I found this article many months ago, but I keep finding myself thinking about some of the ideas in it, such as the image of the person who becomes a whistleblower, as s/he has not other choice; it is a choiceless choice for a person whose character and fiber of being is of certain structure. I post this as a thought provoking article regarding why some people become whistleblowers and others do not. The author, C. Fred Alford writes of what he learned when he sought to understand “the whistleblower.” -GFS
Whistle-blower narratives: the experience of choiceless choice
C. Fred Alford
ONE MIGHT ARGUE THAT THE VERY CONCEPT OF A CHOICELESS CHOICE disqualifies the action undertaken as ethical. Ethical choices are by their very nature the result of willful choice, even if they are not always the result of rational reflection--as when, for example, someone runs into a burning building to save a child's life. By the end of this essay, I hope you will be convinced that dividing the world in this way is not useful. Not only because the way one lives so as to find oneself in a position of choiceless choice is itself an ethical act, but also because the person one is so as to be placed in a position of choiceless choice is already an ethical fact. More important than judging these ethical actors, however, is understanding the people they became. Listening to their stories is the best way to do this.
I have sought to understand the whistle-blower, one who speaks out against illegal or unethical practices in the organization where he or she works. Most whistle-blowers are fired (though it is admittedly difficult to measure these things). (1) Theirs is an act of considerable consequence, especially when one considers that among fired whistleblowers, most will lose their homes and ultimately, their marriages. A majority will turn to alcohol or drugs for some period during their long journey (Miethe, 1999: 58, 78-79; Rothschild and Miethe, 1995: 15-16; Glazer and Glazer, 1989: 205-207; Alford, 2001: 19-21). (2)
While I devoted considerable time to interviewing whistle-blowers, a majority was spent attending a whistle-blowers support group, listening to whistle-blowers tell their tales. In addition, I stayed several days and nights at a retreat on a farm for stressed-out whistle-blowers. The farm had been purchased by a retired psychologist with a large clientele of whistle-blowers (not the best way to get rich in the mental health field) who had graciously opened his farmhouse door to almost any whistle-blower who needed a place to get away for a few days (or even longer in several cases). Stories heard there for the third or fourth time at three in the morning took on a whole new dimension as some of the defensive walls came tumbling down--not just for the teller of the tale, but for the listener as well. There is something terrifying about the experience of whistle-blowing; Daniel Ellsberg, the Vietnam-era whistleblower, compares the emotional experience to that of a space-walking astronaut who has cut his lifeline to the mother ship (Alford, 2001: 5).
Because I spent most of my time listening to whistle-blowers talk with each other, mine is a narrative analysis: an account of the structure of whistle-blowers' stories. To be sure, some of these stories they told to me, but most I first heard whistle-blowers tell to each other. The structure of the whistle-blower support group, or perhaps I should say its ethos, was for the members to go around the table telling their stories. Since I attended the support group for over six months, and since many of the attendees were regulars, this meant I heard many of the same stories again and again. That turned out to be a boon, as it was only after the third or fourth hearing that I began to get the point.
There is another reason I employ narrative analysis. Much of my previous research has involved bringing psychoanalysis to bear on social theory. I originally thought I would do this with the whistle-blowers, uncovering the depth psychological sources of their acts. Soon, however, I came to recognize that asking these men and women about their childhoods, or interpreting their stories about being crushed by organized power in psychoanalytic terms, would be embarrassing to me, and an insult to them. Instead, I turned to narratology, which allowed me to stay strictly on the surface, at least in one respect.
To be sure, there remained a conflict. The whistle-blower wants his or her story told in his or her terms: the content is everything. I, on the other hand, became more interested in the form of the story, the subject of narratology. Especially after I realized what I was doing, I always felt a little bit of a traitor to the whistle-blowers, who so wanted their stories to be told verbatim. In my defense I can tell you that I shared the proofs of my book manuscript with half a dozen members of the whistle-blower support group, and the book with a half-dozen more (Alford, 2001). Only one said she felt used, and I still receive letters, phone calls, and e-mails from whistle-blowers telling me that my book has been helpful to them in understanding their experiences.
WHISTLE-BLOWER NARRATIVES
Three prominent themes of whistle-blower narratives became apparent. The three themes are choiceless choice, stuck in static time, and "living in the position of the dead." The third theme represents, I believe, a resource for richer narrative forms, as well as richer lives. Choiceless choice contains a subcategory, paranoid narrative. One might be inclined to call it a counternarrative; better to call it the most narrative of narratives.
My inspiration is Lawrence Langer's Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (1991). Langer discovers an almost overwhelming impulse to transform the narratives of survivors into inspirational tales. Most listeners cannot or will not hear the shattered meaning that can never be made good, or even meaningful--if, that is, we equate meaningful with whole, coherent, and inspiring, not cold and broken. Whistle-blowers have gone through far, far less than survivors. Just having finished rereading Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved (1988), I can appreciate the reader who finds any comparison between the whistle-blower and the Holocaust survivor offensive; Levi might have found the comparison offensive. Let me be clear. I am not comparing the suffering of whistle-blowers and survivors. I am arguing that an analysis of the broken narratives of survivors can help us understand the broken narratives of whistle-blowers. More precisely, analyses of those who listen and fail to hear the broken narratives of survivors can help us better understand the broken narratives of whistle-blowers.
