In the video you're about to watch, I deal with a very sensitive topic, whistleblowing and whistleblowers.
These are people who lead double lives, integrated as they are in organizations, institutions, family, with friends and other people who they're about to betray.
So like spies, there's a duality to whistleblowers. And sometimes the whistleblowing act lasts for years.
Whistleblowers are also concerned with conspiracy theories.
But whereas classical conspiracy theories are delusional in the vast majority of cases, in the case of whistleblowing, the conspiracy is usually real, grounded, true.
The whistleblower witnesses, malfeasance, abuse and even crimes, and comes forward to attest and to testify regarding all these issues.
So in the video, I deal with the act or action of whistleblowing, I analyze it, and then I go into the motivations and the psychology of whistleblowing.
This is all based on 25 years of studies, most notably by the FBI, but many others. And these studies have come up with some very, very surprising, shocking and politically incorrect conclusions regarding whistleblowing.
One funny or comic moment. In minute 8 and 25 seconds of this video, there's a Freudian slip of tongue. There's a parapraxis. I said selfishly, where what I meant to say, was selflessly, shows you what I really think.
Okay, enjoy the video, and I promise you, your view of whistleblowing and whistleblowers will be transformed by its end.
In our postmodern civilization, where everyone and his dog or his cat are someone else's victim, where political correctness is the only permissible way to communicate, and where narcissistic ostentatious virtue signaling is at the core of victimhood movement.
Well, in this environment, whistleblowers are the new saints.
They are perceived to be as brave, courageous, resilient, moral crusaders out to sacrifice themselves for the greater good.
Is this a true picture? What do the data show?
Go where the evidence leads you.
However politically incorrect it is, and that's what I keep doing in my videos which explains my declining popularity.
My name is Sam Vaknin, I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited and I'm a professor of clinical psychology and today the psychology of snitches, er sorry, whistleblowers.
What do we know?
Okay, let's start with facts, of course.
In studies conducted by the FBI in the United States, studies which included well over 1,000 whistleblowers.
The results were dismaying and shocking.
97% of the complaints were unsubstantiated. A majority of the reports were malicious and malevolent.
That's 97%. Only 3% of whistleblowers came forward with useful or relevant information.
97% of them acted out of mean motives such as revenge or self-aggrandizement.
That's a true picture of whistleblowing.
Whistleblowers face competing loyalties. They are loyal to their employer, to their friends, to their colleagues, to their neighborhood, to their family. They are loyal, in other words, to individuals, to people, to organizations, to organizations, to institutions, and at the same time they're loyal to the greater good, to a moral code, to some ethics in both self-imposed or otherwise inculcated, religion.
And so this whistleblowing is a case of competing loyalties.
There's only one other group of people who are faced with the same predicament. These are spies. Spies face competing loyalties.
In both cases, the whistleblower and the spy, there is a big element of deception, pretension, faking, play acting.
The whistleblower has to pretend that he or she still belong, are still loyal, are still faithful, and at the same time, the whistleblower has to undermine, spy, challenge and destroy in many cases that which he or she whistle blows on.
So there is a Janus-like duality in whistleblowing.
The public-facing persona is compliant, submissive, collaborative, helpful, accepting, belonging, affiliated with allegiances and loyalties. That's a public facing person.
The real person is actually engaged in subterfuge in subverting the target. The target could be an institution, organization, the target would be another individual, but there is a process of subversion.
And this ability to maintain a dual personality is the first indication that we are dealing with a group of people, with a type of people, or essentially psychopathic.
What are the motivations of whistleblowers, according to studies and research, and so on?
And again, the FBI is a major source.
First of all, the overwhelming vast majority of whistleblowers have maintained and possess personal biases.
The message is, my values are the right ones. My beliefs are beyond reproach. My way is the highway.
There is, therefore, in whistleblowing a strong core and element of grandiosity, a cognitive distortion, a lack of flexibility, a lack of ability to entertain the point of view of other people.
Rigidity, moral rigidity, or rather I would say personal or psychopathological rigidity, masquerading as moral rigidity.
These are people who are hell-bent on hurting other people and the organizations or institutions they belong to because they think other people and these organizations or institutions are in the wrong.
Not always in the wrong morally, not always in the wrong ethically, simply in the wrong.
Whistleblowers are punitive. They want to punish other people. They want to punish organizations. They want to punish cults. They want to punish institutions. They're about punishment. Whistleblowing is about punishment.
So this is a core element, literally the common denominator of 100% of whistleblowers.
This grandiose self-elevation and attainment of the high moral ground.
