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.