CHOICELESS CHOICE
"I did it because I had to ... because I had no other choice ... because I couldn't live with myself if I hadn't done anything ... because it was speak up or stroke out.... What else could I do? I have to look at myself in the mirror every morning?." This is what most whistle-blowers say (the comments of several strung together to form a single quote), and the question is how to regard this almost universal explanation, one that is generally offered gratis--that is, not in response to a question about "Why'd you do it?" There is something formulaic about the explanation, but that does not mean empty. The trick will be to find out what the explanation is a formula for. The answer is that choiceless choice is a formula for relief from the almost unbearable regret of having let oneself be sent on a suicide mission.
Consider the parts of the self as actors in a narrative. (3) "Actants," they are called. The mark of the actant is that one person may play several roles; one person may play more than one actant. Actants are a class of actors with an identical relationship to the goal of action. Provide the actants with a plot, and we have a story. Let us call it the plot of plots--the structure of all narrative according to Greimas (1983):
A given order is disturbed.
The sender establishes a contract with the subject to bring
about a new order of things, or reinstate the old. The sender
is an imparter of values, sending the subject on a quest.
The subject becomes competent by virtue of values and attributes
imparted by the sender: these may include the desire
to restore order, the obligation to restore order, and the
ability to restore order.
The subject goes on a quest whose goal is to obtain the
object for the benefit of the receiver.
As the result of three basic tests, the subject fulfills his
part of the contract and is rewarded, or fails to fulfill his
contract and is punished. (4)
The stereotypical love story exemplifies the plot of plots. He is both the subject and the receiver. She is both the object and the sender. Four actors (subject, receiver, object, sender) are incorporated into two actants. The merging of the sender with the object and the receiver with the subject occurs frequently, as in the love story: the subject's desire for the object is what sends him on his quest. It is for this reason that the sender is often called the power. But when the character of the subject is the main issue, the sender (power) merges with the subject. This is the case with every whistle-blower narrative.
The sender is the whistle-blower's character and values; the subject is the whistle-blower in his role as organization man or woman. Choiceless choice is what happens when the sender speaks to the subject in a voice the subject cannot resist. In fact, it is useful to think about the sender as the power of the beloved. We understand what it is to be bewitched by love. How much more compelling it is to be bewitched by one's own values and beliefs; how much more difficult it is to escape that Siren's call.
Deliver me from this kind of love, the Greek prayed, and for good reason. More than one whistle-blower wishes he had the foresight to tie himself to the mast, though a middle-aged whistleblower I will call Jim Bower did not put it quite that way. "If I knew then what I know now, I'd have told my wife to shoot me before letting me call [my congressman's] office."
Not many of us know what it is like to be overwhelmed by our own beliefs. Not, perhaps, because we have not been, but because this type of freedom comes frighteningly close to compulsion, so we blink and call it choice. Some whistle-blowers experience the sender as a virtual dictator, destroying their lives and then walking away, leaving the subject to pick up the pieces. If it is the contract between sender and subject that explains choiceless choice, it is a contract between unequals. But then love was always like that, says Plato, desire a virtual slave to its object (Symposium, 203b-e). "I loved my job," said one whistleblower, "but it was nothing compared to how much I loved the job I gave myself, protector of the public. Now I don't have either. It reminds me of when my parents died one right after the other."
In "What is Freedom?" Hannah Arendt (1956: 151) argues that freedom is acting from a principle. "Action, to be free, must be free from motive on the one side, from its intended goal as a predictable effect on the other." Our motives are more likely to control us than vice versa. And the results of our acts depend upon events far from our control. Only when we give ourselves over to our principles are we free. With the term "principles" Arendt means an idea or value that inspires us from "without," from the outside in. We do not make our principles. Our principles make us. This sense of the term principle is identical to what I am calling the sender.
Jim Bower continued. "Once I blew the whistle, I was free. I could breathe for the first time in years." Better than Arendt, the whistle-blower knows that this freedom does not last. Or if it does, it is because he or she has had to rethink the meaning of freedom. "I was free to say what I thought was right, and now I am not free to work in my career. When was I more free, then or now?" Bower does not know.
Most of us think that freedom is about having and making choices. Arendt comes closer to the truth, writing about freedom as though it were surrender to principle. But even this is an idealization as far as the whistle-blower is concerned. The whistle-blower understands that the freedom he has experienced comes closer to compulsion, one that can seize a person and not let go until it has destroyed just about everything else the whistle-blower cared about: career, home, family.
Bower concluded by saying, "I'm glad I didn't have a choice. I don't think I could live with myself if I thought I chose all this...." One might argue that this statement "proves" Bower had a choice, that his experience of compulsion is a way of avoiding responsibility for the consequences of his acts. It could be; these things are impossible to know for sure. One might, however, as easily conclude that the reader who cannot believe Bower was compelled may be defending against the possibility of such a threatening experience--that one could lose everything one cares about after being seized by an overpowering principle, almost as though it were a god.
Was Jim Bower too loyal to a principle, a principle that was insufficiently loyal to him--that is, insufficiently complex to take all of his interests as a person into account? I do not know. I do know that senders are often like that. How to live with someone who is so terribly loyal to his principles that they can make mincemeat of everything else he or she cares about? How to live, in other words, with the kind of person who is the sender to oneself--that is, the subtext of most whistle-blower narratives.
