I am at an impasse. I don’t think I can continue my current career, but at the same time I don’t know how or when to get off.

Suffice to say, I help administer a component of government.
Over the course of the last year, doubts have developed in my mind over the morality of the work we are doing.

I have become increasingly convinced that the service I and my colleagues provide is not actually helping anyone, and I am seriously concerned that it may be beginning to cause real harm to the people it is meant to protect.

This is something I’ve gone back and forth on, trying to wrap my head around how seriously I want to take myself.

The service is still in its infancy, and the bulk of its intended powers and responsibilities are not yet material, but it does already have powers, and responsibilities, it already makes decisions about real people.

Decisions I facilitate, am complicit in, whether they are right or wrong.

My concerns are not theoretical, I have a few pilot examples of them being borne out already, single digit instances, a tiny percentage of work done, but they are there.

For a variety of reasons, structural, inertial, legal, I believe that these issues will become more common, as well as more serious, as time goes on and more and more functions of the service move from paper to practice.

There are a variety of complicating factors that have kept me hanging around so far, for one, this service is probably necessary, horrific things have happened in the past because of a lack of something like it, and would happen again if it were dismantled.

For another, I believe that nobody involved wants the things that are happening to happen, the issues are caused by a combination of factors that are difficult to see without a bird’s eye view of the entire system and the work going on therein, and because of this no individual or group of individuals actually involved are really culpable, the issue is systemic, structural, difficult to tease out, difficult to articulate.

However, I also believe that the people that directed these services set up probably knew, or should have had the experience to know, that these kind of things happening was going to be an inevitability.

If they didn’t they would have had to have been very naive, I’m not sure which would be worse, stupidity or cynicism.

I do not believe that my leaving, or refusing to carry out work I believe is unethical, would actually make any difference as things are now. I am replaceable, and if I cannot be replaced quickly they will simply carry on, a little blinder, a little slower, but doing the same things in the same way, with no internal pushback.

Ultimately however, do any of these points matter?
There is no “just following orders”, there never is.

I am aware of what is going on, I am complicit, my hands at the pump, my hands wet.

I know what I need to do, but I am lingering on.
Because I like the people I work with, because its easy, because its safe, because I’ve worked for this organisation for a decade, because I am afraid of being unemployed, because I am trying to convince myself that my concerns are overblown, an autist seeing patterns where none exist.

But I don’t believe they are.