This hectoring and preaching quality, I know best, I know better than you, I am far superior to you. My moral fiber is more unadulterated, more pure, I am purer than you, I'm cleaner than thou.
So this self-aggrandizement and self-elevation is a crucial feature, and again literally in 100% of whistleblowers.
Another element that we found in research is that the overwhelming vast majority of whistleblowers actually seek attention.
Now, many of them are afraid, afraid of retribution, afraid of repercussions.
And so they hide, they camouflage, they disguise their activities, they are covert, many of them.
But at the same time, they crave attention. They fantasize about the day after when everything has been exposed to daylight and their role and contribution is lauded and adulated, all of them are very interested in becoming known, if not known to the public, known to their peers. If not to their peers, then to the police or law enforcement.
There is an element of seeking recognition and attention.
Now, there is a minority of whistle-blowers, and about 3% to 5% who are acting selflessly, whose acts have no trace of egotism, attention-seeking, grandiosity, and who go about the whistleblowing process very reluctantly and wish it were over as soon as possible.
These are the true moral crusaders, if you wish. These are the true saints, if you wish.
But we are talking about 3 to 5%.
So, yeah, every group of people have outliers. Every group of people have the exceptions that prove the rule.
But the rule is unpleasant. The rule is that the vast majority of whistleblowers are vengeful, narcissistic, even psychopathic.
That's the rule, I'm sorry to say. Revenge in studies has been proven to be the number one motivation for whistleblowers, of the enormous number of whistleblowers, something like 90 plus percentseek revenge.
Some of them seek revenge because they haven't been promoted. Some of them seek revenge because they believe they've been treated, they've been discriminated against, they've been mistreated, they've been abused, and so on so on.
As I said, there's an element, a punitive element. It's an expedition to punish and to rectify and remedy injustice by punishing the target of the whistleblowing.
And there is glee and joy at the sight of the target being penalized, incarcerated, disintegrated and suffering. There's joy and suffering. There's a name for that. It's called sadism.
Whistleblowers are highly sadistic, and they're highly motivated by revenge, anger, hatred and other negative affects.
A substantial group of whistleblowers are motivated by envy. Envy of others within an organization, for example, envy of leaders, envy of others within an organization for example envy of leaders, envy of the rich, envy of peers.
Envy is a major feature which is not surprising because envy is also a diagnostic criterion in narcissistic personality disorder.
Numerous studies over the past four years, starting with Gaba's pioneering studies in Israel, and later on in British Columbia, others, and in China and so on and so forth, and today it's well established that within victimhood movements, within woke movements, and within moral crusaders such as social activists and whistleblowers and so forth, the preponderance of pathological narcissism and psychopathy is way above the general population.
Let me put it, let me translate this to English.
Many, many whistleblowers, social activists, victimhood movement activists and so on, are actually narcissists and psychopaths hijacking the message or the activity. It's a fact by now.
Competitive, ostentatious victimhood, coupled with entitlement and demands from society and from others. This is typical of narcissists and psychopaths, and many, many whistleblowers devolve into these roles.
They become perennial victims. They demand special rights and impose obligations on others because of having sacrificed themselves in the pursuit of justice and the truth.
So there is a quid pro quo in the vast majority of cases of whistleblowing. I took a risk, I endangered myself and my loved ones, I sought the truth, I exposed and revealed malfeasance and crimes. Because I've done all this, I deserve special treatment, I deserve recognition, I deserve fame, I deserve all kinds of concessions, I deserved to be adulated and admired and so and so forth.
This is part of the attention seeking coupled with eventual tendency.
Now again, the overwhelming vast majority of whistleblowers seek to avoid punishment.
Many of them are actually accomplices.
I mean, step back for a minute, step back for a minute, delete, erase the brainwashing about whistleblowers.
To become an efficacious whistleblower, to have any meaning as a whistleblower, you need to have been sufficiently integrated and sufficiently high in the hierarchy in order to be used to the prosecution or to expose wrongdoing.
You need to have been a collaborator or an accomplice in the very things that you castigate and denounce.
Whistleblowers are glorified snitches. They are a variant of state evidence.
Usually they have colluded in the very acts which they seek to expose and reveal to the public.
At some point they panic. They realize if they don't take the extra step of becoming whistleblowers, they will have rendered themselves accomplices before or after the fact.
And so one of the main motivations of whistleblowers is to avoid punishment by acting preemptively and casting themselves as the good guys on the side of morality and history.
They are the ones who reform and revamp and transform their environment by simply exposing wrongdoing, revealing the truth and introducing the public via its institutions such as prosecution and law enforcement and so on so forth, introducing the public into the situation.
