I Was Perpetrator and Witness

When you tell the story of your career, people want to know who you are in that story. Are you the victim? Are you the hero? Are you the bad guy who has now seen the light?

I’m none of those.

I was part of a machine. Not a big gear in it but one of the small ones that helped keep the whole mechanism running. I made money from it, watched how growth works and also had to watch when it tips over. Not as an outsider but right in the middle.

The victim role is the easiest. I got pulled in because I didn’t know better and everyone else was to blame. That narrative always reads well because you come out looking good and everyone understands it.

But it’s not true.

The hero role would also be easy. I saw through the truth and got out. I’m now telling everything, how it really was, so others can learn from it and admire me. That story reads well too. And it has the advantage that I come out looking even better. Not just a victim but also brave.

That narrative isn’t true either.

There are whistleblowers. The ones who go to the media, spill everything and call it by name and point fingers at others: look what they did. That’s the last thing I can do. I can’t settle scores with others because the story doesn’t go far enough for that. I have to settle scores with myself first.

What is truth?

The fact is, it’s less comfortable than any of these options. I simultaneously profited and watched. Perpetrator and witness in one person, without it ever splitting neatly apart.

The scientists say no, the customers say yes and I stand in this dissonance in between and earn money doing it. This constellation isn’t particularly tragic. As far as I can tell, it’s everyday life. In more professions and situations than we might see. But it did something to me. The dissonance had left traces. Some of them open wounds that don’t want to heal. It wasn’t the pain but the awareness that wounds only become scars when you’re honest with yourself and take that as a prerequisite for healing.

I then found myself in a very unusual situation. It wasn’t about the struggle to process this experience but about the path toward the willingness to tell everything the way it really was. No excuses, no whitewashing, no altered version that sounds better than reality. I’ve watched many insiders who speak up later and tell a sanitized version. One where they woke up at some point. Where there was a turning point, a moment of clarity, after which everything was different.

For me there was no such moment. It was a process. Slow and gradual. Unspectacular. Not the lightning bolt that strikes but more like a fog lifting piece by piece over the years.

I also realized that there’s no point waving the moral stick because it would hit me just as hard. I didn’t get on a stage to wag my finger: you must not act this way. Because I know what it’s like to stand in the middle of it. Because I know that most people in the same situation would have done the same thing. Not out of malice but because in that moment it’s normality.

When I tell the story, I try to commit to the truth. That’s not easy when you’re used to telling yourself this versioned story too. I learned that an uncomfortable feeling can no longer stop me from really telling how it worked and what the price was that I paid.

I haven’t become purer through this. But more honest. That’s the crucial difference for me. Purer means: I switched sides. That would be another role. More honest means: I now see where the hard lines run beyond all the grey zones. Between what I did and what I told myself about it.

The convenient thing about roles is that they assign you a place: victims sit on one side, perpetrators belong on the other. As a hero you end up on stage.

When you say I was perpetrator and victim at the same time or at different times, people don’t have a category for that. They can’t tell whether they should like you or not. They wonder whether you’re trustworthy or just another one of those cranks.

Here’s the point: reality doesn’t fit into categories, nor does it fit into roles. What defines it is that it’s messy, contradictory and uncomfortable.

If I spared myself, the baggage wouldn’t get lighter. But I don’t put myself on trial either. Both would be too easy and unreflective for me. I’ve realized that I risk not being able to sell my version. But the second risk, that I tell a story I wouldn’t believe myself, is incomparably higher. So there’s one version for me: yes, I made money from it. Yes, I knew what I was doing. No, I don’t regret looking at what it does to us. And to me.