Dr Mark Hayes is a Brisbane Webdiarist. Here is an edited review of two books on whistleblowing he wrote for ‘Non violence today’ in 2000. For Harry Heidelberg’s case studies of ethics under pressure in accounting, see My ethics
Deadly Disclosures Whistleblowing and the Ethical Meltdown of Australia, by William De Maria, Wakefield Press, 1999.
The Whistleblower�s Handbook � How to be an Effective Resister, by Brian Martin, Jon Carpenter Publishing & Annandale, NSW, Envirobook, 1999.
These two books about whistleblowing, both launched at the 1999 Annual General Meeting of the national organisation Whistleblowers Australia in Brisbane in November, 1999, are focused lenses examining a syndrome now widespread in Australian society, and strategies for challenging it.
Whistleblowing, which will be more carefully described soon, why people do it, and what happens to them, is not the syndrome. These actions are rather a response to aspects and manifestations of the syndrome and its operations, actions that expose something gravely wrong about our peculiar society that is malignant, malevolent, and evil. The syndrome�s name is domination.
Neither Brian nor William even mention the concept of domination, or explicitly describe it in any detail. But the way I read their books, domination is finally what they are focusing upon and what whistleblowers are exposing. Like nonviolent campaigners, whistleblowers are taking on domination operative in their particular sphere of activity. It ought not be surprising at all, then, that whistleblowers get persecuted using all the insidious, ingenious, devious, and oppressive means dominators in our society can apply.
Domination is an extremely complex phenomenon, arguably the central topic of analysis for much social science and humanities fields. Many scholars and commentators either don�t know or realise that what they are really studying or criticising is some facet or other of domination, or, more likely, they are looking at some symptom, manifestation, or effect of domination. The difficulty of defining domination, or more adequately describing it, is shown even by how librarians have to classify and catalogue my PhD thesis, which was about domination and peace research. The standard library classification systems don�t even have a place for domination as a discrete and special philosophical, sociological, or theological term or concept. The closest available term or concept is �dominance�, which is a psychological term used to describe certain behaviours observed in animal species, such as a �dominance heirarchy� in monkey troops.
Whistleblowing as examined by William and Brian provides a window into the workings of domination in our peculiar kind of society. : Domination refers to socially unnecessary constraints on human freedom which restrict the realisation of human potentials for emancipation, as hermeneutically interpreted in terms of specific contexts and historically precise local ethical systems and legal orders. orders�. Very simply, �hermeneutically interpreted� means �trying really, really hard to fairly, accurately, and adequately understand what it actually means and is really like to be a person in a particular context as much as I possibly can, using some extremely sensitive and complicated investigation, experience gathering, and interpreting techniques, always accepting that no matter how good I am at it, I certainly won�t get their story absolutely right�.
What starts to happen when this is sincerely and properly attempted, though, is a radical re�writing of history as well as how some part of society works, including exposing the heretofore hidden and denied stories of domination in practice, together with an entirely expected backlash which labels these new, and more adequate, views of our society�s story as subversive, unsettling, and dangerous. On the positive side, the question I would ask of a particular society � and I always have my own society in mind here, so ask the same question of your own society � is: �Do we really, really need this particular procedure, practice, belief system, law, regulation, institution, whatever, in order for our society to actively, positively, sustainably facilitate the development of a better society? What stands in the way of a better society coming to be?�
What it is that prevents or constrains us from creating a better society in which all can achieve their potential for full development can be called �domination�. A closely related point, which I think is central to whistleblowing among many other things, is whether or not we persist with objectively unnecessary activities when, by all generally acceptable accounts, we demonstrably know how to operate or behave better.
The method I am applying by asking this general question is called �immanent critique� and comes from a body of sociological theory called �critical theory� . Basically, one looks very carefully at what a society, in this case mine, and its major or most influential, cannonical or credal, statements declare it is on about, and compare those statements with what is actually going on in the ways that society actually operates. The same method can be applied to specific organisations, institutions, or agencies by looking closely at their Mission Statements or Ethics Charters and then seeing what actually happens within the organisation, especially at times of crisis, such as somebody blowing the whistle about wrongdoing inside them.
