Corruption Has Shaped History. Why Do We Still Ignore It?
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1. Mass media is owned by wealthy people, who do not want other people to question how they amassed that wealth, so corruption is not a widely discuted problem. As long as it doesn't touch everyone personally, it will stay this way.
2. Changing it requires organising. That "organising" is typically called government. It's pretty hard to install a whole new government. Reinstalling government in too slow manner will just reinfect newly elected officials with corruption and won't rid of the disease.
3. After changing government, there are still many wealthy people who will try to corrupt new government. Preventing that requires whole new system of governance, but it is not invented yet.
4. Hard to find THE perpetrators. Too many officials and too many corrupters, which do not make big universally regarded as bad moves. They corrupt little-by-little aka boiling the frog. Many wealthy people and officials are not actually corrupted, we just don't know which are.
Corruption is just too natural consequence of someone managing resources without being directly affected by outcomes.
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be.
Then it becomes a game of "Well, play ball and keep getting the gravy, or don't and we show and tell."
This is why we have the Denny Hasterts of the world: empty-suit nobodies who come out of nowhere to become speaker of the house, then are disappeared in a puff of hushed-up scandal when they are no longer useful or can't keep a lid on their appetites.
It's ridiculous that this isn't discussed in the education system. Even if it isn't intentional (it is) at some level stupidity becomes indistinguishable from malice.
I used to know a couple former state senators who played key roles in getting a prominent state senator of the opposite party convicted for corruption. They immediately lost support of their own party and were voted out. One of them was badly frightened in the process and dropped out of the public eye entirely.
They had a lot to say about the workings of our legislature, including that the conflict between parties was largely a sham, and that if you wanted to stay in office, you participated in the quiet deals by which they all divided up the spoils.
The system has nothing to do with it. It is the people.
In France there is a lot of corrupted mayors, even in small villages/cities, it's hard to limit make the power less concentrated, you need accountability and making harder to be corrupted without being caught immediatly.
As an idea, sure - it’s lovely; but, if enacted, I don’t see how it doesn’t lead to something akin to feudalism. I’d even go so far as to suggest that it has the feeling of an ideological strategy by the already powerful to get the average person to ‘unilaterally disarm’ their own collective power. I’d love to be proved wrong, of course.
Wealthy people are just people - and there are many people who are not wealthy who are incredibly corrupt and more willing to take on the corruption risk. However it's much more convenient to paint wealthy people as the problem with the system then ascribe the problem to human nature as a whole or systemic problem.
But to your point, it takes two to tango, the person paying for the corruption and the person carrying out the corruption. I think the OP's point is the wealthy are the ones paying for it and asking for the deeds to be done.
Having said that, there are other types of corruption like CYA coverups we see in the news from police departments and justice systems. The Breonna Taylor grand jury result comes to mind.
Exactly yes. "Peasant's" just don't have enough money to meaningfully bribe someone.
> With the current salary, if they work honestly, they can't even afford a house for 15 years.
Wow, that seems like a nice place to live. I built a house (started in 2019, finished this year) with credit for 30 years, but I earn about twice the average in my country. Building it was the cheaper option, it was projected to be worth 50% more after building, now it's worth twice more.
> However it's much more convenient to paint wealthy people as the problem with the system then ascribe the problem to human nature as a whole or systemic problem.
Poor people don't have means to corrupt others, that's why corruption is typically coming from wealthy people.
Lets look at getting a driver's license in Brazil. It's widely known you can pay to pass your test, and driving instructors near ubiquitously act as middlemen. I know many people who have admitted to paying. They are not rich.
There are many stories I've heard over the years of minor corruptions like this. Paying off cops to ignore irregular documentation, paying off an official to get ahead in line ... this is absolutely beyond rich vs poor.
How can you hold responsible people who have no economic freedom?
Any policeman in a third-world country taking a random 10 dollars equivalent on the street from a random street vendor would disagree. Just because that kind of corruption hardly is world-changing does not mean it doesn't happen - I'd even wager that most global corruption is small-scale, low-amount by relatively poor people towards relatively low-ranking officials.
I think you are talking in very broad brushes with terms like wealthy and poor people. I will say that across the distribution of wealth corruption happens at all levels. I am not disagreeing that some wealthy people are corrupt but your notion that they are the only corrupt people is ridiculous.
