Bribery is largely subject to circumstance: study
english.elpais.com
english.elpais.com
Relatedly, such people are more likely to steal money from a government they see as evil/corrupt, than a government they see as good. This probably drives a large part of the "contextual" corruption effect the article discusses, where a non-corrupt individual starts working for a corrupt government and suddenly becomes corrupt.
It's always said something to me that most people who wouldn't dream of making a profit selling something to a member of their family will spend all day trying to profit off of strangers.
It may just be a matter of proximity, with a instinctual heuristic of shared interests. Rather than people making a division of governments between "good" and "evil", it's more like a government that's with me or against me. I don't want to hurt what's helping me. Which honestly takes it completely out of the range of morality, and back into realpolitik and pragmatism.
So calling them a thief is almost always purely self serving nonsense.
If the baseline is a complete lack of social organization, yes. But that's a terrible baseline. You compare governments to other potential governments, not to anarchy. That would be like calling eating six ounces of oatmeal per day a massive net surplus to starving to death; of course it is, but that's the easiest curve in the world.
And the fact that you can only have one government at a time means that your current one is blocking all of the others.
Fair but it’s such a massive difference there’s steps up the ladder which are still worse.
I’d still be careful when suggesting anything but success is theft, because as you say internal transitions are risky. Migration however has improved the living standards of billions throughout history.
Meanwhile just about anywhere today is still better for the average person than living in say medieval Europe or antiquity etc. Falling birth rates provide a significant opportunity for improvement. China isn’t a great place to live, but it’s also now the 2nd most populous country.
The point of the argument isn’t, or doesn’t have to be, technicality (“bad governance constitutes theft”) but a statement about what one believes the people deserve. Implicit in the argument is a belief in a social contract being voided by one party, wherein the government makes lacking effort to provide “the best possible governance” and the people respond with disobedience. I’d personally disagree with the notion of a social contract, and argue only from the idea that an alteration to the government could produce better outcomes, but that argument would produce the same sentiment as the one they’re expressing, so in what way would you disagree with their sentiment?
I disagree with the idea that ‘poor performance’ rather than ‘negative performance’ gives someone extra authority. Voiding the social contract by leaving is one thing, but “disobedience” is something else.
Anyone can disagree with how a government functions, but individuals who dislike something don’t inherently know how to build a better system. Even non violent means like tax evasion, protests, and voter suppression have real downsides. When people act with the assumption of authority they often result in serious negative consequences and only very rarely cause actual improvement.
Taken to the extreme the idea even supports wars of conquest. If your government is even mildly better than another why not ‘improve’ the situation.
PS: Which isn’t to say operating within a given system is useless. Convincing others, be that voters or a dictator, can also enact change with less risk. But again well supported arguments are safer than simply persuasive ones, because you can more easily adapt to changing conditions.
For example today we have more options, but in the mid 90’s the US environmentalists arguing for nuclear power could have been a meaningful contribution to climate change potentially offsetting ~10 billion tons of CO2 by now. That’s the kind of politics makes strange bedfellows compromise which you don’t see when everyone is throwing around emotionally charged rhetoric. Which sums up my argument, the perfect ideal is often the enemy of the practical.
Given that brain enhancement is a while away, it’s gonna be a while before most people are able to weigh the nuanced ripple effects of their actions in order to optimally resist bad leadership, or be able to see the impracticality of otherwise good ideas; these are difficult mental feats that require a lot of self reflection. I wouldn’t then suggest that these people do nothing. I’d suggest that they represent, in essence, a productive force to be taken up and wielded against the subject of their discontent by similarly motivated, but intelligent, leadership.
Its the same concept with environmentalism. You can’t expect Joe Environment to be smart enough and critical enough to reason his way around the panic-inducing coverage of nuclear scares, but maybe you can harness his frustration with environmental as a source of political power.
