Скачать или смотреть Why We Need to Embrace Whistleblowing | Big Think

Why We Need to Embrace Whistleblowing
New videos DAILY: https://bigth.ink
Join Big Think Edge for exclusive video lessons from top thinkers and doers: https://bigth.ink/Edge
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The first U.S. whistleblower protection law was passed unanimously in 1778 in response to the misconduct of Navy Commodore Esek Hopkins.Whistleblowing and civil disobedience are tools of discourse that keep elites honest and protect democracy.The difference? Whistleblowers are insiders who expose improper conduct to the authorities or to the press. Civil disobedience starts with outsiders whose actions slowly gain popular support, which then catalyzes change.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ALLISON STANGER:

Allison Stanger is the Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, a New America Cybersecurity Fellow, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is also the author of "One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy" and has contributed to Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, USA Today, U.S. News and World Report, and The Washington Post.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIPT:

ALLISON STANGER: It's really important to realize, whistleblowing is in America's DNA. It has been a concept since before the Constitution itself was ratified. The first whistleblower protection law in the United States was passed in 1778 during wartime. It is used to bring down the first commodore of the United States Navy, Esek Hopkins. Hopkins was a Rhode Islander. He was someone who had been involved in the slave trade, as the Brown Project illustrates quite clearly. And people think that the reason that Hopkins was removed from his post is because he was torturing British prisoners of war -- and he was doing that, as the whistleblowers Marvin and Shaw revealed, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. The real reason he was removed -- and research in digital archives shows to be so -- is that he was defying George Washington who was telling him to engage the British in the Revolutionary War effort in certain positions on behalf of the Congress of the United States, and Hopkins was instead directing his fleet to The Bahamas to serve, effectively, Rhode Island elites who were still very much involved in the slave trade even though slavery was illegal at this time. So I think this is a really interesting example because it shows how important the founders saw fighting corruption right when you first see it.

Whistleblowing is a cousin of civil disobedience. Hannah Arendt thought that civil disobedience was a uniquely American institution, very much connected to Tocqueville's emphasis on the importance of civic associations and the vitality of American democracy. Civil disobedience is different than whistleblowing because civil disobedience is about highlighting unjust laws, and you break the law in order to get public opinion on your side to believe the law is unjust and should be overturned. Whistleblowing is different because it's not about breaking unjust laws. It's about serving the rule of law itself. So whistleblowers expose illegal or improper conduct that is at odds with self-government. So whistleblowing is related to civil disobedience, but they're two distinctive enterprises. You might say that civil disobedience starts with outsiders and slowly gains popular support and that's how change comes about, whereas whistleblowers are insiders who see behavior that they believe is improper and expose it either to the authorities or to the press. And this is a really important way of keeping our elites honest because if we don't have honest elites, you can't have self-government. You can't have liberal democracy.

The first whistleblower protection law actually says you have an obligation to report misconduct when you see it, and this is intimately connected to democracy. And I really believe the Founders were right on that point, and you can see this in a number of examples today where, you know, take the #MeToo movement. That very much started with insiders exposing horrific misconduct. And then slowly you saw through social media that actually -- I think it's some statistic like 40% of women on Facebook came forward with #MeToo, 'this has happened to me as well.' But that started with elites pointing out that this has happened and it's wrong, and that rallied all sorts of other people to say, 'Hey, wait a minute. I might have kept quiet about that. I might have thought that was part...

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/sponsored-instit...