Another useful technique I�ll use is sometimes called �forcing�. This involves looking for the very strongest parts of an idea, notion, philosophical or ethical system, suggested procedure or practice and subjecting them to the most rigorous strain possible to see how much stress they can sustain before they fall apart, cease to make sense, or fail to convince. In practice, �forcing� can involve asking somebody to imagine what kind of a society we�d have if everybody � and by everybody I literally mean every socially competent person in society � behaved or acted as they are suggesting we ought to behave or act.
I was again reading Barrington Moore�s 1978 study of Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt while writing this review, and grappling with what seems to be a central question rather poorly addressed in both William and Brian�s books, when some sentences at the end of Moore�s �Epilogue� struck me more forcefully than on past readings. I had returned to Moore because James C. Scott�s 1990 study of Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, when read in the context of considering whistleblowing, suggested that whistleblowing might be understood as another �hidden transcript�, one of the many ways in which routinely dominated people seek to make sense of their dominated condition and deploy all sorts of ingenious tactics to carve out and protect their own �liberated spaces�, be they physical or mental, and resist their dominators, often nonviolently.
Moore wrote:
… one main cultural task facing any oppressed group is to undermine or explode the justification of the dominant stratum. Such criticisms may take the form of attempts to demonstrate that the dominant stratum does not perform the tasks that it claims to perform and therefore violates the specific social contract. Much more frequently they take the form that specified individuals in the dominant stratum fail to live up to the social contract. Such criticism leaves the basic functions of the dominant stratum inviolate. Only the most radical forms of criticism have raised the question whether kings, capitalists, priests, generals, bureaucrats, etc., serve any useful social purpose at all.”
James C. Scott�s purpose in Domination and the Arts of Resistance is to bring to the fore what he argues are the largely hidden stories of what people do when they are dominated, mostly focusing on colonised peoples, slaves, and peasant societies. On my reading of Moore and especially Scott, whistleblowing, because it is and involves the public disclosure of wrongdoing inside an organisation, is anything but hidden, though it might well get burried later on, along with the whistleblower.
To a significant degree, whistleblowing is resistance to certain otherwise routine and largely hidden activities which violate some generally accepted standards of what constitutes proper behaviour. But by no means does it, at least initially, involve a wholesale and radical questioning of the whole point and purpose of the organisation. As a result of their subsequent experiences, if they don�t get destroyed, or driven mad or to suicide, the reflective whistleblower might get thoroughly radicalised and start asking some penetrating questions about what it is in our society that causes our organisations to operate in the ways they do which are so fundamentally at odds with what they say they are supposed to be on about.
Before I get to Scott�s quarrel with Moore, I need to clarify three more important concepts: power, hegemony, and mimesis.
Power is, very simply, the capacity of an actor to get another actor to do their will despite resistance. Very basically, power is what is used by actors � individuals, groups, agencies, institutions, governments, states � to challenge, resist, overturn, or establish and maintain relations of domination. I�ve borrowed this very simple but still useful definition of power from the German sociologist, Max Weber, whose work on domination is difficult but essential reading for anybody seriously interested in understanding domination.
Hegemony,, another concept which often appears in discussions about power or domination, refers to the means used by a dominant group or class in a society to establish, maintain, and extend their domination over other groups or classes through cultural or social means, over against exclusively coercive, legal, or political means.
Hegemony is, like domination itself, most effective when its target group has no idea what is going on, and comes to totally accept that they are at fault, that there is something fundamentally inferior about them as individuals, a group, or a people. All the dominator then need do is continue the reproduction of its own culture as the only culture to secure its cultural control, alongside the political tools of law, regulation, and ultimately, violent coercion.
