The question you ask of our corporate chiefs could just as well have been asked of European Jews stuffed in the box cars on their way to the death camps. It could also have been asked of the Soviet officer corps during the show trials and purges in 1937.
Very few men have the guts to stand up to authority.
I've been thinking about this all day and I believe you're right. I remember once reading an account by a German Jew who suddenly realized that he was in the cross-hairs. He and all of his family had been Germans for hundreds of years. But suddenly, Hitler and his followers picked him out and made a target of him.
There was a strange delayed reaction time. Some Jews fled immediately (and survived), others waited until they knew that their friends and family were disappearing (and generally did not survive). I guess the real question is when you stop thinking of yourself as paranoid and drop everything and head for the hills.