I don’t think we’re going to agree though; I think we’re motivated differently. I don’t really find myself enticed by social order in the same way, and I’d trade away much of that stability to get a good shot at change that could make society more pleasant.
I don’t expect random environmentalist to have a well reasoned stance, but holding activist groups to a higher standard feels reasonable to me. I get just as pissed when nuclear advocates conflate the cost of uranium ore as fuel cost when reactors are using vastly more expensive enriched uranium fuel rods. (Possibly because the fuel bit works.)
> I’d trade away much of that stability to get a good shot at change that could make society more pleasant.
I used to feel that way, but the more I learned about how the world works the more I understood just how delicate these systems are. Gerrymandering isn’t just a free way to political power, it erodes people’s trust in democracy. Elections dependent on swing states and us vs them ideology fed by Ecco chambers isn’t heading to a healthy place. At the other end, the amount of havoc just a single person damaging fuel pipelines and electrical transmission infrastructure could cause is shocking.
Now imagine a few thousand motivated people intelligently trying to damage the US.
You’re also assuming that change only happens in small steps, which would trap you in a local maxima, but what about a revolution? That’s more like a giant leap, potentially in the wrong direction, but it might be worth the risk if the local maxima sucks enough.
People deserve: sugar, fat, an uninterruptible TV programm, constant surveillance (it it for your safety, for your children), apps or streaming apps so their brain never stops to think. /s
An especially corrupt government might be a net surplus compared to anarchy, yet simultaneously a significant net loss compared to a more typical government.
Put another way, the government is failing to give its citizens what it owes them. By analogy, suppose your employer pays you half the wage they agreed to pay. That’s still a form of theft, even if you are still at a surplus compared to the alternative of being unemployed.
A restaurant consistently providing bad food isn’t theft, it’s just a poor place to go. I have a great deal of sympathy for people living in areas captured by Russia or locked into North Korea etc, but in general it’s decades to generations of poor performance at this point.
> Define “net”.
All personal costs vs all personal benefits. Militaries and public roads etc may be basic functions of government but someone needs to pay for them and your personal contribution isn’t enough to completely cover such expenses.
If you look at the criticisms section of your linked page, you'll also see why social contract theory is more popular in high-school than it is with actual philosophers (most of whom think it's wrong).
Personally though, at some point theoretical vs practical takes precedence yeah. Or are we going to start going around ‘fixing’ everyone else’s political systems? Because historically, that hasn’t exactly helped has it?
According to the government he did NOT commit theft.
He was instead “convicted in federal court on two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy.”
Someone could take an underperforming investment to Vegas, happen to double the investment and return. However if they are using your money then you are taking more risk in that scenario than you’re expecting. Literally going to Vegas isn’t required, the same risk exists in many short term investments. Thus misrepresenting risk is considered fraud even if it happened to work out.
Guarding one house in a lawless environment takes less total manpower than guarding a town but not on a per property basis. Enforcing law and order in a country is even more efficient.
Economies of scale are a facet of capitalism.
If you rob me but then give me back twice as much, the only way this action is not unfair to someone else is if it has the effect of undoing a robbery. I e the surplus I received in the end is actually restitution. Furthermore, it was taken back from the correctly identified robbers.
That's how your Bolsheviks and Leninists justified their ideas and actions: monarchs and capitalists are just parasites who have taken from the people, so if you take it away from them, it's just restitution.
Animal flocking behavior exists from what amounts to economies of scale. Each animal can spend less effort watching their surroundings when there exists a large group with similar motivations.
> the only way this action is not unfair to someone else is if it has the effect of undoing a robbery
The benefit of a road network grows with the total size of a road network and can therefore quickly exceed the cost of creating and maintaining it. That’s a surplus which has nothing to do with moving money from individual A to individual B. It’s a surplus derived from scale not the efficiency of construing individual segments of road.
I'm a European currently living in Mexico and this has always been obvious.