In organisations, hegemony operates to create, maintain, and extend the peculiar workplace culture, in addition to its formal rules and regulations, to which employees have to conform if they are to survive.
Mimesis, one of the most insidious features of domination, is related to hegemony insofar as it involves the dominated actor taking on and reproducing within their own ranks the beliefs, attitudes, appearances, and behaviours of the dominator, or at least plausibly appearing to do so. If hegemony refers mostly to cultural means of domination, then mimesis can include hegemony, but is often used to describe social psychological traits found in dominated groups.
In order to really fit in to an organisation, to really demonstrate their loyalty, employees often groom and dress themselves in ways which they believe will ingratiate themselves with their superiors.
Members of the dominated group may use the same language or try to think or see their world in the same ways as the dominator group, refusing to use their own language or world views. Far from being a hidden transcript, or a potential or actual expression of resistance, mimesis all but turns the dominated into the same beings as the dominator. Except that the dominator, though recognising the mimetic reproduction of their domination in the dominated group and thence its value in stabilising and extending their control, will always accept the dominated only on condition that they always will know their place.
The intent of mimesis is partially summarised by reference to a 1960s slogan: �It�s hard to fight an opponent with outposts even inside your own head�.
Another effect of mimesis occurs when the dominated prey upon each other, reproducing domination within their own ranks rather than mobalising or organising to resist externally imposed domination. Barrington Moore wrote in Injustice that:
Even fantasies of liberation and revenge can help preserve domination through dissipating collective energies in relatively harmless rhetoric and ritual. For the dominant group such a phenomenon has the further advantage of justifying alertness, keeping the tools of repression in good working order and their own supporters in line. Among the leaders of both oppressors and oppressed there can be a tacit understanding that this is the way the system is supposed to work, that this is the form the social contract takes.
James C. Scott�s difficulty with Barrington Moore�s point that the most radical question to ask is whether or not we really need domination manifesting in heirarchial agencies such as bureaucracies in order to run a good society, is that most of the time the dominated groups don�t really want a wholesale radical change in the ways their society operates. Scott writes:
Short of the total declaration of war that one does occasionally find in the midst of a revolutionary crisis, most protests and challenges � even quite violent ones � are made in the realistic expectation that the central features of the form of domination will remain intact.
This seems fair enough. Given my definition and approach to domination, it is entirely proper to accept a lot of what my kind of society does and how it works. I also happen to support quite a few of the directions in which my society seems to be heading. It�s the aspects of my society which are demonstrably wrong, particularly where we demonstrably know better, and why and how we ought to behave better, which I oppose. Which leads us into whistleblowing.
These books, and especially William De Maria�s Deadly Disclosures, collect overwhelming evidence which points to a syndrome raging through our society which demands concerted, principled, and courageous resistance. Brian Martin�s Whistleblower�s Handbook offers strategies and tactics, many derived from nonviolent action, which, if intelligently and creatively followed, at least offer the intending whistleblower greater empowerment as they embark on what, on both author�s amply referenced accounts, is usually an extremely risky, frought, complicated, dangerous, and, on occasion, literally fatal course of action to expose wrongness and seek justice.
The best advice William and Brian would give to intending whistleblowers in the short term is an emphatic �Don�t!� In savage summary, the brutal ways in which our peculiar kind of society operates, riddled as it is with the malignant, malevolent, and evil syndrome I�ll attempt to succinctly describe soon, explicitly deter whistleblowing and exact such fearsome tolls upon those who do expose official misbehaviour that, from the perspectives of self-preservation or radical individualism, all but the most foolhardy, naieve, or genuinely masochistic individual would even momentarily consider doing so.
That people still do blow the whistle, despite, or even fully aware of, what they almost certainly are getting themselves, and their families, friends, and supporters into, offers at least a glimmer of hope that all is not completely lost.
