In the northwest corner of the United States, right up near the Canadian border, there's a little town called Libby, Montana, and it's surrounded by pine trees and lakes and just amazing wildlife and these enormous trees that scream up into the sky. And in there is a little town called Libby, which I visited, which feels kind of lonely, a little isolated. And in Libby, Montana, there's a rather unusual woman named Gayla Benefield. She always felt a little bit of an outsider, although she's been there almost all her life, a woman of Russian extraction. She told me when she went to school, she was the only girl who ever chose to do mechanical drawing. Later in life, she got a job going house to house reading utility meters -- gas meters, electricity meters. And she was doing the work in the middle of the day, and one thing particularly caught her notice, which was, in the middle of the day she met a lot of men who were at home, middle aged, late middle aged, and a lot of them seemed to be on oxygen tanks. It struck her as strange. Then, a few years later, her father died at the age of 59, five days before he was due to receive his pension. He'd been a miner. She thought he must just have been worn out by the work. But then a few years later, her mother died, and that seemed stranger still, because her mother came from a long line of people who just seemed to live forever. In fact, Gayla's uncle is still alive to this day, and learning how to waltz. It didn't make sense that Gayla's mother should die so young. It was an anomaly, and she kept puzzling over anomalies. And as she did, other ones came to mind. She remembered, for example, when her mother had broken a leg and went into the hospital, and she had a lot of x-rays, and two of them were leg x-rays, which made sense, but six of them were chest x-rays, which didn't. She puzzled and puzzled over every piece of her life and her parents' life, trying to understand what she was seeing. She thought about her town. The town had a vermiculite mine in it. Vermiculite was used for soil conditioners, to make plants grow faster and better. Vermiculite was used to insulate lofts, huge amounts of it put under the roof to keep houses warm during the long Montana winters. Vermiculite was in the playground. It was in the football ground. It was in the skating rink. What she didn't learn until she started working this problem is vermiculite is a very toxic form of asbestos. When she figured out the puzzle, she started telling everyone she could what had happened, what had been done to her parents and to the people that she saw on oxygen tanks at home in the afternoons. But she was really amazed. She thought, when everybody knows, they'll want to do something, but actually nobody wanted to know. In fact, she became so annoying as she kept insisting on telling this story to her neighbors, to her friends, to other people in the community, that eventually a bunch of them got together and they made a bumper sticker, which they proudly displayed on their cars, which said, "Yes, I'm from Libby, Montana, and no, I don't have asbestosis." But Gayla didn't stop. She kept doing research. The advent of the Internet definitely helped her. She talked to anybody she could. She argued and argued, and finally she struck lucky when a researcher came through town studying the history of mines in the area, and she told him her story, and at first, of course, like everyone, he didn't believe her, but he went back to Seattle and he did his own research and he realized that she was right. So