> "If you put people in the right environment, with the right institutions, you can reduce corruption substantially, possibly because they quickly adapt to what’s going on in their environment".
The way you seem to be using the word "cultural" here and in your other comments seems to be to imply that corruption is, in some sense, "inbuilt" into certain people, based on their "culture", and not into others. I.e., Mexicans are inherently more corrupt, and Europeans inherently less corrupt. By their nature. Is that an accurate reading of what you're saying?
If it is, then the actual point of the article quite violently contradicts your view. If corruption were some inherent aspect of people's "being", based on their "culture", then changing governments or institutions would surely make no difference whatsoever to corruption levels, right? Their true nature would just continue, unperturbed, as prone to corruption as ever.
The article says clearly and repeatedly - as in the quotes I share above - that this isn't the reality of what happens.
Put differently, you could say that corruption is "cultural", if by "cultural" you meant specifically that it is dependent on one's environment, and isn't whatsoever inherent in a person's "nature".
You seem to be saying the opposite, though, and still claiming the article confirms that? Puzzling.
Not at all.
> I.e., Mexicans are inherently more corrupt, and Europeans inherently less corrupt. By their nature.
Not sure what you mean "by their nature" but it sounds like you're saying it's about genetics which is definitely NOT what I'm saying.
Culture is a context. It's not biological, it's artificial.
Europe has a different cultural context than Mexico. Mexicans in Europe will behave differently than in Mexico (and vice versa) which is what the experiment mentioned in the OP showed.
As to why this is... maybe the fact that Mexico has +95% rate of impunity might be a factor (sarcasm).
https://www.impunidadcero.org/impunidad-en-mexico/ (in Spanish)
In Mexico it's blatant and it's everywhere. In Europe most people would never think of bribing a police man to escape a fine while in Mexico a mordida is business as usual. There are police men whose only job is to get money from all the people they stop.
Here's an anecdote from my early years in Mexico. You have to check your car once or twice ever year to get like a govt sticker otherwise the car cannot be used in some places. Well sometimes the queues to do this process are extremely long. I've seen first hand someone from the verification center going to every car in the queue and asking "with jump or without jump?". Meaning, if you want to jump in front of the queue you have to "pay extra".
All of this shouldn't be a surprise.
> In Europe most people would never think of bribing a police man
I would say that lack of petty corruption doesn't exclude big scale corruption which is very much alive in Europe.
Backdealing, lobbying, money laundering. I don't rememeber Mexican banks laundering hundreds of bilions etc. Mexican car manufactures cheating for years on car emissions.
These things are reserved for European countries from top of most transparent countries list (Hello Denmark, Hello Germany).. We just keep forgetting. And we are conditioned by propaganda to look down on other cultures.
Stoping petty officers from accepting bribes is just European establishment's way of "Don't steal - your goverment hates competition".
EU politicians caught backdealing are being prosecuted. Bank money laundering wasn't done by the government's banks. Car emissions cheating also wasn't the government.
Bribing police is government corruption.
This happens on plenty of public offices (probably most). You need some permit to build something? You either pay or wait for years to get it, if ever.
> I built a manufacturing shop in Mexico, the area isn't zoned yet. This should tell you all you need to know, if any government official can find a way to get a "mordida" they will. I spent almost 10 grand in just bribes to get all the proper permits. If you get pulled over by the police, you're paying a bribe. A neighbor of mine had a pistol in his car. He paid almost 2 grand in a bribe to get released.
https://www.reddit.com/r/asklatinamerica/comments/1gpznln/ho...
Amusingly, I bet it also scales based on apparent wealth/income, so is a type of [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine].
It erodes trust in institutions, encourages the breaking of other rules and generally keeps poor countries poor, especially when it comes to foreign investment.
Maybe in 50 years Mexicans will be honest and Europeans will be corrupt. I don't think anyone honestly thinks that corruption is inherent to anyone's genetics.
But today? It's simply the case.
Culture.