The positive sides of the books is that both equip the whistleblower and their supportive associates with many survival and tactical skills and ideas. Whistleblowing provides both a clear window on to what�s so wrong with our society, and when conducted effectively, turns exposing what�s wrong into dissent with what we�re endlessly told is right, correct, and proper, even expedient and necessary, and more effective resistance which can be applied to other manifestations of the syndrome.
The Macquarie Dictionary defines a whistleblower as “a person who alerts the public to some scandalous practice or evidence of corruption on the part of someone else”. William more carefully defines a whistleblower as:
… a concerned citizen, totally or predominantly motivated by notions of public interest, who initiates of his or her own free will an open disclosure about significant wrongdoing in a particular occupational role to a person or agency capable of investigating the complaint and faciliating the correction of wrongdoing, and who suffers accordingly.
There is much embedded in that definition, not the least being an ethical position which guides the individual to make judgements about behaviour they see or come to know about which is contrary to the public interest, over against their own private interests.
There is also the assumption in the rightness, rectitude, probity, and efficacy of the individual or agency to whom the open disclosure is made, and in the tendency to fairness or justice embedded in the society in which the individual or agency is located. After all, the agency�s Web Site has its Charter of Ethics, and its enabling Act of Parliament says it�s to be impartial and fair, that complaints made to it will be treated with the strictest confidence, and it appears to have the power to properly investigate complaints, as well as prosecute proven wrongdoers. On that basis, the concerned employee with conclusive evidence of significant wrongdoing seems to be on a strong and secure foundation.
William has the whistleblower acting out of an occupational role, an employment situation where the whistleblower either comes across the wrongdoing within their own organisation, or as a consequence of their routine work, but not necessarily as a central part of it. The employer � employee relationship, containing legal and often assumed unwritten mutual obligations and responsibilities, is the immediate context in which whistleblowing occurs, excluding voluntary associations, though publically spirited disclosure can also occur in organisations like churches or local sporting clubs. It�s the scale of the disclosure and its effects on society that matters.
To be sure, anonymous leaks, or tip offs that journalists sometimes receive pointing us to look closely at a government department, or ask exceptionally well informed questions of the Minister at a media conference, are sometimes described as whistleblowing, but William excludes the leak, or anonymous tip offs from his definition of whistleblowing. Indeed, while always eager to receive leaks, or bundles of documents falling off the back of a passing truck at 3.00am in the morning, good journalists are always suspicious of them because leaks never tell the complete story, and can be deliberately partial, passed on for baser motives than disclosure solely in the public interest. The up front open disclosure made at first instance to the apparently proper authority is what separates the whistleblower from the anonymous leaker.
The spectacular leaks from 2UE to ABC TV�s Media Watch show, which led to the so�called �cash for comment� inquiry before the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA) in the middle of 1999, were just leaks. Had, say, John Law�s or Alan Jones� producer, wracked by pangs of conscience and outraged about what the undisclosed payments were doing to the essential, even decisive, credibility of not only 2UE, but the entire Australian commercial broadcasting industry, gathered up all the documents and toddled off to the relevant government watchdog authority, the ABA, or even the Federation of Australian Radio Broadcasters (FARB), the relevant self�regulatory industry association, then this might have been whistleblowing, except that the ABA or FARB may have chosen to keep the matter locked away safely in�house for fear of damaging the industry�s credibility, and thence its revenue stream.
What advertiser wants to be associated with a radio station with even the slightest hint of graft about it? Maybe the producer�s identity might have found its way back to 2UE, and a discrete sacking arranged, with word put around the industry that the former high flying producer was the one who leaked, and wrecked it for the rest of us.
Here are the decisive elements in William�s definition of whistleblowing, and I�ll use them, and the assumption of a general ethical consensus which helps us decide what�s in �the public interest�, as entry points into my discussion of the syndrome I attached the name �domination� to earlier.
