Blowers are Flowers - Village Magazine

52 March/April 2022

Introduction

Whistleblowing is usually seen as a cousin of

“snitching”, whereas it might be more helpful to

view whistleblowing on a spectrum of willing-

ness to circumvent group consensus, either

head-on or indirectly.

This by-passes the tendency to scrutinise the

whistleblower for personal “defects”, as is nor

mally the case in whistleblower conﬂicts.

According to a recent Village article, ‘Enemies

of the People’ citing Kate Kenny’s book, ‘Whistle-

blowing: Towards a New Theory’, journalists

often exacerbate the suering of whistleblowers

by scrutinising the whistleblower, as if the

answer to the conﬂict is to be found in the

whistleblower’s character.

Ultimately, no matter what the group might

say in its defence, or no matter what allegations

the group might make to suggest that a whistle

blower is crazy or criminal or defective in some

other way, whistleblowing is not really about the

whistleblower at all, it is about the group.

Mobbed

Dr Janice Harper, an American cultural anthro-

pologist, observed a colleague whistleblowing

on a water quality issue. The colleague was then

discredited by management with attacks on her

character. The usual destroy-the-whistleblower

response. Harper had assumed that the people

who attacked her friend were “bad” people, in

contrast to her own “enlightened” circle of

friends and colleagues.

But it was only when she herself was demon

ised following a faculty disagreement in the

Blowers are Flowers

By Eamonn Kelly

Whistleblowers save us from

ourselves; their bullies driven by

primeval instincts for survival

Group psychology operates very differently

from individual psychology – I hadn’t stood

a chance when I opened my big mouth and

fought for ‘principles’

university where she was

employed as a lecturer in

anthropology that she realised

that she had misunderstood the

collective “bullying” her friend

had experienced. This collective

“bullying” she calls “mobbing”, the

title of her book: ‘Mobbed: What To Do

When They Are Really Out To Get You’.

At ﬁrst, when she was subjected to hostility

by work colleagues, she sought clarity by read

ing up on adult bullying, but discovered, too

late, that the advice such books oered only

exacerbated the situation when acted upon.

She writes:

“What I did not see clearly was that focusing

on the ‘bullies’ made it impossible for me to see

what was going on with those who were not ‘bul-

lies’. What I did not see or understand was that

group psychology operates very dierently from

individual psychology – and that I hadn’t stood

a chance when I opened my big mouth and

fought for ‘principles’”.

Harper, a university professor who special-

ised in organisational cultures and warfare,

realised, when teaching a course on genocide,

at the same time as she was “battling” with her

employers, that many of the same psychologi

cal processes that enable a population to follow

an autocratic leader to genocide are apparent in

the manner in which management can lead

workers towards demonising an individual. This

is dramatic stu.

She writes:

“Their[the target’s]dierence is communi-

cated to others and, in time, meaning is

conferred on that dierence to suggest they are

inferior to the rest of the workplace…they are

called names to dehumanise them (making it

easier to harm them); and the rest of the work-

force learns that they could become targets

themselves if they align with the target, but

could beneﬁt if they help leadership get rid of

them...”.

In other words, the targets, through pro-

cesses of dehumanisation and exclusion

become friendless candidates for what psychol-

ogists’ call “normative violence”. That is,

violence that is morally approved of by the

group.

One of the greatest ironies about a workplace

mobbing is that eventually the target may be

given a label that goes against the values of the

group, allowing the group to then “legally” be

rid of the individual.

In Harper’s case she was labelled a bully. This

is kind of brilliant in its cheek. But it’s conveni-

ent too, not just in getting rid of the by now

labelled “trouble-maker” on trumped-up

charges, but also making the group “victims” of

the target, exculpating the group, in the eyes of

its members, of any wrong-doing in the destruc

tion of the target individual.

The bully label also had the eect of causing

people outside the group to disbelieve Harper’s

story.

“Somehow the worse my employers and co-

workers behaved toward me, the more the

perception shifted from what they were doing to

me, to what I had done to deserve it”.

This idea of somehow “deserving it” possibly

OPINION

March/April 2022 53

also underlies the idea that whistleblowers tend

to be “egoists”. But this is just a dierent name-

calling that has a similar eect of causing people

to believe that they somehow deserve their mal-

treatment through some character defect.

Whistleblowers

One of the things that happens to a person when

they become the target of injustice, is that they

become rattled, and when it comes time to say

exactly what it is they are rattled about, the story

tends to come tumbling out in a disjointed, often

garbled way, having the unfortunate eect of

causing people to back o in uncertainty rather

than engage with the story the person is trying

to tell.

Village magazine’s series of articles on Frank

Mulcahy, former CEO of business group ISME, ,

who has been in such a conﬂict with various

heavyweight parties for the past 20 years, dis-

plays this quality of tumbling grievances.

Perhaps Frank McBrearty too.