If the sender is supposed to make the subject competent, then it is a strange competence indeed, one that renders the whistle-blower unable to perform that most basic American act: making a living from one's chosen career. But perhaps there are other things about which it is more important to be competent. And if the subject is rewarded for fulfilling his part of the contract, as he does, then we shall have to ask what sort of reward it is to lose career, home, and family? One would hope that the whistle-blower is rewarded with a deeper satisfaction, but it is precisely this that proves so elusive.
Choiceless choice is as close as many whistle-blowers get to evaluating their own narratives. (5) Evaluation is not about stating the moral of the story. Evaluation is about telling the story in such a way that the listener comes to believe that it has a point, that it starts somewhere, stops somewhere else, and that one has learned something along the way. Evaluation, says Labov (1972: 366), is "the means used by the narrator to indicate the point of the narrative, its raison d'etre: why it was told and what the narrator was getting at.... When his narrative is over, it should be unthinkable for a bystander to say, 'So what?'"
The most effective evaluations are not tacked on, but embedded in the story itself. Often this is done by the use of comparators (Labov, 1972: 380-387; Pratt, 1977: 49). Comparators move away from the story line for a moment to consider unrealized possibilities, comparing them with events that did occur, as in "if I hadn't blown the whistle, who knows where I would be today. The boss's office, maybe, or the grave." Comparators give the listener the feeling that humans with choices are involved, that life is a drama, not just a sequence of events. Comparators are the mark of a more fluid inner discourse.
Choiceless choice is a comparator in disguise. It seems to be saying "I had no choice, so comparing alternatives is pointless." In fact, choiceless choice is a strong but undiscursive comparator, letting us know the strength of the sender, compared to which the whistle-blower was powerless, as though he were sent to wrestle an angel, or a devil. Choiceless choice makes whistle-blowing an agony, a struggle between sender and receiver. That may sound a little abstract. Senders and receivers are not yet flesh and blood characters. But sender and receiver are actors, and the struggle between them makes a world. This is more meaningful than the next theme, trapped in chronological time, in which actors become patients, to use Bremond's term (Prince, 1987: 69).
NARRATIVES STUCK IN STATIC TIME
For the first several months that I attended the whistle-blower support group, I thought that most of the men and women there had recently blown the whistle, or had been recently fired. Their recall appears total, their emotional reaction as real as today. In fact, many were talking about events that happened five to ten years ago, and often longer than that. It is not as if nothing happens in the intervening years, but what happens is organized strictly by chronology. First this happened, then that, then that.
My boss did this, the company did that, then they committed this outrage, then they did that, and that, and that. Joseph Chaine put it this way. "First they moved my office to what used to be a broom closet, then they took away my computer, and finally they had me wrapping packages. I came in one day and my desk was piled high with other people's reports, and a note that I was to wrap them and mail them. They even gave me the wrapping paper, and a felt-tip pen. And after I did that.... "This from a nuclear physicist at the Department of Energy who blew the whistle on his agency's misuse of computer simulations. Such accounts feel bereft of meaning, one act equivalent to another in an endless chain of abasement.
What makes meaning? In trying to make sense of why chronological accounts feel bereft of meaning, we may learn to better answer this question: What makes some narratives more meaningful than others? In a cheap detective story, meaning inheres in the plot. Who done it? In more complex stories, real human stories, meaning seems to inhere in character development. Or rather, plot and character development are one. The bildungsroman represents their union, but the conjunction of plot and character development is not restricted to that genre. What marks a static narrative, stuck in chronological time, is the way in which it subtly substitutes sequence for plot, including the plot that is character development. The result is a narrative stuck in static time.
Chronology is not an alternative to meaning. The king died, and then the queen died, to use E. M. Forster's (1927) example, is a meaningful story. Chronology is the imposition of a powerful, primordial meaning structure on chaos and fragmentation. Chronology is both the alternative to fragmentation and another form of it, sequential fragmentation, the fragments ordered into line, like a cold and ragged queue of strangers who do not even share the time of day.
Against chronology one wants to oppose plot. The king died, and then the queen died of grief, to use Forster's example again, is the simplest plot, one event causing another. Trouble is, many whistleblowers swing from chronology to plot with a vengeance, from mere sequence to plots in which everything is meaningfully connected to everything else, a theme that could be called paranoid narrative.
The Paranoid Narrative
If narrative is built on the exploitation of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, as Barthes (1975) argues, then paranoid narratives are the most narrative of narratives. Nothing just follows, everything is causally connected, and the whistle-blower is the prime mover. Like the better known Prime Mover, the whistle-blower is strangely absent from the chain of events he or she has set in motion. Nominally an internal narrator, the whistle-blower talks more like an external narrator, telling us from a position of vast remove about a world that considers him terribly important.
One gains new respect for paranoia from listening to whistleblower narratives. Not because "even paranoids have real enemies," as the cliche goes. It is true, but it is not the point. Chronology finds meaning only in sequence, because the flow of experience has been lost. Paranoia finds meaning everywhere. Paranoia is a surfeit of meaning, the world overflowing with meaning. Paranoia is the will to meaning. Or rather, paranoia is a last desperate attempt to flood the world with meaning. Paranoia is a defense against loss of meaning, the same loss of meaning that is the source of dread.