Positions of power will attract people who are willing to be corrupted. Is a very important motivator for politicians.
Being rich is the end result, not the starting point. The starting point is a poor society but with valuable points of power which are not privately owned.
However many government officials have incredible amounts of power but little wealth. Look at any communist party officials over the history of time you will see incredibly levels of corruptions without any wealth AND they aren't doing corrupt work for other people, they are doing it for their own benefit (To refute your idea that some wealthy person is behind their corruption).
If "corrupt" means "willing to cheat", then obviously that is not limited to the rich. If "corrupt" means "willing to abuse power bestowed on them by society", then it is literally impossible for the poor and disenfranchised, whom society has given nothing, to be corrupt, because they cannot abuse what they do not have.
People of all social classes participate in corruption, and have to do so, to survive. It is only those who have power who can be said to be abusing power, and when we talk about corruption, we're generally talking not about all bad human behaviors, but more specifically about the corrosion of institutions and social trust that occurs when those in charge use their positions toward unjust ends.
Since when it doesn't?!
> If "corrupt" means "willing to abuse power bestowed on them by society"
You've just described any public administration: not rich (working on it thought) but corrupted to the bone.
Wealth is extremely important to the conversation, because corruption comes from individuals and corporations leveraging their wealth to influence politics outside of the democratic process.
We can try to design systems that prevent people who want to throw money at politicians from getting their way, but they will still be trying to do so.
Yes it’s systemic. Wealthy people aren’t mustache-twirling evil for wanting to leverage their wealth. They are making the most logical decision from their position.
But if the system continues concentrating more wealth among a smaller subset of the population, without putting up increasing safeguards against its influence, then corruption over democracy seems to be the natural systemic outcome.
Saying that there are some non-wealthy people who are also horrible, something we already know, is classic what-aboutism.
People who thrive in managerial hierarchies (private sector bureaucracies) tend not to be the best among us. Rather, they tend to be the cancer cells of the human species. They are individually fit at the expense of the organism, and while we might hope for a future in which the matter is different, right now the best tools we have to deal with them (e.g., chemotherapy, radiation) are blunt, destructive, and unfortunately quite brutal.
The value they add to our society and lives is tremendous and calling them "cancer" only shows your bias and lack of rationality.
--Your boss
I hope someone is paying you handsomely to post pro-corporate cappie nonsense here, because if you're doing it for free, that's just sad.
For a serious response to what you said about modern medicine and the role of corporations in it... technological growth is possible under socialist as well as capitalist systems. It wasn't clear until the 1980s who was ahead and, on that, the reason the US "won" the Cold War (although we really didn't; we just lost less) is not that capitalism is superior--to be clear, the USSR was also deeply flawed, and Stalin was a paranoid butcher for whose actions there is no excuse--but that capitalism was a sea empire and the USSR was a land empire, and modern conflict is unfavorable to land empires. That's it.
Land empires have to integrate people. Sea empires can point their cannons and say, "Give me money or die." The USSR had to integrate hundreds of different ethnicities. Capitalism just had to overthrow a few democratically-elected socialists and install dictators (see: Salvador and Allende). Capitalism was playing on easy mode; the USSR was playing on hard mode, and eventually fell after a severe mistake (Afghanistan) led to extreme internal dissent and resurgent nationalism.
Had it been the other way around--a capitalist land empire against a socialist sea empire--it would have been the socialists who were wealthy enough to build modern medicine.
>>"The correlation between material success and human decency is negative and this needs to be known" - Again this a myth that permeates society since the beginning days and sounds like you are targeting a population.
>>"one of the most important cultural battles in this war with Capital" - War with the capital? Nobody is at war with the capital except the fringe right who have already shown their inability to understand the complexity of US institutions and how the world works except through violence to serve their own needs.
>>"People who thrive in managerial hierarchies (private sector bureaucracies) tend not to be the best among us. Rather, they tend to be the cancer cells of the human species." - I am seriously concerned about your well-being.
It sounds like you are trying to make a call to violence based on some incredibly fringe thoughts.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you said, but it sounds like you interpreted "Capital" in their sentence as "the government" (or maybe "capitol" as in the building?). I'm pretty sure they meant capital as in "capitalism".
Truly powerfully wealthy people are a small group, globally. They are just people in the sense that they eat and shit and love their moms like everyone else, yes.