now she had an ally. Nevertheless, people still didn't want to know. They said things like, "Well, if it were really dangerous, someone would have told us." "If that's really why everyone was dying, the doctors would have told us." Some of the guys used to very heavy jobs said, "I don't want to be a victim. I can't possibly be a victim, and anyway, every industry has its accidents." But still Gayla went on, and finally she succeeded in getting a federal agency to come to town and to screen the inhabitants of the town -- 15,000 people -- and what they discovered was that the town had a mortality rate 80 times higher than anywhere in the United States. That was in 2002, and even at that moment, no one raised their hand to say, "Gayla, look in the playground where your grandchildren are playing. It's lined with vermiculite." This wasn't ignorance. It was willful blindness. Willful blindness is a legal concept which means, if there's information that you could know and you should know but you somehow manage not to know, the law deems that you're willfully blind. You have chosen not to know. There's a lot of willful blindness around these days. You can see willful blindness in banks, when thousands of people sold mortgages to people who couldn't afford them. You could see them in banks when interest rates were manipulated and everyone around knew what was going on, but everyone studiously ignored it. You can see willful blindness in the Catholic Church, where decades of child abuse went ignored. You could see willful blindness in the run-up to the Iraq War. Willful blindness exists on epic scales like those, and it also exists on very small scales, in people's families, in people's homes and communities, and particularly in organizations and institutions. Companies that have been studied for willful blindness can be asked questions like, "Are there issues at work that people are afraid to raise?" And when academics have done studies like this of corporations in the United States, what they find is 85 percent of people say yes. Eighty-five percent of people know there's a problem, but they won't say anything. And when I duplicated the research in Europe, asking all the same questions, I found exactly the same number. Eighty-five percent. That's a lot of silence. It's a lot of blindness. And what's really interesting is that when I go to companies in Switzerland, they tell me, "This is a uniquely Swiss problem." And when I go to Germany, they say, "Oh yes, this is the German disease." And when I go to companies in England, they say, "Oh, yeah, the British are really bad at this." And the truth is, this is a human problem. We're all, under certain circumstances, willfully blind. What the research shows is that some people are blind out of fear. They're afraid of retaliation. And some people are blind because they think, well, seeing anything is just futile. Nothing's ever going to change. If we make a protest, if we protest against the Iraq War, nothing changes, so why bother? Better not to see this stuff at all. And the recurrent theme that I encounter all the time is people say, "Well, you know, the people who do see, they're whistleblowers, and we all know what happens to them." So there's this profound mythology around whistleblowers which says, first of all, they're all crazy. But what I've found going around the world and talking to whistleblowers is, actually, they're very loyal and quite often very conservative people. They're hugely dedicated to the institutions that they work for, and the reason that they