Yup. I’m talking about whistleblowers again.

But more than just them. I am talking about all the ethical traitors out there. The people who, through the power of their convictions and the sense that something terribly wrong is going on and they are the only ones who can stop it, have the courage to sacrifice all they know in their day to day lives, break with their tribe or sub-tribe, and reveal the truth to the world.

It is not surprising that this is so rare, and the reasons are not merely practical. Sure, a lot of people have a pretty good idea of what would happen to them if they broke from their group and took the truth to the outside. And not a lot of people are willing to sacrifice that much when they can do nothing and have nothing bad happen to them personally.

But it runs deeper than that. For most human beings, their social group is their universe. Their workplace, their home life, maybe a few social commitments, their friends…. this is the whole world to them. Everything else is just a pale mural on a distant wall. To go outside that world is to go past the edge of infinity into the universal unknown.

This is, incidentally, one of the reasons why people stay in bad relationships when they could easily just walk away. Our personal universes are made of relationships. TO leave a relationship is to face the darkness.

And then there is the issue of loyalty. Make no mistake, loyalty is one of the most powerful social instincts we have. It is fundamental glue that holds all our tribes, big and small, together. There is always Us, and Them. And to do something that benefits Them and hurts Us is, for many people, literally unthinkable. Unthinkable like performing surgery on oneself.

That is why we can never truly accept these ethical traitors, no matter how much we applaud what they did and why they did it. We can support a whistleblower one hundred percent and still not want to associate with them. Because how can you trust someone who turned his or her back on everyone they knew?

Part of the problem is that loyalty is part of our primal ethics. It is one of the moral universals. There has never been and will never be a society that does not value loyalty and punish disloyalty. You will never find a people who consider it just fine for people to be out only for themselves and to turn traitor any time it suits them.

As one of our primal ethics, loyalty operates on a deeper level than the more abstract ethics that are usually what drives the ethical traitor to his or her act of disloyalty. The desire to protect a number of total strangers from a theoretical harm, as one would be revealing some bit of corporate corner cutting on safety, will never have enough gut-level appeal to completely overcome our revulsion at any act of betrayal, no matter how noble.

Even very intelligent people who are completely capable of grasping and agreeing with the whistleblower’s motives and actions might find their revulsion overcoming their reason, especially if they are in the group betrayed, or identify with it. A professor at one university might find his or herself trembling with rage at the news of another professor betraying his employers to reveal some dastardly goings-on, even if in the abstract they completely agree that not only was the individual act justified, but that indeed there needs to be more of that kind of thing.

And there truly does. The world needs whistleblowers. We need all the ethical traitors we can get. Evil requires darkness in which to operate and whistleblowers are the only ones in the position to yank the cloak of darkness away from acts of evil and expose them to the cleansing light of day.

But the demand for these brave people will always far outstrip the supply. The barriers against it are simply too high. Even the most famous one of the moment, Edward Snowden, was only a sub-contractor and thus not part of the group he betrayed. People still treat him as a disgusting and horrible traitor because he betrayed the amazingly large and potent in-group known as the military, but he did not, in fact, betray people he knew and worked with.

Becoming an ethical traitor is simply too wrenching and unnatural to most people. Human beings, as a group, will always be more loyal to their in-groups than their high ideals. Often, the only people willing to become ethical traitors are the people who never fit in with their group in the first place. And that creates an entirely different set of problems of the “bitter, disgruntled worker with an axe to grind” variety.

So how can we encourage more people to go out in the cold and reveal what desperately needs to be revealed? I think the most important thing is to immediately take them into the warmth of a new group : the group of noble whistleblowers.

And I mean that in more than just the abstract sense, like Abraham Lincoln is part of the group of American presidents. I mean this has to be a group that meets, socializes, and forms a common identity. We would find people far more willing to turn against their current group if there was another, possibly even more glamorous group to take them in.

That’s why I think that the only way to truly make this work is to have it backed by a few wealthy concerned citizens who are rich and powerful enough not to give a shit whose toes they step on and who can afford to create this special group and use their wealth and power to make it well known and high status.

Sure, you might get people wanting in for the wrong reasons, but that’s what background checks and private detectives are for.

So raise a glass to the ethical traitor, folks. Those few who do it face unbelievable hardship from those for whom disloyalty is the absolute worst crime imaginable.

I will talk to all of you nice people again tomorrow.

I have a few idea in my notes that aren’t quite big enough for a whole article, so I thought I would deal with them tonight.