For speaking out, and bringing the wrongdoing to the attention of their superiors, employers, or an external agency with, at least on paper, the power to investigate and do something to remedy the situation, the employee, far from receiving praise for their honesty or rectitude, often receives the kinds of persecutions met�d out to Franz Kafka�s Joseph K in The Trial or Winston Smith in George Orwell�s 1984. In other words, it seems far more important to conform, stay silent, go along to get along, exist only for the advancement of your superior�s career, keep your mouth shut, don�t cause trouble, etc. and similar, because if you don�t, this is what will happen to you.
In genuine bewilderment, we might well ask, �Why?!!�, as it seems incomprehensible that the genuine, and even totally vindicated, exposer of official wrongdoing in our organisations would receive anything less than praise, support, perhaps a promotion, or a financial reward for helping root out corruption which might be costing taxpayers millions of dollars, or eroding the trust we ought to have in agencies such as the police or the courts.
As William details by way of case studies taken from well documented whistleblowing across academe, the ABC, the Royal Darwin Hospital, the National Crime Authority, several Queensland Government Departments, and the Tasmanian Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries, whistleblowers usually wind up enmeshed in a complex web of formal, bureaucratic, as well as informal, revenge and retribution, some of which even superior courts of law can find entirely legal if utterly unjust.
In passing, it�s interesting that almost all of the whistleblowing cases described in �the literature� occurred in government or quasi�government agencies. Comparatively few occur in private corporations, though they are not entirely unknown, as environmental organisations like Greenpeace know well.
That a producer at 2UE did not blow the whistle about �cash for comment� to either the ABA or FARB, but somebody very well placed indeed apparently anonymously leaked enough solid material to the ABC for �Media Watch� to expose the whole greedy works, is indicative of an important point which radically differentiates so�called public and private agencies. Somehow we expect private companies and corporations to be less ethical, less open to media and general scrutiny, less accountable, than agencies like government departments or the ABC, for which we pay as tax payers, and thence we kind�of sense that we �own� them.
Budget oversight committees, Senate and Parliament Committees, and the like, further add to this sense of public accountability we have about so�called public institutions. The final bottom line for a corporation is finally that, the balance sheet, and the rest of it, like Ethics Statements, and Ethics Audits, are the preserve of public relations consultants doing adroit spin doctoring whose operating maxim is: “We have ways of making you believe.”
Privatisation of formerly government owned and run agencies or services shift this sense of public ownership and accountability into the private marketplace. This shifting of accountability from the public into the private sphere through privatisation or corporatisation, William argues, is a partial explanation of why phenomena such as whistleblower protection laws, in place in several Australian states with significantly varying power, agencies such as Administrative Appeal Tribunals, industry or government Ombudsman�s Offices, and company, institutional, or departmental Codes or Charters of Ethics do not protect whistleblowers against reprisals, or facilitate sufficient investigation, exposure, and erradication of wrong doing.
Freedom of Information legislation is better described as Freedom from Information legislation, as anybody who has used it would fully confirm, because even public organisations can keep even harmless documents from being released under a welter of exclusion clauses, and, if needs be, governments can and do process bulk documents through Cabinet, making them �Cabinet in Confidence� and not for release until years or decades have passed.
With privatisation and outsourcing rampant, information about even the ordinary operations of governments is increasingly whithheld because it is declared to be �Commercial in Confidence�.
If legal strategems, plain and simple delays, mendacious obstructions, evasions, even lies, don�t dissuade the persistent nuisance, then it might finally come down to a court case, or ‘QCs at ten paces at $5,000 a day each’. While all organisations routinely squeal about how financially strapped they are, it�s quite amazing how many large buckets of money they can find to fund expensive legal advice, if only to finally get the pest out of their faces because the organisation�s funds are always far, far greater than those of the lonely individual.
