasement). He believed that you can't resist Gestell, that enframing occurs because people have this unique unrelenting desire to control everything around them. It's subtle, but he pointed to things like the wording of "human resources" as evidence. Everything around us is resource to be brought under control and wielded to our desires. We desire to make everything, including people, stand in reserve to be used for our benefit. And even if you realize that you're Gestell the best you can do is Gelassenheit, release your desire to struggle against that enframing. And even that releasing? It's just another way to view things.

It's so goddamn pessimistic.

I mean, I get it. It's what you get when there's no shared Teleology, and that's more or less exactly what Alasdair MacIntyre is getting at in After Virtue, that modern moral disagreement just goes on forever and never resolves because we lost the shared telos that used to let "this is wrong" actually land as a conclusion instead of slowly rotting into personal preference. When you can't sit down face to face with somebody and say "this is wrong" and have a mutually understood conversation about why, then it all just devolves into mutually exclusive moral opinion. Heidegger and MacIntyre are really describing the same wound from two different angles, Heidegger's telling you to release into it and MacIntyre's telling you how we got here in the first place.

Loosely you can frame Heidegger as "quit bothering about it" because that's the difference between what you think and what you do. And MacIntyre says the opposite, find a community that shares your teleology so there's no conflict to sit with in the first place.

Condemned to choose.

I choose neither and both, a yes-and-no if you'll entertain it.

Fundamentally, my stance is this:

  • I will not directly support the military industrial complex.
  • Work that indirectly supports it, I will do, insofar as the intent is not to benefit it directly.

What that means, for me, is that supporting my team and shepherding the open source projects I care for are good. They serve a good internal to their practice. When I teach someone to build something, even if they take that knowledge and apply it to supporting the military industrial complex, that is their choice, not mine. What I know I give freely because it is right to do so. The same logic applies to open source work. I maintain and shepherd systems that are used to deploy infrastructure. Just because another engineer uses that to deploy a system for a purpose I don't agree with doesn't mean I have the right to enforce my ethics on them.

Fundamentally that's two halves of an actual life. The first one has its instance now, the work that came close enough to nearly be mine, the moment it would've been my own hand on it and I said no. And the second has its instances too, they're just less comfortable to sit with, in a Sartrean Anguish sort of way. Anguish in the existential sense, that I must sit with these things and turn them over in my head until I've drawn some sort of conclusion. As Camus would say, "we must imagine Sisyphus happy", so too I. And ultimately the question becomes, how can I sit with "yes-and-no" as my answer?

When I teach someone something, or when I maintain a project and hand it out to the world, I'm relinquishing control over it by design, that's the whole entire nature of a gift. So to then turn around and hold myself responsible for every single thing done downstream with what I gave away freely, well, that'd be incoherent, I can't give a thing away and still keep my hands clamped on it at the same time. My responsibility tracks what I intend and what I do directly, not the full causal weight of every last use my gift eventually gets put to. If some other engineer takes what I taught them, or what I maintain, and points it at something I find repugnant, that's their choice and their hands on it, not mine. So refusing the work that would've been my own hand on it, while simultaneously still giving away what's actually mine to give, is the only coherent state I can comport myself towards.

The funny part is, I've gone back and forth and rehashed this entire post numerous times, anguished over the wording for months. The immediate anxious Thoreauvian "civil disobedience" came and went, I asked for a recusal from work that violates my ethics, and it was granted. But this point, tracing the philosophic thought that forms how I understand why, and how I formulate all of this; that is the harder path.

And even then, none of that actually has to matter. Sartre had this idea that there's no essence set for us a priori, we exist first and make ourselves after, so I have to live the moment and choose!

...reality exists only in action. Man is nothing other than his own project. He exists only to the extent that he realizes himself, therefore he is nothing more than the sum of his actions, nothing more than his life.

Existentialism is a Humanism - Jean-Paul Sartre

And that when I choose, I'm never only choosing for me. In drawing out where my ethics exist, I'm holding up an image of what I think a person ought to be, I'm saying, quietly but unmistakably, this is the man I'd have a man be. And that image is mine to answer for, all of it, there's no setting it down and no slipping out behind "well, that's just my preference." This is a harder line to walk than MacIntyre's lost teleology lets you off with. His diagnosis leaves you an exit; you can sit across from someone, decide your teleologies simply don't overlap, and write the whole disagreement off as nothing more than preference. Sartre takes that exit away from me. I don't get to wave off my own failures and shortcomings as "preference" either. I'm condemned to the freedom to choose, and in that choice I own both the direct outcomes and, past them, what it ultimately means to "exist".

What is more, to say that we invent values means neither more nor less than this: life has no meaning a priori. Life itself is nothing until it is lived, it is we who give it meaning, and value is nothing more than the meaning that we give it. You can see, then, that it is possible to create a human community.

Existentialism is a Humanism - Jean-Paul Sartre

So where Heidegger tells me to loosen my grip and let the enframing have me, Sartre tells me I'm condemned to choose inside it whether I want to or not, and that the choosing is the one thing no machine can ever do in my place. That's the part that lets me breathe. And it means that my ethics don't need to change the world, they don't need justification, they simply need to be.

So state your line before the world forces it out of you, and when you state it, do it without contempt for the people across the table, because the moment you sneer you've turned the whole thing back into two opinions that'll never meet. Choose, and then own the man you chose. You can be both civil and disobedient.

Things Referenced

This isn't a literal bibliography or anything, but for anyone curious to read further.