But in their ability to shape the world around them they have much more capacity than almost everyone else. That is the topic here, and in that sense they are not "just normal people."
It's saying that people being rich is the problem. Having a desirable fungible thing means the ability to trade that desirable thing for favors. Being able to accumulate more of that thing means an unfair ability to do that. And that's corruption.
People see that rich people are getting ahead by corruption, so they emulate them and that is their rationale for breaking the rules.
At least in my experience, the local level politicians are more likely to be corrupt. Like city planners, district attorneys, etc. Their pay is lower so they are more likely to look for ways to make extra money. Or they might be doing improper things not for money, but for ideology/power (ie they might have joined despite the lower pay to make a difference, but they think they are doing the right thing even if breaking the rules). Like magistrates ignoring the law to rule against someone, or police and the DA holding a known incorrect charge against someone. Etc
Just wanted to point out that it's not all rich people, that many times it starts out as normal or poor people who want what they never had, and to never return to being poor. Although, those people may be more likely to bebecome rich since they're playing outside the system, not paying taxes, etc.
Where I live, the planners are widely considered to have been corrupt for decades. Planners are ordinary, medium-salary bureaucrats, dealing with hugely-valuable property and hugely-wealthy businessmen. Once the rot has set in, it seems to be really hard to remove it.
Once anti-corruption institutions put in-place to investigate and prosecute corruption themselves become corrupted, then the system will rapidly degrade to cover up the favored de facto political power corruption. Depending on the system in place, this can occur either top-down or bottom-up. In the US, it appears to be occurring top-down.
Political party loyalism always leads to corruption, which is why it's absolutely critical to have a multiple party system with strong de jure political powers to keep the de facto political power in-check. There are numerous historical accounts depicting what happens when you do not. In the US, both parties should be split up and serve as more representative components to their constituencies, and to keep each other in balance more so than what's transpiring today.
If your boss is a crook, then he's not going to mind if you're crooked too. In fact he'd prefer it - he won't want goody two-shoes as his subordinate, and having the dirt on you will enable him to control you. And so on, down the stack of turtles. A clean policeman in a corrupt department, refusing to take the payola, runs the risk of getting no backup when he's in trouble.
Author notes that corruption in an army results in the hollowing-out of that army - equipment, men and supplies that are recorded on the books are fictional. But entire societies get hollowed-out; this is why corruption ought to be stomped on early and hard.
Unfortunately, a fish starts rotting at the head. Who's to do the stomping, if the chief is a crook?
Morale and corruption are kind of opposite elements used to form a society, "self"-imposed gates between the direct personal interest and the society-wide interest as also a personal long-term interest.
Issues arise because most do not really "master the society they live in" so they can't know implications deeply enough to decide and other who master the society enough can abuse those who don't for their own sake.
My view is: culture shape the history, the more culture the more just society so the less corruption. The more corrupted society means less culture, less justice, something unstable that can made few rich an many poor BUT not only rich the skilled and poor the less skilled, in a far more unbalanced, casual and bad for evolution manner.
On the contrary, it could be easily implemented on people not in power to prevent uprising.
To prevent corruption, you to change society.
To effect change, you need power.
Power corrupts.The developed Western countries have been very successful in stamping out street level corruption (most Americans are not used to bribing a cop if they get pulled over, for example), but they have turned a blind eye to corruption at higher levels. The general population in these countries are left with an impression that corruption either doesn't exist in their country, or that it is quite rare and limited. A cursory review of the state of international banks' performance in "enforcing" anti-money laundering laws, or the recent bribery record of Western insurance, energy, mining, and civil engineering companies should give pause to any thoughtful observer. Indeed, the rich, Western world's form of corruption seems far more insidious and far reaching than the stories of street level corruption in places like Afghanistan or Ukraine.
The article claims this is complicity in the Supreme Court, but I’m not so sure. Cases of corruption since that verdict have been interesting:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4...
It is not because other nations, like Russia, would not like to be more corrupt; they just don't move enough money to compete. China is the only serious rival to the title, and is openly organized for corruption, first and foremost, where the US still pretends.
If we want to become less corrupt, it will be a long and hard road. But thus far we, instead, elected an out-and-out grifter to the Presidency, and then held our noses and elected the father of another to replace him. So, it will take a change of direction we seem not to want.
Too many think they have a chance to get on the gravy train, and would hate for it to stop while still have the chance.
https://infogram.com/mirror-mirror-2021-exhibit-3-1h7k230dkl...