Do they have like shops where someone live fries the tortilla chips in front of you? Like authentic Totopos, not whatever Chipotle serves.
Do they dry the corn tortillas out first then fry them? Are the corn tortillas for Totopos extra thin?
Thank you Pier25.
You can make them at home if you have access to fresh tortillas from a tortillería.
Racism? Selfishness for the group. Religious bigotry? Selfishness for the group. Misogyny? Need I say? Corruption? Selfishness for one's personal gain at the expense of the system, itself.
Goodness? Virtue? Honor? Positive cultural evolution? Selflessness in service to the whole.
That is why the world has been tending towards the negative for soooo long. We have been inculcated into belief systems that separate us from each other along some boundary, be it cultural, racial, religious, gender identification, sexual preference, country, neighborhood, ... whatever.
We are all one human race, of many ethnicities and cultures, but we will only begin to heal our blessed Earth and end all conflict, by recognizing that we are the only creatures capable of self-evolving a world culture of universal care.
The goal must be universal compassion towards one another, selflessly, except when such kind, selfless behavior would contradict the paradox of tolerance. In those instances, we must be unyielding, but as gentle as good outcomes allow. Only a compassionate society can know how and when to prosecute the vermin among us, who come from all walks of life. We must endeavor to teach the ignorant, while protecting the innocent.
Just systems of law, enforced fairly, are the bedrock of such a society.
I went to that wikipedia article you link there to see if that gets a mention, and the "Criticism" section is ginormous. So I'm not going to go out on a limb and say you shouldn't be recommending it at all, but I will say that based on the very large number of serious scholars who were apparently upset enough about many of the claims of the book that they then went on to write long serious things criticising it, perhaps in light of that you should reconsider whether it's as "data-backed" as you thought.
It could have crap data, or good data poorly interpreted. The many critics seem to think both.
In typical Graeber fashion, the book is very fun to read, but he's an unreliable narrator of history, which is why they could only get a no name historian to be involved in an attempt to add credibility.
And FWIW, I'm also very skeptical of Pinker.
I have read one long criticism of The Dawn of Everything, I don't know if it's the one you're referring to, but I didn't find it very compelling.
I've read several critics of Graeber otherwise though, and to me they roughly seemed to amount to: "we don't like what this person is saying." I mean, I could not find anything substantive in there, some direct, blatant issue with the scholarly work. Perhaps there's a tendency to get "over-excited" about some idea or other in his work, but I think readers (academic and laypeople) could consider forgiving someone for presenting their work with sincere excitement.
The comment about David Wengrow you make there is especially odd - for one, you make it sound like he was thrown in to the project as an afterthought to add some clout, which is factually not what happened, they collaborated for years in emails for what was originally a small project, which grew larger organically in a sort of growing excitement.
I wouldn't be big on bandying about academic records as proof of anything much, but he'd twenty plus years professional academic experience as an archaeologist, three books, a suitably voluminous number of essays and papers, etc etc. The usual "impressive academic" things had been done. So I don't get your dig there at all.
Here, for the brave of heart:
Proving that humanity was better at some specific era in history is a very tall order. Discrediting one claim does not credit any other.
For instance, they take the upheavals at Teotihuacan as evidence that there was some kind of anarchist-ish revolution going on, when most scholarship believes that it's more likely an oligarchic system (with less emphasis on the monarch) who destroyed (from my memory) the temple/cult/district of the Feathered Serpent - a sub-group of their oligarchy.
This is interesting, but is pretty consistent with how other Mesoamerican ruling classes selected their rulers (Aztecs, etc.) ie there was often an oligarchy who picked them, not the populous as a whole via an anarchist / direct democratic method.
For Wengrow, I assume him working with the far-more-famous Graeber probably led to him to have some flexible interpretations of history, and I bet Graeber was pretty convincing + had a high power differential (implicitly) which could lead this to happen somewhat unknowingly.