But no one bothers to ask, how did the whistleblower come across this information? How did the whistleblower have access to this information in the first place? How did the whistleblower reach so high, so as to be of use, to those who seek to penalize wrongdoing and malfeasance and abuse and crimes?
So whistleblowing is just a politically correct woke type, victimhood type rendition of the snitch of the grass.
It's as simple as that. It's a glorified snitch.
In studies of whistleblowers, we have discovered personality traits which are very common among psychopaths and psychopathic narcissists.
For example, a huge percentage of whistleblowers are defiant, absolutely defiant. They're contumacious, they hate authority, they regard authority as an imposition and a humiliation, they're reckless, they're reckless.
And so these are common features in psychopathy and in antisocial personality disorder.
Now in the aftermath of whistleblowing, many whistleblowers embark on a self-aggrandizing career, seeking fame and celebrity. The act of whistleblowing becomes their identity.
When they ask to describe themselves, the first thing they say, I am that whistleblower from that situation. I am that whistleblower who took down this organization. I'm that whistleblower who exposed these documents. I'm that whistleblower who took down this organization. I'm that whistleblower who placed so and so in prison. I am that whistleblower who has been the main star in this and this television series. I am that whistleblower.
It's as if they have no biography. It is as if they have accomplished nothing else in life except to snitch from a position of intimate knowledge and access.
Because they've been accomplices all along. They should have been punished as well. But they've turned state evidence or state witness. As simple as that.
So this self-aggrandizing career and fame, this is a main feature of prominent whistleblowers. I can name names, but I'm not going to do it. Wizard-blowers who are listening to this, know that I'm referring to them.
And whistleblowing becomes an identity the same way victimhood is an identity. Some people make sense of their lives, imbue their lives with meaning and direction and purpose, wake up in the morning just because they're victims.
Victimhood defines them. Victimhood elevates them. Victimhood makes them special. Victimhood entitles them to everything.
This is the same with whistleblowing. This is a subspecies of victimhood. The whistleblower renders the act of whistleblowing to a noble dimension of the determinant of his personality.
The fact that I've acted as a whistleblower shows that I'm noble, that I'm pure, that I'm moral, that I'm conscientious, that I'm a good person, the whistleblower tries to convince himself or herself.
And so whistleblowing is a self-affirming, egosyntonic, ego-congruent identity. This is something narcissists do all the time.
Ironically, the vast majority of narcissists believe that they're good people. And almost all narcissists believe that they're victims.
You talk to a whistleblower, the first thing that springs to mind, bloody hell, that's a covert narcissist if I ever saw one.
And I've had the misfortune of interacting with seven to ten whistleblowers in my lifetime.
Whistleblowers, therefore, could be construed as a variant of the pro-social communal narcissists, the narcissist whose locus of grandiosity is his or her rigid morality.
The narcissist who elevates himself or herself above others because he is less fallible, less sinful, less amenable to corruption, more righteous, strikes you as familiar because that's a profile of the typical whistleblower.
Here's my summary. Here's my take.
Being a snitch, being a traitor, being a backstabber, being a snake in the grass, in other words, being a whistleblower, for a good cause, doesn't make you less of a traitor, a snitch, a backstabber, a grass, and a snake in the grass.
Let me make this distinction clear.
Whistleblowing in 3% of the cases is a good thing. Whistleblowing in 3% of a cases is a moral thing. Whistleblowing in 3% of a cases enhances public good. There's no debate about this.
But whistleblowing in 100% of the cases demands a highly specific type of personality. Traitors, narcissistic, psychopathic or quasi-psychopathic, a snitch, a traitor, a backstabber, a grass, and a snake in that grass.
We should distinguish between the personality that leads people to do some things and the action.
The action could be laudable, the action could be commendable. Action should even be encouraged socially.
But the motivations of the people who commit these actions, they are very different.
The personalities of these people are pathological and actually in the essence antisocial. These people are unfaithful, unstable, morally rigid, unforgiving, sadistic, vengeful. That's not Sam Vaknin, that's the FBI if you're a whistleblower, this is your character. This is who you are.
And who you are is not the same as what you do. Your actions don't define you as a person. They don't.
Many, many narcissists are prosocial and communal and charitable and altruistic. Many psychopaths are saviors and fixers and healers. I've come across those in my long career, terrified.
And yet they're still psychopaths and narcissists. They're helping people. They're healing people, so to speak. They're doing good things and good deeds. But they're still narcissists and psychopaths.
That the end does not ennoble the means or the agent of perfidy and treason. That you ended up doing a good thing does not make you a good person.
And any claim to the contrary is counterfactual and of course self-aggrandizing.