speak up, the reason they insist on seeing, is because they care so much about the institution and want to keep it healthy. And the other thing that people often say about whistleblowers is, "Well, there's no point, because you see what happens to them. They are crushed. Nobody would want to go through something like that." And yet, when I talk to whistleblowers, the recurrent tone that I hear is pride. I think of Joe Darby. We all remember the photographs of Abu Ghraib, which so shocked the world and showed the kind of war that was being fought in Iraq. But I wonder who remembers Joe Darby, the very obedient, good soldier who found those photographs and handed them in. And he said, "You know, I'm not the kind of guy to rat people out, but some things just cross the line. Ignorance is bliss, they say, but you can't put up with things like this." I talked to Steve Bolsin, a British doctor, who fought for five years to draw attention to a dangerous surgeon who was killing babies. And I asked him why he did it, and he said, "Well, it was really my daughter who prompted me to do it. She came up to me one night, and she just said, 'Dad, you can't let the kids die.'" Or I think of Cynthia Thomas, a really loyal army daughter and army wife, who, as she saw her friends and relations coming back from the Iraq War, was so shocked by their mental condition and the refusal of the military to recognize and acknowledge post-traumatic stress syndrome that she set up a cafe in the middle of a military town to give them legal, psychological and medical assistance. And she said to me, she said, "You know, Margaret, I always used to say I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grow up. But I've found myself in this cause, and I'll never be the same." We all enjoy so many freedoms today, hard-won freedoms: the freedom to write and publish without fear of censorship, a freedom that wasn't here the last time I came to Hungary; a freedom to vote, which women in particular had to fight so hard for; the freedom for people of different ethnicities and cultures and sexual orientation to live the way that they want. But freedom doesn't exist if you don't use it, and what whistleblowers do, and what people like Gayla Benefield do is they use the freedom that they have. And what they're very prepared to do is recognize that yes, this is going to be an argument, and yes I'm going to have a lot of rows with my neighbors and my colleagues and my friends, but I'm going to become very good at this conflict. I'm going to take on the naysayers, because they'll make my argument better and stronger. I can collaborate with my opponents to become better at what I do. These are people of immense persistence, incredible patience, and an absolute determination not to be blind and not to be silent. When I went to Libby, Montana, I visited the asbestosis clinic that Gayla Benefield brought into being, a place where at first some of the people who wanted help and needed medical attention went in the back door because they didn't want to acknowledge that she'd been right. I sat in a diner, and I watched as trucks drove up and down the highway, carting away the earth out of gardens and replacing it with fresh, uncontaminated soil. I took my 12-year-old daughter with me, because I really wanted her to meet Gayla. And she said, "Why? What's the big deal?" I said, "She's not a movie star, and she's not a celebrity, and she's not an expert, and Gayla's the first person who'd say she's not a saint. The really important thing about Gayla is she is ordinary. She's like you, and she's like me. She had freedom, and she was ready to use it." Thank you very much. (Applause)