If your brother killed someone, would you turn him over to the authorities? You can't answer this question by checking how selfish someone is - both options can be considered selfless acts.
If I remember correctly (can't find a source), places that answer yes to that question tend to have higher trust in institutions and lower rates of corruption
Corruption is selfish gain. If one eschews corruption because they realize that it harms the society-at-large, then they are acting selflessly. If one eschews corruption because they're afraid of being caught and punished, then the legal system has prevented societal harm, by preventing corrupt selfishness by a public servant.
As to your hypothetical, I like my friend from Lousiana's saying, "If my aunt had a d*k, she'd be my uncle." Of course, in 2024, that saying is looking a bit ragged.
That said, extreme hypotheticals are not going to get to the bottom of this issue of corruption. It's the ordinary, everyday corruption that erodes society, not having to turn one's brother over to the authorities for murder. And ordinary, everyday corruption is both selfishness, pure and simple, and a failure of society to emplace the necessary checks to prevent it.
"Trust the universe, but tie your donkey."
"If my grandma had wheels, she would be a bike"
Or selfishly + long-term. Especially if you include your family's offspring in your "self", which is a phenomenon we call "love".
But most people misunderstand love as merely the feeling one has about another person or creature.
Love's highest manifestation is, however, an action that serves another person's happiness. It can be something that lessens a person misery or discomfort, or actually makes them happier in some way. It can be as simple as a warm smile on the street or giving something to them. Intention is important, and how it is received is irrelevant. The universe is sublime, and there is no end to our learning, if we so endeavor to plumb its depths.
Every human being's life is the result of such selflessly compassionate service, for, as infants, we must be given everything or we perish. For years. There is nothing tangible received for that giving, unless one understands how very tangible inner peace and happiness is. Understanding our place in this moral universe makes such happiness the only thing that matters, to those of us who actually understand. Know that no one is forced to comprehend or accept this most sublime of laws, just as there are flat-earth folks, too, who refuse to look through a telescope. We all have the choice to be as foolish (and unhappy) as we wish.
All evidence I've seen in the world is tending better. There are, and always have been concerning signs, but overall things have been getting better. But everyone places more emphasis on the concerning signs and doesn't really think of all the things that have gotten better.
The amount of energy we spend on irrelevant stuff like the stock market & AI should instead be directed toward dealing with climate change, and not turning our oceans into lifeless garbage dumps. But our economical model can only handle things that make more money for rich people, so we won't.
The stock market is a good idea. Without it you wouldn't have most things you think are a good idea, nor probably half the things you think are a scandal because not everyone has them.
> But our economical model can only handle things that make more money for rich people, so we won't.
No, it handles all sorts of things.
But also things like suicides are up in certain demographics, expected life span is down, nutrition in vegetables are trending down.
Those "small" gains are absolutely important, and are essential for our next societal level-up, but the corruption-in-the-large is an order-of-magnitude (or two) more physically destructive. I mean, look how many fools look up to Elmo and his cohort of kleptocrats. And look how the fossil-fuel industry buried the truth of global heating.
That's why I believe that RATM's self-titled debut album is the most important album of the 20th Century. And while I understand rage to be purely destructive, I firmly believe there's a time for righteous anger, especially in the face of oppression and wanton destruction.
It would be nice if we could make some progress on this front for a change.
PS: your closing sentence severely rubs me the wrong way because it feels like it could be interpreted as support for the status quo.
So, Sir, I stand with Banksy, Bob Marley, MLK, RATM and other like-minded agents of change. But I understand that love is the only way to forge a better future for our Earth and ALL her peoples -- but a fierce, unyielding love, to be sure.
We mostly pay lip service to these things, but if you look around the world at things that get done (what you refer to!), there's a lot more than lip service and nice sentiments/intentions involved.
Is the world what we make it?