Answers to the question of why this occurs are also hinted at in the sub�title of Deadly Disclosures � �the ethical meltdown of Australia�. Here Brian and William part company in their explanations of why our institutions and organisations behave in the ways they demonstrably do. Brian largely locates the problem in the operation of heirarchies and what almost inevitably happens when people dominate each other even in apparently benign situations. In my view, the weakest part of William�s book lies in his explanation of why �the ethical meltdown of Australia� he most ably documents occurs.
In one of several newspaper articles which appeared in early December 1999, surrounding the release of Brian and William�s books at the Annual General Meeting of Whistleblowers Australia in Brisbane, William was quoted as saying that:
We live in soft dictatorships. When our material needs are so important that we can identify how to satisfy them in society, we peripheralise the big subjects.
Corporate Australia is about a fear�driven workplace in the sense there�s no longer that family concept. It�s more like � give us your heart and soul, and we might not ask for your leg as well.
In the same article, by Shelley Gare in The Weekend Australian of December 4, Brian was quoted as saying that:
The reprisals for being a dissenter are extremely serious in many cases, which is why you often get either the young or the old being rebels. Less to lose.
The balance in society is way too skewed towards conformity. Dissent is becoming more important, but it�s also more difficult to take on powerful corporations. And if you�re on the inside of the corporation, it�s easy to be targeted vehemently. Elsewhere, Brian has studied and written about intellectual suppression, or how inconvenient, dissenting, embarassing, or unfashionable ideas or research at universities and think tanks is suppressed.
Write me off as being hopelessly naieve, but I still cling to the proposition that a major role of universities is to explore, debate, and promote precisely the kinds of cutting edge ideas or research outcomes which, while they might challenge accepted orthodoxies or practices, may well result in real and lasting improvements.
As globalisation, corporatisation, and economic rationalism overtake universities, and they are transformed into factories manufacturing only acceptable, commercially exploitable knowledge and compliant, technically skilled graduates whose original ideas extend to the making of money for themselves and their employers, even whistleblowing about how these dynamics are impacting on a given course, department, or faculty can and does result in exactly the same insidious web of revenge enveloping the dissident academic or researcher as it does on the whistleblowing public servant, police officer, or corporate employee.
The Sydney Morning Herald Good Weekend Magazine for December 11, 1999 carried a lengthy and deeply unsettling, article entitled �University Inc.� which detailed how Australian universities are using exactly the same silencing methods as corporations or government departments to control and exclude their dissenters.
William�s discussion of whistleblowing in academ�, entitled �Being UnFree in Free Spaces� adds to the story of what�s so wrong with institutions like universities, where one would expect dissenting ideas to be at least tolerated.
When frustrated by public servants or corporate employees from whom I�m seeking even a very mild off the record bit of harmless information, who seem to have to get written approval from higher up even to confirm the time of day, I have been heard to mutter darkly that I can think of several hundred thousand reasons why they will not talk to me. I�m referring, of course, to the important social control function of superannuation schemes. The longer somebody has been employed, or the higher they are in an organisation, the more they stand to lose in terms of employer�funded super contributions if they are sacked for even the mildest unauthorised disclosure of information, let alone serious whistleblowing.
This is also the Golden Handcuff or the Velvet Gag, and it is a major method deployed to ensure compliance, obedience, and silence.
If these don�t work, and an employee does speak out, even within the organisation, the web of revenge drops upon them from a great height, and they can get slowly squeezed almost, and in some extreme and tragic cases literally, to death, usually by suicide induced by acute frustration, depression, despair, or isolation.
In Shelley Gare�s article, this is explained by reference to a corporate herd mentality, in which the perceived rebel is ostracised. William was quoted as saying that:
The shunning is 100% effective. It�s the closest thing to death..
Shunning of this kind occurs within the organisation � restricted access to information needed to do one�s job, signatures from supervisors on work or equipment orders become impossible to get, formerly sociable colleagues avoid the whistleblower even in the canteen or after work socials � and outside.