One more element of the paranoid narrative deserves discussion, but it is hard to know how to describe it, except to say that the paranoid whistle-blower is absolutely right. Not about the details, like the manager who may have smashed the windows of the whistle-blower's car. About the details it is hard to know. The paranoid whistle-blower is absolutely fight that his organization is not just out to fire him, but to obliterate him or her. The whistle-blower's paranoia is an accurate emotional reading of an emotional reality: the one who has become the scapegoat cannot just be dismissed, but must be destroyed, so that others will know.
Marjorie Gooden put it this way. "After mom got fired from the Department of Agriculture for being a whistle-blower, I think she went a little crazy. Mom thought the car that ran her off the road was from her agency. But, you know, after awhile I realized that they did want to kill her. Not really, but they wanted to make it as if she had never existed, that everything she said had never happened. That's a type of murder too." The worst kind according to George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four: to have the record of one's life shoved down the memory hole, as though one had never existed.
It is this aspect of paranoia that is the most difficult of all for an outsider to come to terms with because it represents a truth that is hard to know: that if the organization feels sufficiently threatened by the individual, it will remove him or her. Not just beyond the margins of the organization, but all the way to the margins of society. The average whistle-blower of my experience is a 55-year-old nuclear engineer working behind the counter at Radio Shack. Divorced and in debt to his lawyers, he lives in a two-room rented apartment. He has no retirement plan, and few prospects for advancement.
Because the power to marginalize is so frightening, it is easier to attribute paranoia to the whistle-blower rather than to see the whistle-blower as a prophet: not just in what he or she has to say about waste, fraud, and abuse, but what he or she has learned in crossing that frontier between loyalty and morality. It is not a reality that is easily expressed in words. It is the paranoid form of the narrative that comes closest to this truth.
Scherherazade
In The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot (1995: 7) is concerned with the way in which the disaster de-scribes, making writing (and telling) about it almost impossible. By disaster, Blanchot means those experiences that disrupt our experience of going on being with the world, so that we cannot put ourselves and the world back together again. The mark of the disaster is that we cannot weave a meaningful story around it. We cannot weave a story because we have lost the place from which to speak. That place is the present.
The narrative voice may speak from past and future, inside the story and outside. The power of narrative stems from the narrator's ability to be there and then, as well as here and now. But the implied author (not the narrator, but the one whose existence is implied from the design of the story) must be present, and feel present, in order for the listener to share the story. This is especially true for spoken narrative, in which speaker and listener are in each other's presence, but it is as true of a 2,000-year-old text.
If, that is, we understand presence in its dual sense of contemporaneous, as well as intellectually or emotionally available, accessible, knowable. The disaster de-scribes because it destroys not chronology, but the meaningful experience of time. Chronology substitutes for the experience of going-on-being, as the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott (1958: 304) labels it, one of the authors cited by Blanchot. Chronology is the defense against time that has lost its meaning, probably because life has lost its meaning. Mere chronology takes the place of an experience of time as flow that carries us with it, which is why strictly chronological narratives feel so wooden. Time loses its meaning because the present no longer holds, in the sense of being a place that it is possible to be--because the I is no longer present to be there.
The "presentiment of a something which is nothing" is how Kierkegaard (1957: 38) defines dread. We may think about dread as something terrible, but that is not how dread is experienced. Dread is experienced as no-thing, an experience that is void because we are unable to put it in a story. As Blanchot (1995: 15, 29) puts it, "When the subject becomes absence, then the absence of a subject ... subverts the whole sequence of existence, causes time to take leave of its order. ... Time has radically changed its meaning and its flow. Time without present, I without I." Narrative goes all over the place in time and space, speaking in dozens of voices, but it still needs the present presence of an I to tell it.
Narratives that lack presence feel vicarious, somehow unreal, as if the teller were not fully there. The Stranger, by Camus, achieves its literary power from the exploitation of this effect, with Meursault strangely absent from his own story. Many whistle-blower narratives have this same quality. The difference is that the whistle-blower is not a character in a novel, so it becomes useful to ask what happened to the whistle-blower so that his story feels unreal.
What has happened is that the whistle-blower has become Scherherazade, desperately keeping the story going lest disaster strike: the disaster of having nothing more to say because the story is finally over. "And then they didn't do anything else because it was over." To say this is to be abandoned by one's persecutors to a faithless world, which is why so few whistle-blowers can say it. As Jim Beam, a long-time member of the whistleblower support group put it, "Any time I'd say something bad about them to the newspapers, they [the company that fired him] used to sic their lawyers on me. Now they don't even respond when I threaten to sue them. I'm starting to think I don't exist."
"The turbulence of stagnant motion" is how another whistleblower described his years of exile. It is also a good description of narratives stuck in static time, filled with meaningless motion, an endless sequence of events, because the storyteller cannot bear to bring the story to an end and so finally know its meaning.
Stories are defined by their end. Everything that happens before is reinterpreted in light of how it all turns out in the end. Without an ending there can be no plot, and hence no satisfactory meaning. Which is precisely why whistle-blowers cannot bear to end their stories. One could argue that it is because the whistle-blower does not know the meaning of his story that he cannot bring to a stop the endless sequence of events. On the contrary, it is precisely because he does know that he cannot find the end. Then he would have to learn the meaning of what he already knows. That, evidently, is almost unbearable.