在美國的東北角 緊挨著加拿大邊境 有一個在蒙大拿州的小鎮叫Libby 四周被松樹和湖泊所環繞 還有令人讚歎不已的野生動物 那些高大的樹木直達蒼穹 在那裏有一個叫Libby的小鎮 我去過那裏,覺得那裏好像有幾分孤單 也有一點與世隔絕 在Libby有一位頗不尋常的女士 她叫蓋拉貝尼菲爾德 儘管她在那兒生活了幾乎一輩子 她總感覺自己是一名異鄉客 她是一個有俄國血統的女人 在去學校的路上她對我說 她是唯一一個選擇 念機械製圖的女孩 那之後她找到一份工作 一家一戶地讀家用碼錶--天然氣表,電錶 並且她每天在中午開始她的工作 有一件事特別引起她的注意 那就是在正中午的時候 她碰見了許多待在家裏的男人 有中壯年男性,也有中老年男性 他們之中似乎許多人是插著氧氣管的 為此她感到十分詫異 幾年後她的爸爸在59歲時 在他應該領退休金 安度晚年的五天前去世了 他當了一輩子的礦工 她以為是工作強度壓垮了她的爸爸 但是幾年之後她的媽媽也去世了 這更是令人感到奇怪 因為她的媽媽家族裡有很多人 都活到很大的歲數 事實上蓋拉的叔叔至今仍健在 他還去學跳華爾滋 所以蓋拉的媽媽沒道理 這麼年輕就過世 這是個異常的現象 她一直對這些異常現象百思不解 有一天一個想法啓發了她 她記得,舉個例子 當她媽媽腿部骨折去醫院就診 她拍了好多X光片 其中兩次是腿部X光 這很合理 但是另外六次是胸部X光 這就讓人不明白了 她對自己和她父母生活中的 每一個細節都仔細思索 想嘗試理解眼前發生的事情 她想到居住的小鎮 在那兒有一個蛭石礦 蛭石被當做土壤改良劑 它能幫助植物長得更快更好 蛭石也被當做隔熱物質 在漫長的蒙大拿冬季 它被大量地放置在屋頂下 具有保暖的作用 它也用在戶外場地上 用在足球場 用在溜冰場上 當她開始著手解決這個問題時 她發現蛭石是一種毒性很強的石棉 當她找出了疑問的根源 她開始告訴她所遇見的每一個人 過去已經發生了什麽 包括發生她父母身上的經歷 那些她看見在家插氧氣管的人 又遭遇了什麽事情 但是令她感到不可思議的是 她認為當人們知道真相後 他們會嘗試去改變 但其實沒有人願意知道真相 事實上,她因為堅持把真相告訴 她的鄰居,朋友和社區裏的人 而使得自己遭到別人的厭煩 最後有一群人聚集在一起 做了一張保險桿標語貼紙 並且自豪地貼在汽車上 貼紙上寫著 “沒錯,我來自蒙大拿州的Libby鎮 但是我沒有得石棉沉滯症。” 但是蓋拉沒有放棄 她繼續著她的研究 網路的出現幫了她很大一個忙 她告訴所有人她知道的東西 她一直爭辯著 最後當一位研究當地礦井歷史學者 經過了這個小鎮時 她巧遇了這位學者 她把這些事情告訴了學者 像大家一樣,學者一開始並不相信她 但是他回到西雅圖自己做了調查後 他發現蓋拉是對的 現在她有了一名支持者 儘管如此,人們仍舊不願意相信 他們經常這樣說 “如果真的那麼危險的話 肯定會有人告訴我們的。" “如果那真是人們死因的元兇, 醫生會告訴我們的。” 一些過去常常做繁重工作的人說, ’我不想成為受害者 我也沒有可能成為受害者 再說每一個行業都會有意外發生。" 但是蓋拉仍舊堅持著 最後她成功請到了聯邦機構來小鎮 檢查小鎮的居民 --共1萬5千人-- 他們發現了 當地居民的死亡率 比美國任何地方高出了80倍 那時是2002年 甚至在那個時刻 也沒有人舉起手說,"蓋拉 看看你的子孫玩耍的戶外場地 那裡鋪滿了蛭石啊。” 那並不是忽視 那是“刻意無視” “刻意無視”是一個法律概念 如果是一個你應該知道 而且能夠得知的資訊 但是你以某種方式試圖不去獲知 那麼法律上認為你是“刻意無視” 你只是選擇了不去獲知 現今周圍有許多“刻意無視”的現象 在銀行中可以發現“刻意無視”的情況 當成千上萬的人把房貸貸給 那些根本負擔不起的人們 在銀行你還可以看見 當利率被操縱 而且人們都知道發生了什麽事情 但是人們故意忽視了它 刻意無視的情況也發生在天主教堂裏 幾十年孩子被虐待的狀況被漠視 刻意無視的現象 也發生在伊拉克戰爭中 刻意無視不僅發生在 像剛所提到的那些大範圍中 它也存在於十分微小的層面上 在家族裏,在家庭裏,也在社區裏 特別是在組織和機構裏 那些接受“刻意無視”現象研究的公司 經常被問這樣的問題 “在工作上有沒有 員工不願意提出來的問題?” 當研究機構對這樣的 美國公司做研調時 他們發現85%的人給出了肯定答案 85%的人知道存在問題 但是他們什麽也不會說 我在歐洲重複這項調查時 問了一樣的問題 我得到了完全一樣的數據結果 85%。那是靜靜的死寂 那是赤裸裸的無視 有趣的是,我訪查瑞士的公司時 他們告訴我:“那是瑞士獨有的問題” 而去德國時,他們說 “噢,是的,那是德國人的毛病。” 去英國公司時,他們會說 “哦,對啊,英國人在這方面挺差勁的“ 但真相是,那是人類的通病 在特定情況下,我們都“刻意無視” 研究結果表明 有些人因為害怕而無視 他們擔心遭到報復 有些人無視因為他們認為 看清一切也是徒勞的 沒有什麽會因此而改變 如果我們提出抗議 如果我們抗議伊拉克戰爭 不會發生什麽改變,那又何必為此操心? 還是不看見這樣的事情為好 我不斷遇到人們這樣說 “嗯,你知道 那些看清問題的人,是告密者 我們都知道他們將遭遇什麽” 所以對於那些告密者 人們存在著嚴重的誤解 首先,一般認為他們都是瘋子 但是我走遍全球和那些告密者 聊天時發現,事實上 他們十分忠誠,而且通常都是很保守的人 他們在自己工作的組織奉獻自己 他們站出來指出問題 堅持看見的問題的原因是 他們對自己的組織十分關心 並希望它健康發展。 關於告密者,另外一件大家常常談論的事是 那沒有用啦 因為他們的遭遇你也看見了 他們被打壓了 沒有人願意經歷像這樣的事情 但是,當我和告密者交談時 他們的語氣中總是帶著自豪感 我想起了喬伊達比 我們都記得Abu Ghraib的照片 (注:美軍虐待戰俘事件) 那張照片震驚了世界 讓人們看到了伊拉克戰爭的面目 但是誰還記得喬伊達比 那是位十分服從命令的好士兵 是他發現那些照片並且發佈了它們 他說:你知道嗎,我不是那種狡猾的揭發者 但是有些事做得太誇張了 有人說無知者是幸福的 但是你不能容忍像這樣的事情發生 我和史蒂夫波爾森交談過 他是一位英國醫生 他努力抗爭了五年 讓人們注意那些誤殺嬰兒的危險手術 我問他爲什麽這樣做 他說:是我的女兒鼓勵我這樣做的 一天晚上她來見我 她說:爸,你不能讓那些孩子喪命了 也或者我會想到辛西婭托馬斯 她是一位忠誠的軍人女兒 也是一名軍人的妻子 當她看見她的親友 從伊拉克戰場上回來時 辛西婭對他們的精神狀態感到震驚 也對軍方拒絕承認他們得了 “創傷後壓力症候群”感到震驚 於是她在軍方的小鎮中心開了一家咖啡館 為那些士兵提供法律上 心理上和醫療上的協助 她對我說:瑪格麗特 我以前都說我不知道 我長大後要做什麼 但是因這個事件 我找到了自我價值 我已經煥然一新了 如今我們享受著廣泛的自由 那是來之不易的自由 無需擔心審查的寫作和出版自由 是我上次到匈牙利時 他們所還沒有的自由 選舉的自由 特別是婦女們奮鬥所爭取的選舉自由 不同種族,不同文化,不同性取向的人 可以依照他們渴望的 生活方式生活的自由 但是如果你不使用自由,它就形同虛設 那些告密者 和像蓋拉貝尼菲爾德那樣做的人 他們的所作所為 代表他們真正行使了所擁有的自由 並且他們已經充分的意識到 是的,那樣做將會面對爭議 而且我的鄰居,同事和朋友 都會反對自己 但是在這個衝突中我會變得非常好 我會面對那些反對者 因為他們會使我的論述 變得更好更完善 我可以和反對者合作 來讓自己更善於處理我正著手在做的事 那些人有極大的持久力 不可思議的耐心和不可動搖的決心 他們不願意視而不見 當我去Libby時 我拜訪了由蓋拉創建的 石棉沉滯症診所 一開始有些人 想要得到幫助和醫療關注時 都會從後門進入 因為他們不想承認 蓋拉是正確的 我坐在餐廳裏觀察著 卡車行駛在高速路 一車車運走花園裏的土壤 然後替換上新鮮的,無污染的土壤 我和我12歲的女兒在一起 因為我真心希望她見見蓋拉 女兒問道:爲什麽?這有什麼了不起的 我說:她不是一位影星 她也不是名人,更不是專家 但是她是第一個說 自己不是聖人的 蓋拉的閃亮之處 就在於她的平凡 她和你一樣,也和我一樣 她擁有自由,並善用了它 非常感謝 (掌聲)