It depends on what you mean by that. We can choose how we perceive the objective reality we live in. But, the totality of the world is really just the sum-total of results of what we are all doing to it, for the simple reason that all our free wills are equal, no matter how positive or negative. It is really that simple, but the wealthy and powerful move levers that affect far more people than I can (yet) move by myself.
> but are there some potential flaws in the analysis?
If there are flaws in my analysis, I am open to learning how to correct them. That is the only way to get better at anything, right? That said, the correctness of my foundation of logic is evident after more than a half-century on this Earth. Most people do not understand, but we physically manifest our cumulative karma as we age, from our tone of voice, to choice of words, to eye shine, and -- most of all -- to our inner peace and happiness, sense of humor and delight in the small things of life. Life is beautiful, and what we choose to manifest in this world shows up in our being as surely as a tree's experiences show up in their rings. The problem is that most people are too confused and mired in their self to learn how to see others for who they are.
> there's a lot more than lip service and nice sentiments/intentions involved.
Absolutely, but intention is a multiplier for the karma we receive for our actions, which are of paramount importance. That is why the feeling of love is not nearly as important as the selfless doing of compassionate deeds to serve others' happiness.
One thing you should be certain to understand: the selfish fools of this world have always been the majority, and not just within extrema such as Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. Their dominant ignorance and my relative powerlessness do not diminish my family's efforts to create positive change in our every interaction with our fellow human beings. That our efforts mostly fall on deaf ears is not our failure, but theirs and theirs alone.
What we are doing is not sentiment, whether it is a kind word on the street or a couple of hours typing into HN. Teaching the truth of compassion is essential in this troubled world full of willfully ignorant human beings.
The nature of human life is, however, that we feel good for making others feel good, and vice versa. We truly reap what we sow, but it is sublime and at odds with what most people value in life, namely wealth, pleasure, and power. And, along with our power to choose, we can choose to ignore our conscience's pleadings for better behavior.
So, in an odd (but accurate) way, making others happy is the most selfish thing we can do, because it is the only way to earn happiness, which is a mysterious flowing into ourselves from parts unknown.
We live in a subtly reflexive, karmic universe. Only we human beings inhabit this plane of existence, because only we have the choice between selfishness and selflessness, with a conscience to orient ourselves, and a mind to evaluate the potentialities of every move we make. And we are each absolutely free to value the horrific (vice-eous) and eschew the virtuous.
WWII is a deep example of how societies can go so completely wrong, and yet be so confident in their intentions and self-destructive actions. It is also an example of other folks uniting to do good in the world. Both paths are totally human; the question is which path do each of us choose, and by which moral ethic?
In the aggregate yes, but the distribution is very unjust.
That is why I counsel that it is best to just do good as often as possible, but without any connection to reward. Let the universe reward you in its time and place; it knows best, always. Simply send out your deeds' good vibes; they will return. Every time. And, all the while, one's internal peace and happiness will only grow.
[Also, William Gibson is by far my favorite fiction author. "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed."]
"Selflessness" is itself selfishness. You act good, virtuous, honorable, etc to selfishly attain societal praise or esteem. Or even rewards in the afterlife.
> The goal must be universal compassion towards one another, selflessly
Not selflessly. Selfishly. After all, kant's categorical imperative is logically selfish. You would benefit from the realization of such a goal. Everyone would.
It's perceived selfishness that drives people toward good or evil. It's actually selfishness itself that defines good and evil.
In game theory, games have global optima and Nash equilibria, and they don't always coincide. Selfless people seek global maximum, selfish people seek Nash equilibrum (maximizing their gain given the others also maximize their gain).
As a society, we have choice to change the rules so that global maximum coincides with Nash equilibrium.
When a person causes negativity/unhappiness, the person(s) on the receiving end gets an equal positive amount of karma. Karma is what determines our long-term happiness or lack thereof.
When a person does something intended to cause positivity/happiness, there is no negative effect on the receiver, even if they refuse the gesture.