"Our ability to gain access to these narratives depends on what we are prepared to forsake to listen to them" observes Langer (1991: 195). He is writing about listening to the narratives of Holocaust survivors, but it applies to whistle-blowers too. Not because whistle-blowers have suffered similarly. The suffering of survivors exceeds that of whistleblowers by orders of magnitude. Indeed, this is precisely the point.
Not as wounded as the survivor, the whistle-blower is more likely to just keep talking, so that he himself will not have to give up the truths of common narrative, the stock stories we all draw upon to make sense of our lives. The "little man who stood up against the big corporation and won" is a common narrative. Common narratives are not lies. They are more like cliches, worn and out of context truths, insufficiently complex to account for experience.
Knowledge as Disaster
To know what he has already learned, the whistle-blower would have to give up what every right-thinking American believes in. To forsake this is particularly difficult for the largest group of whistle-blowers I listened to: conservative middle-aged men. "Hell, I wasn't against the system," said Bob Warren, a civil engineer and retired naval officer. "I was the system. I just didn't realize there were two systems."
What must the whistle-blower forsake in order to hear his own story?
* That the individual matters.
* That law and justice can be relied upon.
* That the purpose of law is to remove the caprice of powerful individuals.
* That ours is a government of laws, not men.
* That the individual will not be sacrificed for the sake of the group.
* That loyalty is not equivalent to the heard instinct.
* That one's friends will remain loyal even if one's colleagues do not.
* That the organization is not fundamentally immoral.
* That it makes sense to stand up and do the right thing. (Take this literally: that it "makes sense" means that it is a comprehensible activity.)
* That someone, somewhere who is in charge knows, cares, and will do the right thing.
* That the truth matters, and someone will want to know it.
* That if one is right and persistent, things will turn out all right in the end.
* That even if they do not, other people will know and understand.
* That the family is a haven in a heartless world. Spouses and children will not abandon you in your hour of need.
· That the individual can know the truth about all this and not become merely cynical, cynical unto death.
Not only is it hard to come to come to terms with these truths, but when one finally does, it seems one is left with nothing. "My case is not grievable," Warren noted. He meant that it was not subject to further grievance procedures, but one might think about it another way. Warren could not feel the appropriate grief because to do so he would have to learn too much about what he had already knew.
Or consider the case of Joseph Rose, who exposed the Associated Milk Producer's illegal contributions to President Richard Nixon's reelection campaign. "I believe I can make a contribution to the young people in this country by continuing to respond with a strong warning that all of the public utterances of corporations, and indeed, our own government concerning 'courage, integrity, loyalty, honesty, and duty' are nothing but the sheerest hogwash" (Glazer and Glazer, 1989: 223). How in the world could one want to teach this to schoolchildren and not be possessed by cynicism? Rose would teach a lesson as bitter as his heart.
"Knowledge as disaster" is how Blanchot puts it. Not knowledge of the disaster, but knowledge as disaster, because it cannot be contained within existing frames and forms of experience, including common narrative. The result is that Bob Warren is stuck in chronological time, an oxymoron that isn't once one considers that chronological time may be experienced as a respite from the end of time, or at least the end of the story, when one must finally know its meaning.
"I just can't live with myself knowing what I know," said Amy Brown with a long sigh. "I just have to do something about it." She finally did, but I cannot get beyond the first part of her statement, the one before the sigh-as-caesura. Amy Brown is a psychologist who went to the FBI over Medicaid fraud committed by her previous employer. (Medicaid fraud is probably the single biggest source of whistle-blower complaints, primarily because there is so much of it.) Her boss went to jail, but she could not get a job in the state where she worked. "They were all afraid I might commit the truth," she said. Eventually she moved across the country.
"My new colleagues, the ones who didn't know my story, kept asking me if I'd had been violated in some way. They meant rape or assault. There must be something about the way I carried myself, like I was scared of being intruded upon or something."
Amy Brown was violated by knowledge. The violation is the knowledge, knowledge as violation. Ordinarily we think of knowledge as something gained. But what if the gain implies losses we can hardly bear? The unwanted knowledge of the way the world really works invaded Amy Brown, possessed her, and the only way for her to be free would be to give up the truths of common narrative. She is headed in that direction, but it will take a while.
Being vindicated, as Amy Brown was, is not enough, and now we are in a position to see why. What is the satisfaction in being right if as a consequence once has to give up everything one believed in?
Another whistle-blower, a nurse who reported an extreme case of Medicare fraud at her old job, had to quit her new job when she discovered that the home health care company she went to work for was bending the rules regarding patients' eligibility for Medicare. I told her I thought she quit because she could not stand being a whistleblower again. No, she said. "That's not it. I could do that. What I can't stand is thinking that everybody cheats."
