Next idea. . .

"What distinguishes the whistleblower's narcissism from that of the ordinary narcissist is that he  is wounded by the right thing: that he was cast into an environment of lies and deception and was expected to become like everyone else" (78-79).

( A narcissistic wound is anything that punches a hole in the self that your ego is struggling to make whole by pulling the world into it, defining itself over and against and through everything else in the world.)

"Why people act ethically is a far richer and more mysterious phonomenon than we know, and our first category should be wonder, not judgment. . . Not too many things will make a man or woman give up everything for his or her beliefs, but wounded narcissism is one."

Work with the text a bit

More connections to past texts. . .

Alford writes:

What marks a historical moment is that suddenly it is, and we have to choose, suddenly to find that we have already made the choice a thousand times before in similar, less dramatic situations, even if we didn't know it at the time" (70).

Comment as you wish. Connect to other texts or to service.

A little more explanation: comment as you wish

Chapter 4: Whistleblower Ethics: Narcissism Moralized

To summarize what Alford means by this term.

We think of narcissists as being egotistical self-centered people--which indeed the average narcissist probably is. But Alford describes the core drive of the narcissist as the desire "to be whole, good, pure, and perfect." As he then describes, there are two ways to work towards this goal: 1. lower your standards until they correspond with your "miserable self" or 2. raise that miserable self  "as high as one possibly can so that one comes a little closer to these ideal standards" (63). This is what he calls "narcissism moralized."

To explain a little further. Primary narcissism is Freud's description of the infant whose sense of self is "unbounded." Meaning, the infant, pre-ego, does not know that she is separate from anything else in her environment. Everything is her. When we move to the next stage, this primal experience of interconnection/oneness becomes part of the ego ideal (that which we know is good and right--those set of principles which call to us from the outside which in our primary narcissistic state, we saw as part of us.?

So, for the whistleblower who, in a sense, experiences harm to others as harm to herself, life itself loses meaning when these principles are lost in the world that she knows and believes in. The whistleblower is often the most loyal employee, the person who has believed and invested herself in her work but will "risk all but their lives so as not to be made less whole, pure, and good by corruption in the organizations that they work for" (63).

Do you understand Alford's concept here: the whistleblower is motivated through self-love but the self that the w/b seeks to protect is the ideal self that is inherently and inextricably part of a larger reality. 

What ideals do you strive for? Would you risk everything for them?

Prompt 3

Alford writes:

What is the meaning of life? To this little question Freud answered, love and work, an answer that by now is almost a cliché (Erickson 1963). What happens when the world becomes unlovable and our work impossible . . . If love is not just a psychic discharge but a way of being in the world, then that way of being 'demands that the world present itself to us as worthy to love (Lear 1990, 153). . . if love is not just a feeling but the force that makes the world go around, as Freud speculated in his later works . . . then loving the world and being able to love the world because the world is lovable are two sides of the same coin.  We make the world meaningful by being lovable. When one partner fails, both do. The meaning of life depends on our ability to remain in a love affair with the world. (52).

So this is about the reciprocal nature of love and the meaning that it gives our lives. Alford is saying that part of the whistleblower's dilemma is that when her work becomes unprincipled, when she has the freedom to act on principle but loses everything else and is confronted with a world that does not share these ethical principals, her world becomes unlovable. This leads into the next discussion on paranoia. But let's focus on the first idea. Again, we have this theme about individual agency actually being contingent or finding a source in a relationship with the world. Can you start to tie the themes of these prompts together?

Prompt 2

Alford writes: "Not many of us know what it is like to be overwhelmed by our own beliefs. Not, perhaps, because we have not been, but because this type of freedom comes frighteningly close to compulsion, so wewe blink and call it choice" (41).

A little later he adds: 

In "What is Freedom?" Hannah Arendt (1956, 151) argues that freedom is acting from principle. . . Only when we give ourselves over to our principles are we free. By the term 'principles' Arendt means an idea or value that inspires us from 'without," from the outside in. We do not make our principles. Our principles make us. (41-42).

What does this mean to you? Do you have an example from your service experience of someone who is "made" by their principles. What about your principles? Where have they come from and have you ever thought about acting on your principles as a freedom?

Text Discussion: Self, Community, and Service

Text: Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power by C. Fred Alford

pps. 37-81. (please start a thread by adding a comment. The next reader doesn't need to start a new post but add a comment. Please integrate an acknowlegement of the comment prior to yours into your comment so that we have a dialogue going, a little different than our normal reader responses.)

Prompts

Chapter 3: Alford writes: "Narrative is best formed as it enters into discourse. In the absence of a discursive frame, narrative tends to turn in on itself, like a snake biting its tail. Without someone to share it with, narrative risks becoming an endless monologue" (37). Does this resonate with other concepts that have come up in prior readings? What are the ethical implications of dialogue vs. monologue?