https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Wigand
Trailer: https://youtu.be/MGOb29aePyc
The best scene: https://youtu.be/gNKmmA6_oTQ
His name was Richard Jewel
Surely there's better sources to read/watch than a fictional dramatization?
https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/1996/05/wigand199605
But the film is really, really good and I think the gravity of the situation is more apparent than in the article.
It doesn't matter if you're right; it doesn't matter if the group is doing bad things; it doesn't matter if speaking up will help save lives.
The function of the group is to survive as a group; it will do whatever it takes to achieve that.
Laws that go against human nature fight an uphill battle; it doesn't mean we should not try, but it does mean we should be aware of the difficulty.
A more appropriate term than 'insiders' would be 'cunts'.
citation:
Learning from Schelling's Strategy of Conflict Roger B. Myerson JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC LITERATURE VOL. 47, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2009 (pp. 1109-25) https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.47.4.1109
The amount of cases where C-suites or owners take it very personally and go on vengeance streak are many... you don't want to fight bunch of very well-connected rich sociopaths hell-bent on destroying you or worse, and from position of a 'nice guy'.
It would be their opportunity to reach said level. Blackmail their way up the corporate ladder.
Is that how they get there?
1-2% of the population may be a sociopath / psychopath — but its still considered “abnormal psychology”.
If someone had proof that a device I made was hurting people, I wouldn’t try to destroy their life or kill them.
A lot of this whistleblowing doesnt even have jailtime as a consequence to those who failed their duty of care - often it just means they’ll make a few million less dollars but still be plenty comfortable.
We shouldn’t feel its “normal” to murder / torture / assault or ruin the lives of these whistleblowers any more than we think sociopaths are “normal”.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/ebay-execs-sent-... <- this is not just normal “human nature”. It’s the result of abnormal psychology.
That’s not a “threat” - they’re in no danger.
I don't expect the greedy and powerful to change, but as a society we should do more to protect whistleblowers, the same way we protect threatened witnesses.
Also, more solidarity between workers, although not always possible, would go a long way. So many Google employees can definitely afford to quit in solidarity, or strike. Not saying it's easy, I recognize it isn't.
They are a control mechanism for the masses, nothing to do with right or wrong, which is written in our hearts. But, if you want to disempower the individual, take his money (tax), use that money against him (police, tax inspectors) you need some authorised hymnsheet for the feeble minded to get behind. And that is law.
It's just quite unfortunate we're all reading from different heart books.
Funny, btw. But, not all truth has to be found in a book.. Arguably, no truth is.
No, no we are not.
It might be the authority of the pharmaceutical industry with regards to what treatments can be provided more psychiatric conditions.
And even then you have to wonder about their criteria - a doubling of diseases with every edition, all those 'chemical imbalances' and not one physical test!
Too bad we are not evolved enough to have left all of this inhumanity behind along with the extinct hominids, but you have to play the hand you are dealt.
When you think about it though, what most people usually call "human nature" is actually really inhuman nature which has not been fully surpassed.
They wouldn't say it if it wasn't false ;)
Also widely regarded as an excuse to begin with even if not fully recognized as such.
It's always been plain to see the world would be a better place the more inhumanity has been eradicated, but there have always been those who favor more inhumanity not less anyway.
Maybe some people have always been concentrating on their limitations rather than their possibilities, and that's been the limit of their horizon historically since the dawn of man. Others, not so much.
Full "human nature" would be the complete absence of inhumanity in thought & deed.
I'm reluctant to name it "human nature", but let it be.
Most laws are needed to restrict "human nature". Moral codes exist to restrict "human nature". So it is the fate of a law.
> The function of the group is to survive as a group; it will do whatever it takes to achieve that.
It is an oversimplification I believe. Groups have very different goals, and sometimes money is more important then group existence. Groups can accept additional existential risks to increase profits, in such cases it means money has more importance for a group than its existence.
I strongly disagree with that. Laws (and moral codes) exist to codify the general, agreed-upon human nature. They therefore "restrict," as you say, a subset of people whose internal moral compass is broken.
To pick the most extreme example: most people don't need a law, or even a moral code, to not kill other people. We all (for some large and growing, but not 100%) agreed that killing is wrong, and most of us do not need the threat of a murder trial to talk us out of killing someone who cuts in front of us at the fast food line. To be clear, not 100% of us, but more than 50%, and I hope in many places, much more than 50% of us.