Or consider the case of Mike Quint, an engineer who exposed defects and cover-ups in the construction of tunnels to be used by Los Angeles Metro Rail. Since Los Angeles is the site of frequent earthquakes, shortcuts in building the tunnels endangered hundreds of lives. Though Quint was eventually fired from the construction management company that oversaw the building of the tunnels, he persisted in his letter-writing campaign. As a result the construction management company was removed from the project, the tunnel contractor performed eight months of remedial work, and several employees of Los Angeles Metro Rail went to jail. Quint takes little satisfaction in his victory. Not only does he say he would not do it again, but he has turned into something of a zombie on his new job. Whistle-blowing "has reduced my trust and faith in people and in our justice system. ... I [now] expect fewer benefits from work, and perform my duties as directed, with fewer questions of decisions or procedures" (Miethe, 1999: 161-162).
Why does Quint despair?. He was right, the Los Angeles Times made sure everyone knew it, and he has a job in his field again. It must be his perverse choice to see the glass as half empty when he could just as well see it as half full. Or so the distant observer might think.
What if Quint has lost the glass? What if he has lost the container that held everything he cared about and valued, what he calls his trust and faith in people. Simple words, but what if they really mean something?. For some, the earth moves when they discover that people in authority routinely lie, and that those who work for them routinely cover-up. Once one knows this, or rather once one feels this knowledge in one's bones, one lives in a new world. Some people remain aliens in the New World forever. Maybe they like it that way. Maybe they don't have a choice.
What is the meaning of life? To this little question Freud answered love and work, an answer that by now is almost a cliche (Erikson, 1963). What happens when the world becomes unlovable, and our work impossible? One might argue that the world can never become unlovable. We just need to try harder. But this does not seem to be Freud's position. If love is not just a psychic discharge, but a way of being in the world, then that way of being "demands that the world present itself to us as worthy of our love" (Lear, 1990: 153). If love is not just a feeling, but the force that makes the world go around, as Freud speculated in his later works (and as Plato imagined in the Symposium), then loving the world and being able to love the world because the world is lovable are two sides of the same coin. We make the world meaningful with our love, and the world makes our lives meaningful by being lovable. When one partner fails, both do. The meaning of life depends upon our ability to remain in a love affair with the world. Like any long-term love affair, this means that the world must love us back, even if this only means remaining worthy of our love.
It will not do to encourage the whistle-blower to try harder. He or she must find alternative sources of meaning--other aspects of the world that remain worthy of the whistle-blower's love.
"LIVING IN THE POSITION OF THE DEAD"
Maybe the whistle-blowers knew more about what they were doing than I did. Maybe there was an unspoken permanent agenda among the whistle-blowers, to which I was not privy. With the term unspoken permanent agenda, Labov (1972: 370) refers to the way in which the context and point of the story are set by the expectations of the listeners, not just the narrator. Among the young men Labov studied, a fight narrative was always on the agenda. It was "felt to be tellable," simply because it was about a fight. One did not have to explain the point; it already had one.
Sometimes it seemed to me that the point of the whistle-blower support group was to experience pleasure in hearing the same old stories, whether told by old members or new, over and over again. I became impatient, wanting to ask "So, what's the point? What's next? What did you learn? How are you doing to use what you learned on the rest of your life's journey?." But, this was my agenda, an instrumental one, albeit in the service of life, or so I believed. Sometimes it seemed to me that the whistle-blowers had another agenda: taking pleasure in the same old stories. There was, in other words, a contract between the whistle-blowers to which I had not signed on. What I took as narrative forms that risked imprisoning the whistle-blowers, they experienced as forms that held and comforted them. Or so I sometimes suspected.
Since this is my story as much as theirs, I will continue with my argument, recognizing the possibility that whistle-blowers might see it differently, because they are operating from a different agenda. One reason I believe that I am right (which does not make the whistle-blowers wrong) is because I occasionally came across a whistle-blower whose narrative did not sound stuck or imprisoned. The difference was striking. Most whistle-blowers' narratives seemed stuck in time, or imprisoned in a closed universe in which everything refers to everything else, with nothing left over for the world. A few whistle-blowers sounded free, but hardly in the conventional sense.
One expression of this freedom was the freedom of one "who lives as already dead," as the Japanese express it (Benedict, 1946: 248250). Though I never heard an American whistle-blower use this term, I heard the idea several times. To live as if one is already dead is what is said about a Japanese who has suffered a terrible experience of shame, humiliation, and loss and lived through it. The term may also be used as an admonition. When a Japanese student is about to take an exam his friend may say "Be as one already dead." The term implies a supreme release from conflict: between the desire to be free and the desire to fit in and serve. To live as if one were already dead is to live free of self-watchfulness, self-surveillance, and constant concern with what other people think, a concern of us all, and a special concern to some Japanese.
"One day I realized I didn't care what people thought any more. I make barely enough to live on, but I can tell the truth about anything." Joe Wahlreich said this, a lawyer who now cleans the building in whose basement he lives in order to make ends meet. This was as close as I heard a whistle-blower come to living in the position of the dead. His freedom was, I believe, Wahlreich's reward for having fulfilled his contract with the sender. Finally he was free of its terrible power, because its demands could no longer destroy his life. His sender had done its best (or worst), and Joe was still standing.
Wu-wei is a Taoist term meaning nonaction, but better rendered as action that is in accord with nature. Living in the position of the dead is wu-wei. Perhaps it is more akin to mimesis, becoming the disaster in order not to be destroyed by it. I believe this is what Blanchot (1995: 41) means when he says "the danger [is] that the disaster acquire meaning instead of body." To become disaster's body is to live in the position of the dead.