This is possibly why it is so easy to side-line

whistleblowers, because often they are alone,

usually against an organisation or a collective

of some description, and they are rattled as indi-

viduals, for very human reasons related to group

dynamics and a sense of belonging.

It is easy then, and even amusing for some, to

gaslight such people. This is a standard weapon

used by organisations and groups against indi-

viduals, often supplemented by accusations

and charges of sexual impropriety, as hap

pened with Julian Assange and Maurice McCabe.

Primitive Groups

In Janice Harper’s case, when she found herself

the target of a faculty mobbing, her training as

an anthropologist kicked in to ﬁnd some per-

spective in the otherwise traumatic experience

she was undergoing.

She was able to bring her learning to bear on

the situation, providing some striking insights

as to what was actually going on in terms of pri

meval Human group dynamics that are still

installed in our biological makeup.

In ‘Mobbed’, she shows how ancient group

dynamics are triggered by dier

ence, and also shows the manner

in which the group behaves to

expel unwanted individuals from

the group.

For instance, in hunter-gatherer

groups, one of the safeguards for

group survival in a world where

wild animal attacks were still a real-

ity, was to have a standby sacriﬁce

should the group ﬁnd itself having

to oer up a member to an animal

to ensure the survival of the group.

This would usually be an individual

marked in some way by dierence

and regarded as more expendable

than others in the group. The

dierence might be a physical defect, or it might

be some characteristic the group considered dif-

ferentiated a “foreigner” or “outsider” in one

way or another. “Dierence”, no matter how triv-

ial, was the deciding factor.

According to Harper it is these primitive con

siderations that are triggered when someone,

such as a whistleblower, moves against the

group. A new ruthlessness towards that individ-

ual is triggered in the group, and has the eect

of causing the group to bondagainstthe indi

vidual, more determined than ever to expel

someone now regarded as a danger to the secu-

rity of the group.

Loyalty

So, in this primitive blood-like group dynamic,

the accusations of whistleblowers, become not

crimes of the group - though in our world they

may well be crimes – but instead positive or

intrinsic characteristics of the group being

attacked by a perceived “outsider” or traitor.

A neutral individual happening upon such a

conﬂict is likely to be ﬁrst greeted by an

aggrieved and frightened individual – in primi-

tive society it is death to be expelled from the

group – with a cascadling narrative of serial

injustices perpetrated by various group

members.

The neutral individual, being themselves nat-

urally group-oriented, will, in most cases, be

inclined to side with the group. And this is the

tragedy of whistleblowing. Though often well-

intentioned, the resulting conﬂict has less to do

with right and wrong and more to do with blind

biology, inadvertently triggering primitive

hatreds and alliances, and often only succeed-

ing in expelling the individual from the group, to

the extent even of destroying that individual,

and the Village piece made the case that nearly

all whistleblowers get destroyed, rather than the

intended reform of group practices which the

whistleblower initially might have hoped for.

In this respect, it is crucial to enact laws that

convincingly protect whistleblowers, not in the

often-mistaken belief that such laws will protect

the whistleblower only, but in the knowledge

Schoolyrd whistleblower?

that such laws will protect the wider society from

the emergence of primitive and often violent

group dynamics.

Ireland and Whistleblowers

The ‘Enemies of the People’ articel, by Michael

Smith and David Langwallner, paints a depress-

ing picture of Irish society. A society that

appears often to be “underworld” in its outlook

and practices, to borrow a concept from Eric

Berne’s 1964 book ‘Games People Play’. For

instance, we’ve seen time and again that an Irish

politician caught in some corruption scandal,

and even expelled from the party, is returned to

power as an independent with more support

than they ever had before.

This can only be due to a post-colonial hango-

ver of Us vs Them, where Dublin is seen as the

home of Them. But “They” shipped out one hun-

dred years ago. Since then, there has been only

Us.

This would also explain the Ansbacher scan

dal, where a bank Guinness Mahon, founded by

tos provided funds for a chippy elite who

regarded themselves as entitled, even if nobody

else did. It accounts for much of the weakness

of Charles Haughey who considered horse-rid

ing, and a taste in historic houses and Charvet

Shirts would somehow elevate him to what can

only be described as colonial levels of big-man

ascendancy.

Conclusion

Though it may be more comforting to think that

whistleblowing is ultimately about some errant

individuals who can’t keep their egos in check,

and get their noses bloodied for their eorts, the

truth may be that whistleblowers are those indi-

viduals who have seen through the hypocrisies

of the group, inadvertently triggering primitive

group dynamics related to survival, a situation

further complicated in Ireland by the tendency

of groups to adopt underworld understandings

as a hangover of colonial rebelliousness.

Many of the same

psychological processes

that enable a population

to follow an autocratic

leader to genocide are

apparent in the manner

in which management

can lead workers

towards demonising an

individual