If you truly want to make a difference in the world, moral handwashing and the piestic pursuit of moral purity in consumption and investment doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Progress has only ever been made by people organizing. Read the history of the American Revolution, the abolitionists, the suffrage movement, the labor movement, or the civil rights movement. In each leap forward for individual rights, it was organized people who pressured politicians, built massive public support, organized growing local social societies, and defeated their opponents at the polls (or in the cases of the Revolution and Civil War, at war). At the very least, it always took decades of meetings, donations, volunteering, letter-writing, rallying, and bleeding.
In a nutshell, I'm saying that worrying about index funds is a distraction. If you spend two hours researching this issue, that's two hours of volunteer labor a real-life organization could have used to promote your values in an actually effective way. If you earn $10k less over the next few years due to stock-picking, that money could have filed a lawsuit, printed a million handbills, or lobbied for change.
Today, the civil rights, labor, women's rights, and human rights movements are starving for time, talent, and money.
Meanwhile, we're all staring into our cell phones, sending data to Facebook and Google, certain that sharing a fucking meme or "liking" a "news" article changes the world in some magical way. Guess what. The only result is more effective advertizing.
Today there are few union family picnics, few local communities of like minded people, hardly any great orators, and a few empty shells of the organizations that once moved the world. And yet there is this faith that sending our petitions and complaints to some corporate cloud server makes us activists, or absolves us from abandoning our values - which we have done by doing nothing to support them. People consider their Facebook "groups" to be the same as an actual group. The meaning of "friend" is also different, and cheaper, now. Nobody realizes they're playing video games while Rome burns.
Millions of people think they are doing good by purchasing organic strawberries or recycling their toothbrushes. The activists of yesteryear would slap us out of our self-delusion if they could.
These days, people prefer push-button or consumption-based pseudo-activism, oblivious to the realization that politicians ignore online petitions, corporations ignore socially responsible investing, and their own consumption/investment decisions are completely based on greenwashing from PR departments. Totally ineffective.
So, bottom line, if you care about something, join or start an organization. Volunteer. Build networks of friends and mobilize them. Don't congratulate yourself for pushing buttons like most people do.