When a whistleblower is ‘let go’ or their contract terminated, sometimes for what might be very strictly legal grounds and using the most minimally proper procedures possible, but what on any reading amounts to persecution or contrived circumstances, word can be quickly spread around an industry network that the dissenter is ‘a problem’ and finding work in their chosen career field becomes impossible.
Fighting the innuendos, and even lies, can be like punching smoke or chasing ghosts, because the network closes ranks, completely excludes notions of ethics, fairness, natural justice, and refuses to explore the possibility that the dissenter may well be correct, and can verify their claims with wads of documents.
Nobody wants to hire ‘a problem’ and very few people have either the time or the patience to wade through the documents and/or listen to the whistleblower�s tale of woe, let alone add their support to the whistleblower�s often lonely campaign.
Indeed, in not a few cases, even being seen in the company of a whistleblower can rebound upon the possible supporter, contaminating them in the eyes of their colleagues and superiors just as surely as if they were carriers of a highly contagious disease.
More widely, our society arguably depends on the existence of a generally understood and applied informal ethical consensus about what kinds of behaviours are acceptable or tolerable, a consensus which is formally written into our laws and enforced by formal institutions such as courts and the police.
This ethical consensus, vague though nevertheless very real and quite effective, is constantly contested, continually evolving (though not necessarily always in progressive directions), and is a product of general debate and discussion, often reinforced by actions such as general support for those who seem to exhibit or embody the best of the consensus, and social criticism, even ostracism and exclusion, of those who do not.
A major way in which this conversation is conducted throughout society is through the mass media, especially news, current affairs, comment, and letters outlets, though even sitcoms and soap operas often contain didactic content).
Now, suppose we divide our society up into two very broad areas. The top area we�ll call ‘the system’. It is the area in society where behaviour is governed or regulated by reference to formal laws, rules, or regulations, and is guided by the astringent application of formal, strictly rational, and predictable standards which are usually written down and very carefully interpreted and applied. This is where the thinking and formal behaviours largely typical of the accountant, the lawyer, the engineer, the skilled tradesperson or technician, and similar, have their place and operations.
It would be a mistake to assume that these standards and behaviours are devoid of ethics, but they operate out of different ethical criteria. Using the methods of �forcing� I mentioned earlier, if we rigorously force the ethical standards demanded by system thinking and practice � setting to one side entirely appropriate technical or procedural competences � we appear to end up with what looks suspiciously like nihilism.
Beneath the system we have what many commentators variously describe as the �civil society�, the �civil sphere�, or the �lifeworld�. This is the sphere of society were debates or conversations about ethics, about what�s right and wrong, what�s good and bad, what we individually and as a society ought and ought not do. These debates or conversations are usually conducted nonviolently because the point of them is to arrive at sustainable agreements which suit most participants and enable most people in society to live, be, become, experience joy, freedom, satisfaction, happiness… slippery yet crucial ideas which don�t fit into an accountant�s spreadsheet. Here the grease of social intercourse is also created and applied to social interactions. This grease includes such fragile and delicate, yet absolutely essential and reciprocal components like trust and loyalty.
Between the system and the civil society is a highly permeable membrane, composed of sets of ideas and practices which, in theory, equip us with necessary filters, discernment capabilities, evaluation tools, and the like, which help us sieve through information, processing it into knowledge, and then into wisdom.
Straddling this membrane is a major social institution, the mass media, which is the source of much needed information about what�s going on remote from the everyday experience of society�s constituent individuals.
Another tool essential to protecting the civil society from encroachments from the system is the deceptively simple capacity and activity of reasonably aware and informed people to have worthwhile conversations about concerns and issues which really matter, and to be able to inform themselves and their actions in and on society and the world on the basis of those conversations.
What many commentators argue is so wrong about our society is that the expected behaviours and practices largely appropriate in the system are colonising the civil sphere, where they have the same corrosive, destructive effects on the civic body as a malignant cancer does on the physical body.
