Great convo. I empathize with Mary. What's crazy is how the "humiliation" and "getting fired" reifies the consensus, company line view.

Way before Trump, startups taught me about the relativity of morality and even truth. If you go against the grain, you run the risk that moral standards and even the truth will be rewritten such that you are the villain. The painful part about this isn't the judgement of the sociopath with whom you locked horns; it is how everybody else, even your work-friends, adopt this false narrative. After all, their job is on the line.

As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." The inverse is also true: it is easy to get a man to adopt a false world view if his salary depends upon him believing.

The worst part of this "institutional betrayal" (https://dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/institutionalbetrayal/) is that you, yourself may start to believe the false narrative, at least in some parts of your brain. If everybody seems to agree with the narrative – even those who you like, trust, and behind closed doors were as "against the grain" as you – it's hard to resist asking yourself "are they right?" It's gaslighting, albeit in an emergent form in which most of the perpetrators don't know they're doing it.

All this is so viscerally painful that now I understand why most people keep their heads down and tow the company line.