To know the truth behind the veil, the truth that not only is concealed by common narrative but antithetical to it, is already to be in the position of the dead. To know it is already to be socially dead--that is, unable fully to be present with those who do not know it. For it is to know that most of the things people value about society are already dead, lost illusions.
"You know what's different now?" Joe Wahlreich asked. "It's a funny thing, a little thing really, but if feels like a big one. I can't make small talk anymore. When I hear someone saying the little things people say everyday I get impatient. I want to say to them 'Look, open your eyes. People around you are living in hell, and you don't even notice.' I was in hell and no one noticed. I didn't either, not for years. You can't get out of hell until yon know you're there."
Where are you now?
"Purgatory, I guess. And you know what? That's as good as it's going to get for me. I know too much to ever get into heaven."
For Joe, getting into purgatory meant living in the position of the dead.
For another whistle-blower, Martin Edwin Andersen, getting into purgatory has meant accepting that he had accomplished something very different from what he set out to do with his life.
(6)
I've always wanted to be somebody, but I guess I should
have been more specific.... Integrity--what should be a
minimum requisite for public service--has become instead
your specific, and perhaps only real, memorable contribution
to the workplace. Forget your years of professional
preparation for greater challenges and greater recognition;
forget the sacrifices you and your parents have made to get
where you are, and forget your fondest dreams of advancement.
The bottom line is that when you look around, your
career is stalled, and you feel alone.
One is reminded of Polemarchus, a character in Plato's Republic (331d-334c), who learns from Socrates that justice is not just one profession among many, but a just man's only true calling. In this world that knowledge can feel cold as ice.
CONCLUSION
Is living in the position of the dead a coda or a resolution? If we see it as a coda, then we will emphasize the way it serves to bring the story back to the present, the purpose of the coda (Labov, 1972: 365-66). If we see it as a resolution, then we will see it as the whistle-blower's successful attempt to escape the prison of static time, albeit in a way that is most ironic. By living in the position of the dead, the whistle-blower's life becomes subject to infinity--that is, endless time. This, though, may be taking the phrase too literally. Because living in the position of the dead is the way in which Joe Wahlreich has found new meaning in his life, it is probably most accurate to see it as a resolution, through which he returns to the world of meaningful experience, albeit in a way he had never imagined, as a passionate bystander.
Most whistle-blower narratives lack a resolution. They just go and on. Not because the whistle-blower lacks the narrative skills to bring his story to an end, but because the resources of common narrative are insufficient. The stories that most of us tell are too superficial, too dedicated to not looking, to be of much help to the whistle-blower who has seen what one is not supposed to know.
So many Americans hate their government and distrust big corporations one would think that whistle-blowers would find more understanding for their stories. After all, some whistle-blowers become heroes, at least to a large segment of the public. A movie, The Insider, was made a few years ago about a cigarette company executive who became a whistle-blower (though even the movie devoted most of its attention to the television personality who interviewed him). A few years ago, Time magazine put three women whistle-blowers on its cover as "Persons of the Year" (December 30, 2002). "The little man who stood up against the big corporation and won" is a type of folk hero. But that is just the problem. He is a type of folk hero, which is a stereotype. Everyone wants to hear about the stereotype, no one wants to know how vulnerable we are to power, and how much it can take from us, including the meaning of our lives. It is this that the whistle-blower has to teach, but no one wants to learn.
We may tell our own stories, but we cannot tell them to ourselves. We can tell them only if others are prepared to hear them in something resembling the terms they are told. (In the language of narratology, one can tell one's story only if the narratee is on the same diegetic level, which means shares the terms of the fiction. (7)) What happens when the terms we most value, the terms of the sender, are not recognized by the world? What happens when principles for which one has ruined one's life are regarded by others as mere words?
The ignorant reaction of the world to the whistle-blower becomes a part of the whistle-blower. The whistle-blower becomes less at home in the world, because the world is not an understanding place to be. It is this homelessness that is the present absence in narratives structured strictly by time, or flooded with paranoid meaning, that last desperate alternative to no meaning at all.
The suffering the whistle-blower experiences has the quality of what Michel Foucault (1979) calls discipline. "Nuts and sluts" is the term many whistle-blowers use to describe this disciplinary process, referring to the way those who raise ethical issues are treated as disturbed or morally suspect. About this discipline one cannot tell a story. Or at least one cannot tell a human story, about a protagonist engaged in a quest. Discipline works through the language of science and medicine, in which actors become patients. In other words, discipline operates at a different diegetic level, its subjects transformed into objects.
Joe Klein struggled for years to make sense of what happened to him. An accountant for a large corporation, he had gone to his boss about his suspicion that they were overcharging the government on a contract they were working on. "First thing, they sent me to the doctor, then they put me on medical leave, and when I tried to go back to work they told me I was too sick. Before I knew it they gave me early retirement, made me take it. Don't get me wrong, I got great benefits, better than if I'd kept my mouth shut, but it's not what I wanted. I wanted to do the right thing, save the government some money. Now I'm the one with the money and no job." Joe Klein does not know if he's a victim, a hero, or a co-conspirator.