The Emotional Roots of Heroism

People often wonder what makes a person into a hero. What causes a perfectly normal human being to spring into action when danger knocks on their door and do the sort of things that we normally only see in movies? What motivates these ordinary citizens?

And while what pulls the hero forward is things like courage and compassion, I think the wind that pushes them from the back is something a lot more like terror : the terror of being witness to a tragedy, and all the harm it would do to said witness.

Call it empathic horror. We know deep down that seeing something horrible happen to someone will be extremely damaging to us. That alone would be a large enough trauma to seem unthinkable. The sort of trauma that destroys people.

But then add in the possibility of feeling like you could have prevented it, and you can see how an ordinary (but caring) person would be willing to take all kinds of heroic risks in order to prevent their own psychological annihilation.

That’s why, in tales of real life heroism, the hero or heroine often replies to questions about the dangers they faced with something like “I wasn’t thinking about that. ” The real danger, in their minds, was failure. If they failed to save the person or people, that would have been a trauma so large that it might as well have been death.

Note that this is an inherently empathic operation. Not only does the fear of empathic death drive the hero, but it is the hero’s empathic nature that makes them feel “involved” in the situation and act as though he was saving someone they knew and loved, even though they are actually saving total strangers.

When danger threatens one of us, we are all of the same tribe.

The Nature Of Faith

Faith is, at its heart, chosen belief. It is belief chosen completely independent of evidence or reason. Its origin is in emotional need, not careful examination of the evidence. It is born of unmet human needs and takes the form of whatever will fulfill those needs. Like a child’s imaginary friend (the prototype of all faith), the chosen belief(s) will fill the gaps in the human soul, and when something does that for a person, they become ferociously attached to it even if the outside world does not agree. They will defend this belief till their dying breath because said belief fixed them when they were broken and, in the case of religious faith, filled a whole host of emotional needs all at once.

There is no point in trying to argue with someone whose chosen beliefs have become such a fundamental part of their psyche that they could not function without it. These people know what it was like before the faith came to restore them, and they will never, ever go back to that state. You might as well be trying to talk them out of their arms and legs.

To clarify, this is true of all forms of faith, most of which are not, in fact, religious. Most people have their own set of things they will keep believing till the day they die because these things have become part of them. It might be belief in a person, a news channel, a political movement, a religious practice, or even a television show.

But we are born to believe.

Hence the resistance to science. Science does not concern itself with the emotional need for belief. It finds the objective truth, without concern with people’s subjective realities. Hence, to some, it seems cold, and even cruel. And by extension, those who practice it and promote it are cold and cruel as well.

It’s easy for us rational science types to say “Well then, don’t emotionally invest in things that can be disproven”, but are we so sure of our own innocence in that matter that we are willing to throw that stone?

The Value of Diversity

Modern democratic societies have, as one of their strongest cultural values, the treasuring of diversity. From cradle to grave, society tells us how important it is to embrace diversity and eschew divisiveness, bigotry, and intolerance.

And most people have a basic, gut-level understanding of why this is a good thing. You mind your business, and I will mind mine. My freedom to be who I want to be requires others to show tolerance to me, and in return, I show tolerance to them. We all benefit from a diversity rich system that practices tolerance and respect for all.

But this sometimes seems to fly in the face of our judgment. Surely we can’t tolerate everything. Some things are just plain wrong, and should be stopped and/or punished. Right?

This arises because we have lost sight of the roots of diversity, which lay deep in the foundations of the humanism that founded all of our great democracies. At the heart of this humanism is the understanding that, as diverse as the human race is, below the surface we have far, far more in common with one another than we have in difference.

This is the counter-argument to the seeming anarchy of total tolerance. We embrace all the wonderful ways in which people are different from one another because we know that, deep down, we are all the same, and all those differences are merely ripples on the surface of a very deep pond.

It is also wise to understand that a tolerant society does not judge the contents of someone’s skull. In a tolerant society, what is between your ears is your own business. That is the ultimate privacy and it is vitally important.

Only your actions are judged. So yes, it’s fine to be a criminal, or evil, or a pervert, or even a racist, as long as you do not break the law.

That is hard for some to believe, paradoxically especially amongst the supposed “law and order” crowd. Human beings inherently want to judge one another’s characters, and the short-sighted think this judgement should, at least in some ways, be reflected by society and its laws.

But you are free to be whatever you want to be, and the law is and should be completely indifferent to your character, your beliefs, and your personality. Only actions matter.

And when we lose sight of that, we lose our grasp on democracy and freedom themselves.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.