On another note its also important to point out that culture also plays a role, certain well off cultures you have corruption in the form of lavish events or gifts or some cases where it's in the gray area (like say you rub my back I rub yours).
Corruption is overwhelmingly an easy scapegoat you can gesture towards and have people agree with you without much effort. If we think there's something that is corruption that isn't covered by the legal code we can agree on what that is and push for it in the legal system. If we think our executives aren't enforcing our legal code we are the ones who elect them. If the problem is that no one cares enough to make the "right" decisions then whining about elites isn't going to do anything.
1. ...healthcare
2. ...who gets a bank account, what money gets spent on
3. ...which countries to invade
4. ...a lot of other stuff
I respect the position because I have no choice but how an entity that schizophrenic, over-stretched with responsibilities and mad with power is supposed to resist corruption I do not see. It is going to be a moral and administrative cesspit.
The problem is that "we simply need to make the government good" is not realistic. That's the single biggest reason people want limited government.
There have to be limits on the government's power, whether they come from the constitution, the country's legal system, or the traditional culture and character of the people.
It's easy enough to justify this by looking at the opposite end of the spectrum: are there any examples of small government that have succeeded other than by presiding over only very few resources? I'm having even more trouble thinking of any than thinking of examples of successful large government.
This notion is not lost on those who are arguing the Federal government should be smaller.
The countries seen as least corrupt by their citizens all have what you would call "large governments".
And the Americans have very transparent politics compared to the EU. I expect the situation there is a lot more civilised in how much they advertise what is really going on. Nobody has come up with the philosophical tools that are needed for a public to assess how corrupt the government is and respond to it.
Particularly when the competition is somewhere like Denmark/Finland/New Zealand in slot one. I mean, sure. 6 million people is a mid-tier US state. There are probably some cracking good local councils out there too. The scale isn't impressive as far as 8 billion humans reckon it. If we want to break the world up into >1,000 countries with independent governments I'd consider that a step in the right direction for small government and cracking down on corruption.
The government is the one hierarchy so far that we have figured how to democratize.
Corporations are also corrupt and are always autocratic.
Not much precedence to go by in the history of mankind on that, specifically.
Just wondering.
Addendum: and if there are two opposed ideologues, there can be no peace and tranquility.
So if you don't want ideologues coming to power, don't tolerate corruption.
Corrupt capture of political and economic institutions and the culture at large is not a historical constant. Victims have reversed it by penalising perpetrators and enacting systemic reforms. Or by establishing new forms of government.
We don't have to accept the status quo. We don't have to keep letting foreign criminals who don't even live here (for any value of "here", since this is a global problem) buy our real estate. We can take that shit back. "Property rights" were not invented by God. People made them up and people can unmake them if there are good reasons to do so.
But corrupt networks are resilient. When challenged – and even after suffering such blows as the fall of a government or the prosecution of leading members – they usually succeed in maintaining or reinstating the corrupt system.
That's what terrifies me. Look at how quickly the worst people in the Soviet bureaucracies turned into cappie criminal thugs--and, in Putin's regime--murderers. "Communist" systems (the USSR never claimed to have achieved communism; the cappies started calling an extremely flawed country "communist" to discredit the idea rather than the implementation) had more than a few bad leaders, but capitalist systems have only bad leaders, and we pay a lot more for this shitty "leadership".
All systems conceived by man so far are deeply flawed and libertarianism-like systems have some pretty horrendous blindspots, if you ask me.
You need cooperation at a society level in order to tackle many externalities and existential issues, and that requires people organically coming together (won't happen) or some overarching entity with some sort of stick and good intentions or maybe something else, just not sure what.
This superficial worldview caused horrible errors in American foreign policy decisions. The US gave up Chinese government during China’s civil war, so let the communists took over. Did the same thing in Vietnam. Similarly in Iraq and Afghanistan and many other places, given up the government and let terrorists took the country.
All because the corruptions in their governments. The fact is that those governments were deemed to be corrupted no matter who is in charge. You cannot just command them out of corruptions. So instead of living with the imperfect reality of the historical and cultural context, we choose to let the worst to take over so that we can close eyes and make nice postures.
"Western" administrations keep corruption under control through education and culture. Non-western administrations have often included corruption in their culture.
Private property and free markets quickly root out any corruption.