The failure of common narrative is not just a cultural failure. It is also a political failure, the failure of our society to address the isolation and sacrifice of the moral individual in this evidently most individualistic of societies. Narrative analysis can help us see this, and richer narrative forms can help us make sense of this experience. But such forms are dependent on the forces of power and production, just as culture is dependent, even as it is no mere superstructure. New narrative forms are unlikely to be forthcoming, at least on a large scale, in the absence of social and political change.
Neither the whistle-blower nor the rest of us lives in a world of wall-to-wall narrative, to paraphrase the late Edward Said. The whistleblower's narrative is not arrested because all narratives are arrested. The whistle-blower's narrative is arrested because the whistle-blower has had experiences that cannot be framed and formed within the resources of common narrative. These last remarks may seem obvious. They are aimed at those few academics who occasionally write as if narratives lived a life of their own.
REFERENCES
Alford, C. Fred. Whistle-Blowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001.
Arendt, Hannah. "What Is Freedom?" Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Enlarged ed. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1956: 143-172.
Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
Barthes, Roland. "An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative." New Literary History 6 (1975): 237-262.
Benedict, Ruth. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
Erikson, Erik. Childhood and Society. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1963.
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novd. London: Methuen, 1927.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Trans. Jane Lewin. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Glazer, Myron Peretz, and Penina Migdal Glazer. The Whistle-Blowers. New York: Basic Books, 1989
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Labov, William. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972.
Langer, Lawrence. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
Lear, Jonathan. Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.
Miceli, Marcia, and Janet Near. Blowing the Whistle: The Organizational and Legal Implications for Companies and Employees. New York: Lexington Books, 1992.
Miethe, Terance. Whistle-blowing at Work: Tough Choices in Exposing Fraud, Waste, and Abuse on the Job. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977.
Prince, Gerald. A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987.
Rothschild, Joyce, and Terance Miethe. "Keeping Organizations True to Their Purposes: The Role of Whistle-blowing in Organizational Accountability and Effectiveness." Final Report to the Aspen Institute, 1996.
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NOTES
* Most of the research for this article, as well as the methodology involved, is discussed in my book (Alford, 2001). Several interviews were conducted in the intervening years.
(1.) In theory, anyone who speaks out in the name of the public good within the organization is a whistle-blower. In practice, the whistleblower is defined by the retaliation he or she receives. No retaliation, and the whistle-blower is just a responsible employee doing her job to protect the company's interest. This almost certainly results in overstating the amount of retaliation whistle-blowers receive.
(2.) One study (Miceli and Near, 1992: 226-227) found significantly less retaliation. Most of the difference depends on who and how one counts. Miethe's (1999) remains the most empirically extensive published study of whistle-blowers and bystanders. I (Alford, 2001) listened for over 100 hours to over two dozen whistle-blowers. The profile of these whistle-blowers fits that of the average whistle-blower described by Miethe remarkably well, with one exception. Among the whistle-blowers to whom I listened, over two-thirds lost their jobs.
(3.) I have turned to the theory of narrative in order to think more systematically about whistle-blower narratives. Most helpful was the work of William Labov (1972), a structural linguist, whose most famous work, Language in the Inner City, is a study of black English vernacular. I also turned to several narratologists, as they are called. Here I include the works of Roland Barthes (1975), Gerald Prince (1987), Gerard Genette (1988), Algirdas Greimas (1983), and Mieke Bal (1997). The best definition of narratology is that of Genette (1988: 8), who says that narratology is distinguished by "respect for mechanisms of the text." This includes verbal texts, tales, and stories. One of the achievements of narratology is to demonstrate the sophistication of everyday narratives, which share almost every mechanism of the classic text. I turn to narratology as an adjunct to interpretation, not for the sake of the text, but for the sake of understanding.
(4.) A fully developed narrative has the following elements according to Labov (1972: 362-370) and Pratt (1977: 45-46):
a. Abstract (establishes the relationship to the listener)
b. Orientation (sets the context, time, place, persons)
c. Complicating action (then what happened)
d. Evaluation (what it all means, the point of the story)
e. Resolution (the ending)
f. Coda (closes the sequence of events, often returning to present)
No whistle-blower narrative has all these elements, and there is no reason it should. Some elements are more important than others. The resolution is essential, the coda is not. Many whistle-blower narratives have more the quality of anecdotes, and that too is fine. What is missing is evaluation and resolution. Even an anecdote has to have a point. What is missing, in other words, is the meaning of the story as framed by its ending.
(5.) One could argue that the experience of being stuck in static time is itself an evaluation by whistle-blowers. Several whistle-blower comments, such as the one by the whistle-blower who spoke of his life as "the turbulence of stagnant motion," support this claim. Overall, however, it was my experience that the dominance of chronology over plot that marks this theme was itself an alternative to evaluation, a way for the whistle-blower to put off evaluating the narrative. One sees this, for example, in the way in which narratives organized strictly by chronological time rarely change tense. Time travels only in one direction: from the past slowly forward into an ever receding present. This makes it more difficult to gain even a little perspective on events.
(6.) Martin Edwin Andersen asked that I use his real name, as did several other whistle-blowers. The quotation is from an e-mail titled "The Zen of Whistle-blowing (Notes from 4:30 in the morning, one Sunday)."
(7.) Diegesis refers to the fictional world in which the situations and events that are narrated occur. It is fictional only in the sense that it stems from the subjective experience of the narrator. All worlds are fictional in this sense.
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