Whistleblowing and Sisyphus

Whistleblowing and Sisyphus

The whistleblowing project can be a depressing one.  Initially, it is far from that: we find it exciting, challenging intellectually and emotionally.  The thrill stems from our sense that we are doing something good and we demonstrate a moral courage that others lack. 

Maybe it remains exciting for big-time whistleblowers, who receive media attention and whose complaints are echoed by millions.  I wouldn’t know.  Media had no interest in my case; authorities didn’t care, either.  The National Whistleblower Center didn’t respond to my email.  I attended no congressional hearings about my complaints, and I published no much-read opinion pieces. 

For me, the project became the long slog it is for all who don’t reach a quick settlement.  Soon after I filed my wrongful termination complaint with the State of California, I was told that it would be acted on within 6-8 months.  Instead, 15 months passed before my case was assigned to an investigator.  It took her 6 months to write a report, which has been under review for 7 months now, as the third anniversary of my termination approaches.

Many whistleblowers keep fighting for years.  Some continue unsuccessfully until no court remains to which they can appeal or they have run out of money.  But others, seeing the battleground ahead of them, just give it up.

Nothing came of my ten disclosures of suspected wrongdoing.  Even where there was no debate – the HUD and Santa Clara County overbillings, for example – the government agencies took no action against the company.  They considered HomeFirst too valuable to disturb with retribution.  Instead, the County granted the company a bail-out so it could make its payroll and then advanced more money on its contracts.  HUD stopped replying to my FOIA requests about the repayment that the company claims it continues to negotiate ten years after discovery.

Today, only a handful of HomeFirst’s 14 Board members and few current employees would recognize my name.  My retaliation complaint is reduced to a one-sentence mention in the company’s audit report.  It is common, of course, for boards to shuck their whistleblowers: a footnote to Wells Fargo’s 110-page internal investigation report said it discovered no any intent to harm those who objected to fraudulently opening customer accounts; the HomeFirst board considered my complaint of retaliation and found no big problem.

My whistleblowing project failed in key respects – it achieved nothing beyond causing me pain.   But I had reason to expect failure.  Like nearly all whistleblowers, I sensed what I was getting myself into before I started.  Arguably total failure is unique to my case or perhaps to small-time whistleblowers in general.  But I don’t think so.

Daniel Ellsberg, for example, ranks among the most famous of U.S. whistleblowers for his 1971 disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, which revealed government lies in support of its conduct of the war in Vietnam.  However, by the time of his disclosures the public had already endured years of vocal protests that caused President Johnson not to seek reelection in 1972.  The bombing of North Vietnam, which Ellsberg hoped to stop, continued well after the disclosures, and the U.S. did not withdraw from Vietnam for three more years.  From this perspective, Ellsberg achieved nothing at all.

The case of Eric Ben-Artzi demonstrates that even a multimillion dollar win against a big international bank can feel like failure.  Another high-ranking whistleblower, Sharon Watkins, who blew the whistle on Enron’s fraudulent accounting, “succeeded” only by causing the collapse of a 10,000-employee company and its top-tier auditor.  Ellsberg, Watkins and Ben-Artzi have since converted whistleblowing into speaking opportunities, if not whistleblowing successes.

Whistleblowing is, at base, meaningless; it is absurd.  We can hope to drown out that absurdity by blathering about how we will make the organization or the world a better place.  We can praise the heroism of the whistleblower, but the absurdity of the role remains. 

The only path available to one who is conscious of an organizational misdeed – and not every observer is conscious of the wrong – is a sort of death.  She may kill her career by speaking out or her moral self by remaining silent.  Whistleblowers revolt through our disclosures.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus wrote of the person who faces the meaningless absurdity of life without yielding to the temptation of suicide, “That revolt gives life its value. Spread out over the whole length of a life, it restores its majesty to that life.”  He declared three consequences of the absurd: “my revolt, my freedom, and my passion.  By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death—and I refuse suicide.”

The whistleblower’s motivation comes not from the moral egoism that C. Frederick Alford identified in his whistleblowers but from a choice to live.  That is our revolt, freedom, and passion.