In other words, acts of selfish negativity incur a zero-sum negative karmic effect, every time, without fail, though often without being observed at the time (or even, ever). OTOH, acts of selfless positivity only incur positive internal karmic effect for the doer; nothing is lost by the receiver.
In yet more other words, we can only receive negative karma from our own actions; others' actions can only result in positive karma for ourselves (if we are on the receiving end of selfishly negativity). For example, a poor person loses no karma from accepting charity, though the giver definitely gains.
As such, karma is skewed asymmetrically towards easier positive creation; i.e. it's only a zero-sum game when the first choice is negative/selfish.
Why, then, have the world's populations not yet created a "Heaven on Earth"? Because we human beings are also free to ignore all notions of karma and the associated question of why we are happy/unhappy. If a person chooses to believe that they are just amoral animals competing for scarce resources, then they are fully authorized to live their lives that way. We are also free to believe that the Earth is flat. The universe is the sole arbiter of the truth, however, and we all reap what we sow. Every time, without fail, with perfect justice, however difficult it is for us to comprehend at any given time, given our state of moral undevelopment.
A newborn can have a chronic disease that makes their life terribly difficult. Do you think negative karma caused that? Or can other things cause unhappiness?
Some people have been given greater challenges than others. Any difficulty given by the universe itself only counts positively for us, but we have to use it properly; i.e. we can't let it give us an excuse to be an ahole.
On the other end of the spectrum, most people feel that being born into wealth would be a great blessing, but look how those fools behave, wasting their blessings on themselves for meaningless pleasures that deplete the Earth, being callous in their treatment of those less fortunate, and generally working with their fellows to keep themselves on the top of the heap.
Being striken with disease is an effective way to go within oneself and connect with the Source of all creation, which is an essential part of the intent of the creation of our human nature. One way to look at the Unfathomable Creator is as the Ultimate Loner. It is a blessing to have been created as a human being, for only we can connect with It, and receive the blessing of reaching out for It.
That is the Ultimate Design of the human race, with our absolutely free will, but within a universe that rewards the seeker who connects with the sublime majesty of the Creator of all that will ever be. The Greatest Command is to, first, "Love God with all your being". That is not because we can add anything to It, nor because It is needy in any way. No. It is because the universe is designed to reward those of us who use our free will and energy to radiate love into the universe; it radiates that love back from within ourselves in happiness, clarity, and purpose.
Another way to look at the underprivileged (in money or health) is that they are rewarded for being where a person of means can prove their humanity, and thus giving them the chance to learn how happiness is gained from selflessly sharing, not from selfishly keeping.
Clearly no one had any ‘karma’ 3 billion years ago, since living organisms did not exist.
From another perspective, I'd say that the first human being could sin against God, but that doesn't align with my understanding of how human beings were created. My understanding is that Adam was created in a state of grace, as a Prophet, free of negativity, but that as the population grew, our negative tendencies (to vice) established itself and the karma began to flow.
[I have some understanding of how the universe works, but I in no way claim to be authoritative. That said, I don't see any obvious errors in my reasoning.]
How could they have karma if they predated the first human being?
If karma is the result of will, what we're asking here is "When did the first willful creature come into existence?"
(Or, if karma is simply synonymous with cause and effect, then we can probably say the first karmic act was the big bang, the effects of which we are living with even now. But I think that's a less useful view, so let's abandon it.)
> Karma is a human-only dimension of the universe we inhabit. We alone have free will
Some say only homo sapiens is willful, but that seems unlikely given what we've learned about other now-extinct members of our genus. Did they have free will and/or karma? Do elephants, great apes, dolphins, house pets truly have no free will?
At this point it becomes imperative that we define "free will,"[0] and we just might get stuck there. It's a toughie. We are apparently physical systems, constrained by the laws of the universe just as every other system. Perhaps we are simply acting out our biological programming, another domino falling in a long deterministic line back to the universe's beginning[1]; perhaps we are endowed with the ability to modify reality itself through observation, that our "will" acts in concert with physical law to create reality; perhaps all things have a measure of "will" proportional to their internal systems' complexity[2]... maybe some version of all of these[3] or none of them.