For other, less extreme crimes, the percent of people in consensus might be lower. But even for something like speeding on the highway I think human nature is, on average, a limiting factor more than laws or moral codes, rather than being an uncontrolled source of chaos reined in by law.
People (on average) drive maybe 60-80 mph on the highway (depending on the highway -- looking at you, Montana). If there were no speed limit at all, that wouldn't jump that much: the average speed on the autobahn is apparently 125kph, or 78mph.
Everyone's human nature is, on average, reasonably aligned, and laws tend to reflect that average.
And that's just one facet of our lives. In a low complexity society, especially ones with smaller populations there are typically fewer laws. As society grows, and especially as the populations begin to specialize formalized laws are a natural outcome. The farmer, the taylor, and the brickmaker all need common set of rules for expectation in things like trade and debt that get very hard to coordinate as population size grows.
In short, laws are not (generally) handed down by some authority, against the will of the majority of the people -- at least not in non-dictatorships.
> To pick the most extreme example: most people don't need a law, or even a moral code, to not kill other people.
How it may be a "nature" if it is artificial? Some cultures routinely eat other people, we do not, how it can be a human nature, if different people coalesce at different "natures"?
There is a famous debate "nature vs. nurture", and I believe it is unwise to call something to be a nature thing, if it is really a nurture thing. It just bring a lot of confusion.
> Everyone's human nature is, on average, reasonably aligned, and laws tend to reflect that average.
Eww... averages... I believe it is impossible to have a meaningful definition of an "average person". There was a story of average pilot[1], and later of a search for average american woman (can't find a link). You cannot have meaningful averages in highly multi-dimensional spaces.
But if we rephrase it referring to a social norms, it could make sense, but then comes a question what is the difference between human nature and social norms?
[1] https://worldwarwings.com/no-such-thing-as-an-average-pilot-...
every human has the potential to be a great person. and only education is needed to enable that greatness and allow humanity to benefit from it.
No indeed it's not specific to the west, but the emphasis was worth it: many western people have such an high opinion of their country that they believe it could only happen in Iran, Russia, North Korea and the likes
Not all "groups" are created equal though. I think a big factor in this is how much people make the group a part of their personal identity. If they feel like they are the group (ie "I am American"), then they feel like an attack on the group is an attack on them (is "Americans are dumb" means I am dumb).
Not all groups latch on to their members sense of identity like that, and in that case an attack on the group is much more acceptable to members of the group.
The west is unique because it has created a very believable façade of cleanliness, majority of the population believes that whistleblowing works and often allegations of corruption are treated like conspiracy theory.
In, let's say, Russia, everyone knows that things are corrupt, at least they are realists.
> fight an uphill battle
For some reason our ideology talks about entrepreneurs as wealth creators and completely forgets about wealth creators that our society doesn't reward or punishes, like whistle-blowers.
My guess would be that things are less corrupt in Russia in 2023 than in most 'Western' countries now.
After all, laws in a rule-of-law country are better thought of as restrictions on the state, not the individual. Without criminal law, what's stopping a police officer for killing you if they think it's appropriate? Laws protecting whistleblowers can then be seen as a promise by society to individuals: "If you come forward, we have the power to protect you."
If the person has pre existing medical condition like diabetes, doing good will literally cost one’s life . Living the experience, for voicing discrimination at employment situation
Have interviewed 176 attorneys over 2 year period with only 5 confirming that the discrimination is illegal , but they had signed agreements to not represent employees.
Found out that one can buyout judges, apparently a judge can punish a legal practice if they don’t want a whistleblower case be presented
Being rich definitely allows one to be ignorant all these ongoing friction in life
TBH that's the only circumstance in which I think it would make sense to whistle blow.
"In 2012, as a consequence of his whistleblower status, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) awarded him $104 million, 26% of the total $400 million in taxes returned. It was the 4th reward paid to date since the IRS Whistleblower Program went into effect in 2006."
He did 40 months in prison as well but stil...
It's equally-lucrative in Defense. You won't work anywhere ever again, but the DoD pays out enough to make it worth your while.
With regulatory capture and the revolving door between .com and .gov, those who run the corporations and those who are supposed to respond to the whistle are often hanging out in the same back rooms.
