Object or Leave?

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

-Elie Wiesel

Stories of Fyre Festival, Theranos, WeWork, Great Jones, and crypto scams consistently come up in the media.

Many have commented on the schadenfreude of it all-- the reveling in seeing rich and pompous know it alls getting screwed. Schadenfreude can feel good, but when I read these stories and watch the documentaries, that’s not what I think about. I give little thought to what awful people the perpetrators of these scams are… it’s known. I think about the psychology of the investors and clients who bought in… but mostly, I think about how if I worked at the company, what would I have done?

A friend was browsing an old bookstore where he saw a book called “Object or Leave”. It debated the morals of staying and objecting vs leaving to start a new life, especially with regards to Nazi Germany. I couldn’t find it online, but I love the concept.

This can be extended to when you are part of a community, group, or organization that does things you don’t agree with, do you object or do you leave? Do you stay and fight the good fight or is it too far gone? And if your objections fall on deaf ears, how long until you leave?

I feel as with most things, it depends. If you are objecting in Nazi Germany, you would have been thrown in jail or killed. In Mexico, those who write about the drug cartels and call out corruption are killed along with their families. Objecting seems rather pointless there. I think leaving would be optimal. If you can’t leave, perhaps, joining and sabotaging would be best. Alternatively, protesting from afar is more powerful than it was in the past.

Let’s go through some examples.

Fyre Festival and Theranos

OBJECT. When it’s a company, I feel it’s easy to make waves. It’s far easier than most employees realize. This is probably because I’ve seen companies from the outside and understand how boards and management act when confronted with external and internal factors. 

If I was at either of these companies, I hope I would have recognized that things weren’t adding up. I could have asked questions and when shot down, gotten a group of employees together to protest to management as a group. If that failed, skip levels of management each time they ignored me and directly reach out to the CEO, then the board, and then investors. If all that failed, I’d then and only then go to the media as I planned my departure.

Immediately leaving would be the selfish, immoral thing to do. Employees generally have a lot more power to change things internally vs externally. Every company has people criticizing them from the outside, and it’s common for ex-employees, even those leaving on relatively good terms to say negative things about their former job. It’s easy for reporters to write a takedown piece on any large company by talking to ex-employees. Sometimes this is a post-rationalization for why they left/mostly them trying to convince themselves they made the correct decision, but other times, they’re telling the truth.

For Theranos, the schadenfreude for the tech sector came out as she blatantly impersonated Steve Jobs and people just went with it, which... is really funny. I mean, who meets an Elvis impersonator and invests in their new album. To me, what’s fascinating/sad is how many people went along with everything at the company.

Venezuela

LEAVE. I feel bad for people living there, but it’s difficult for me to have too much sympathy as I feel I would have left long ago if I saw my country jump into socialism the way Venezuela did. I’ve met many smart Venezuelans while traveling abroad-- they left as they saw their country nationalize businesses and run them into the ground.

In places like North Korea, people are mostly suffering from their ancestors’ mistakes, but in Venezuela, many are suffering from their own mistakes in supporting or being complicit in the rise of this government. It’s admirable to stay and fight, but I think if they all left then the fall of the country would have been drastically faster along with a faster regime change vs what is happening now.

Nazi Germany

LEAVE. Well, I’m Jewish so I wouldn’t have had a better option. If I wasn’t Jewish, then staying and secretly resisting could have been another option. 

The question there is how long do you stay in Nazi Germany objecting until you realize it’s best to leave. I would first want my friends to know what’s happening is awful. At a certain point, objecting too much in public would make me a target. I think leaving sets an example and may convince others to leave as well.

California

LEAVE. This is how I feel about the California government... I’m not equating them to Nazi Germany, but leaving California set an example that leaving is a possibility.

I convinced many friends that a better life can be had outside of California than in California. I think this is due to the California government and municipalities being uniquely corrupt and incompetent. It’s hard to explain to my foreign friends how corrupt and incompetent California is-- from the special interest groups whose incentives are misaligned with the public (e.g. making hundreds of millions from exacerbating prison and homeless problems) to a bay bridge that went from costing ~$1B and taking seven years to costing $6.4B+ and taking 17 years to build. Government is generally inefficient, but the government has an important role. I don’t want to leave the US, but the US government is uniquely inefficient partially because many government jobs are poorly disguised jobs programs.

East Asian and European nations may have more socialist sounding policies, but their government employees are oftentimes rated and fired when they underperform. That isn’t a thing in the US… we can’t even fire bad teachers. NYC has their infamous rubber rooms while SEC employees can look at porn at work and also don’t get fired... from some googling, I stand corrected. In 2008 the District of Columbia fired nine municipal employees for using work computers to visit porn sites. Each fired employee clicked on at least 20,000 porn images over a 12-month period. I guess everyone has a line.

At this stage in my life, I don’t think I want to live outside the US again, but if extremists take over, massively increase taxes, implement wealth taxes, and nationalize businesses-- I think it’d be immoral to stay.