The �civic capital� we have so painfully and carefully built up in our society, the reciprocal obligations and expectations we have invested in creating a society in which we can trust each other and where loyalty is earned rather than expected or demanded simply in return for a pay packet, is rapidly eroding away.
It is being replaced by trust which is bought and sold and loyalty which is expected and demanded for a mess of pottage. Another name for this kind of activity, at least in part, is economic rationalism. And woe and chaos engulfs those who dare blow the whistle on this.
It gets worse. In theory, nihilism is the purported belief in nothing (from nihilo meaning nothing). Nihilism rapidly devolves into rather crude forms of hedonism or narcissism, or into the complex and continually shifting activities associated with domination in practice, and the ideas systems which give license to domination in practice, making it hegemonic, and reproducing itself mimetically throughout society.
Ours is supposedly a post�modern society, and a fashion in contemporary thought called postmodernism has arisen purporting to make sense of this situation. In brutal summary, a major feature of postmodern society is that most of the foundational moral and ethical absolutes, such as truth, justice, trust, and loyalty, are up for grabs. What several critics of postmodernism have pointed to is that, while its methods of analysing social phenomena, such as literary, visual, or aural texts to expose obscured meanings, often called deconstruction, do provide useful insights, removing from deconstruction any practical sense of what the final point of the exercise even might be opens the door to endless deconstructions the end point (telos) of which is rarely, if ever, spelt out, or even remotely glimpsed. Once again, this approach, when forced, leads at many points straight back to nihilism, and gives license for domination to rampage into what is finally a yawing and growing meaning vaccumn in our society, an empty, meaning devoid spiritual, psychic, philosophical, and ethical black hole.
From a related angle, system informed domination, located in a space such as the everyday workplace, purported nihilism and its practical outworkings of hedonism and narcissism, and postmodernism can all be subjected to an immanent critique, rigorously isolating each complex phenomenon�s explicitly stated goals and purposes and comparing them to what actually occurs in the real world or specifically located places in the real world. This kind of activity inevitably drives dominators crazy, and rouses them to exact revenge, because they usually have a mimetically created internally consistent and extremely robust cage which reinforces their own self�understanding of their rectitude, probity, and ethical practice � ‘We�d never do anything like that!’ � and protects and insulates them, particularly, from external challenges.
Because they really and truly believe they have paid for and thence bought and control their employee�s trust and loyalty, an internal challenge represented by a whistleblower is all the more outrageous, challenging, and dangerous not only to their own power and prestigue, but also to their entire self�image and self understanding.
Whistleblowing, why people do it, and what happens to them when they do it, can finally be largely explained by reference to the confluence of the system colonising the civil society with its domination riddled standards and practices and the practical effects of applied postmodernism tunneling through our meaning systems, endlessly deconstructing them to no final point or purpose, leaving a meaning void into which domination offers at least some sort of certainty, even if grasping for that certainty demands the all but irrevocable surrender and sale of one�s soul, personhood, or whatever you finally believe it is that makes you truly human.
Sensitivity to whistleblowing in this context helps us really get to grips with what�s so wrong in our society, and the most disturbing part of this is that we actually do know how to behave and act better, firstly to prevent the kinds of things happening to which whistleblowers draw our attention almost as a last siren of warning, and secondly, to not persecute them for doing so.
Dangerous Disclosures � Whistleblowing and the Ethical Meltdown of Australia provides us with a concentrated examination of the phenomenon of whistleblowing and points towards an explanation of it.
The Whistleblower�s Handbook provides an accessable, well�researched and developed, tactical manual for the intending and committed whistleblower, the whistleblower even part way into the byzantine territory they may well come to, regretfully, call ‘home’, those moved to support and encourage whistleblowing, and as a very focused addition to the serious activist�s bookshelf and training resource kit. The References and Further Contacts sections will offer more useful sources for information, insight, and potential support.
I commend both books to all readers concerned with the current state of Australian society who are moved to do their part to improve it.