Remember Professional Ethics
Reflections on Timothy Snyder's "On Tyranny," Lesson Five
I lost my job last year after I called out unethical behavior.
I have felt the pain of what happens when a handful of “well meaning” people forget professional ethics. When a necessary lie is followed by another and another; when self-protection becomes the mission; and when those who ask for transparency and accountability become the problem.
Authoritarian regimes become toxic environments because the leader (or institution) often demands that people betray ethical standards in service to them. Empathy necessarily becomes a sin as it gets in the way of obedience.
I started to work on this piece right after the passing of Senator Lindsey Graham, who made the deliberate choice to betray the truth.
In January 2021, the President of the United States incited an insurrection and Graham made the decision not to hold him accountable. Once he crossed that line, there was no going back. He had to continue with the parade, insisting the emperor’s new clothes were the finest around, until the very end.
John Adams once said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Some say that means we are a Christian nation, I disagree. What the founders understood was that self-government only works when people abide by moral standards - ethics.
The founders understood that an ethical society is the only way to restrain power; they assumed Christianity would always promote the ethics of Jesus. I suspect they would be shocked that it is the churches and “Christian” leaders who have convinced Americans that ethics don’t matter, that the teachings of Jesus are irrelevant to their faith.
They wanted to create a society where everyone agreed to abide by the rules, and where even the leader was subject to the same rules as everyone else. The only way that works is to ensure there is accountability - checks and balances.
Professional ethics build trust with the community. When professionals violate the ethical standards they’ve agreed to, trust is broken. When trust declines, so does freedom.
When institutions, like the church or the government, insurance companies or other businesses, break that trust, it is called institutional betrayal.
So many of us have been harmed by the institutions that we trusted. It’s easy to think that the only way forward is to let it all burn and start over, and some organizations are so corrupt that they will not survive, but most can be reformed.
Restoring trust requires transparency and accountability, the bedrock of ethics.
Reform begins with us. We have to be the change we want to see. As individuals, we have to remember our professional ethics and we have to call out the violations when we see them, even when it costs us.
I will tell you, it’s hard. It will wound your soul when you blow the whistle and are told to shut up or leave. It will hurt every time the lie you sacrificed to expose gets repeated as truth.
Toxic cultures persist because people are afraid to tell the truth. That fear is very real, but it’s no way to live.
Lindsey Graham kept his job, but for what? Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger lost their jobs, but kept their souls.
For whomever who needs to hear it:
Demanding transparency and accountability is not divisive.
Reporting misconduct and abuse is not disloyalty or disobedience.
Expecting to be treated with dignity is not disrespectful.
Expectations of confidentiality do not extend to unethical behavior or misconduct.
“To dissent is to risk being wrapped in a kind of negative identity - defined by what you are not. But it’s the environment, the external circumstances, that recast these individuals in oppositional terms. Dissidents don’t choose to be dissidents. They simply choose to be who they are.” (Angwin & Fields-Meyer, On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear, p. 25)
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