The general response seems to be a slap on the wrist and a hardy “Don’t get caught doing that again!”
Forget about whistle-blowing in Europe, it will likely blow up in your face. Best thing is, if you are in a company with unethical behavior, to pack your stuff and leave ASAP and hope that you don't get anything of the fallout.
In most European countries, in fact not any that I am aware of, will you get a reward for blowing the whistle. If you do, best case, you don't get any legal problems. Don't expect anyone to hire you in the future. Nobody blew the whistle with the "VW/Audi emissions scandal". They would have gotten a big reward in the US. In the trial the big boss claimed as long that he had nothing to do with it, that it was the sole decision of his engineers, until the court offered him a probation sentence. You blow the whistle? Expect that your boss will claim that it was only your responsibility and he knew nothing about it. Emails on the company server? Expect them to be gone.
"Best thing is, if you are in a company with unethical behavior, to pack your stuff and leave ASAP and hope that you don't get anything of the fallout."
When I was a young engineer in a terrible place, the big boss told me to do something. Disregarding all good practices, risking the health of the employees with this action etc. If I had followed his oral command, it would have been at the same time a reason to be fired on the spot. I could have lived with that, but they could have also claimed millions in damages from the circumstances. There were other issues (IP that I developed). I called in sick for two weeks and then submitted my resignation. Best decision ever. I read about this guy many years later in a major newspaper when he screwed another employee totally off. (Do you read hear H.L.?).
Bottom line: If shit hits the fan, people will lie. They will try to throw you under the bus.
I actually emailed my old boss when I saw the newspaper article, put a link to the article and wrote: "I'm glad to hear that you stayed true to your character." He did not reply.
Yes, he got trouble from the Newspaper article, but they guy he screwed over, he screwed over deeply.
I couldn’t trust a whistleblower. While grateful for a lot of the work they do, I never want to be their target and would never risk getting close to them.
Well, from an anonymous account, it means jack. Bull, even.
(In particular if you're in, say, finance, or a safety-critical industry, you are not going to want to hire someone who has a known track record of failing to report crimes. I mean, unless you're, like, FTX or someone.)
It is a different story when coworker tells "boss" who is lazying around, and a different story when someone reports a serious misconduct towards other people. I'm not sure how to phrase it clearly, but generally I would not associate myself with former people, but I wouldn't mind the latter. Maybe one day they'd prevent me from doing something really terrible (given I wouldn't know better).
I have secrets, but if someone were to leak them nobody would seriously employ the term "whisteblower".
Implying that because someone doesn't want to stay quiet when he sees unethical/unlawful things they can't be trusted on a personal level is a dehumanizing thing to say.
I might be breaking a rule here, but this comment could probably be found verbatim in some company's playbook to discourage whiteblowing.
It doesn't matter. This still applies even if you haven't done anything yet.
Nobody wants to be friends with the kid who narcs on everyone. Show me the man and I'll show you the crime he's committed. Why subject yourself to that?
It's a bit reductionist to consider the things that get whistleblown about as just "everyone has their secrets". Alice is illegally spying on all of society, well, everyone has their secrets. Billy has a porno magazine hidden in his closet, well, everyone has their secrets. Charlie is stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers, well, everyone has their secrets. Daryl is running a child trafficking ring, well, everyone has their secrets. Not all secrets are the same.
> I couldn’t trust a whistleblower. While grateful for a lot of the work they do, I never want to be their target and would never risk getting close to them.
So, you make it a little more likely that whistleblowers will have a hard time, and a little more likely that whistleblowers will be discouraged from ever whistleblowing in the first place. The end result is that you are a little more likely to be affected by the corruption that might have been stopped by whistleblowers.
Everyone has their definition about what a "good person" is. Let me offer my definition. A "good person" is someone who is more likely to benefit than to be harmed by widespread wistleblowing. Good people should want whistleblowers to be protected and commonplace.
You see, it makes sence, consider that guy over there - corporate drone, climbing the ladder, would sell his own mother - totally trustworthy, you know what he is gonna do.
But this guy, who values his abstract principles and integrity above any social contract? Can you tell when he has had enough? Do you even know what his values are? What if, one day, he decides that the place is so miserable, so corrupt, so complicit in suffering, that he just burns it all to the ground?