In my opinion, karma is a useful framework for recognizing that we are, indeed, all connected to Kevin Bacon, and whatever we do will ultimately effect that poor man.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism
Peoples' entire behavior thought their life is largely influenced by their circumstances in which they grew up in. Corruption is just one of them.
It doesn't surprise me that we find participation in corruption increasing as news of corruption increases. Especially when you feel like people get away with it. One of the factors controlling whether or not people engage in these activities is how pervasive the activity is in society. Another is whether or not a person thinks they'll get away with it? If they believe they will, they're more likely to engage in corruption. And the more they see others get away with corruption, the more they think they themselves can get away with it.
I liken it to speeding. To many drivers it appears pervasive, and they often see many other drivers get away with speeding. So the circumstances one grew up in won't have nearly as big an impact on anti-speeding behavior as seeing the flashing blue lights of highway patrol vehicles every few miles.
This is just to say, taking part in corruption may not be optional where it is the norm, regardless of a person's education or morals.
That is simply not true, for the vast majority of the world's cultures and societies.
Yes, we all have a conscience (inner moral compass), but few of us are taught how to hone and develop it over one's lifetime, using one's intellect to improve our thought processes to be better, more virtuous, human beings.
We are the only creatures that self-evolve, and it is precisely our moral nature that puts this severe responsibility upon us to nurture selfless universal compassion as a personal and societal imperative. Otherwise, we wreak destruction on our blessed Mother Earth and our fellow human beings. We are to use our gifts to create happiness for each other, not misery.
We have the free will to ignore this moral imperative. Look at the state of global heating to gauge its prevalence.
You can't stop it with upbringing.
You're right; we all have the choice to be saints or demons, or anywhere in between! We can be one on one day and the other on others.
What is important is to teach empathy as the antidote to bullying, and then have those individuals construct their society's laws to prevent and/or punish bullying of all kinds. Same with govt corruption, of course.
"any other human, would fall into the pattern of engaging in corruption."
I wouldn't, because I honor my sense of honor, of truth. I can raise my voice and say, without hesitation, that I am incorruptible, because I choose to be this way, because it strengthens my inner peace and happiness. I was not always like this, but I have learned to be this way and appreciate feeling the joy of having self-evolved myself in this direction.
It is each person's choice. That most are choosing poorly is academic, if one sees what the world is becoming, and knows what the world could be, if only our design was based upon selfless, compassionate cooperation instead of selfish, callous competition.
From the article:
"But what they discovered is that the nationality of the other player was more important than their own and all — New Zealanders, Dutch and British — were willing to offer bribes to those they believed to be corrupt in what they defined as conditional bribery."
This is very important as corruption is one of the major causes of countries poverty. (Taking as base-line the country natural-resources).
Is it though? Survival of the fittest doesn't sound particularly fair to me.
So, yes. Fairness is intrinsically human.
"Might makes right" will also force cooperation from those who are less fortunate. I'd argue there was almost never "fairness" in human relationships, from stronger warriors getting the best food to kings forcing their will upon their subjects to filthy rich individuals owning the greatest part of the world wealth today.
My point is in no way that this is right. Only that humans are not intrinsically fair.
I can dig up the relevant studies if you are interested.
Sometimes you can't change the circumstances.
If people would consider their actions in the context of, “what I do, others will do”, then they would realize that many actions they deem as insignificant or harmless (throwing a small piece of trash on the sidewalk, taking two items from the “take 1 free” basket, etc. cause real problems when everyone does it.
It may seem insignificant to the individual, but in principle if they do it, others are also doing it, and it has a large scale impact. This applies in the positive direction too, such as when people perform random acts of kindness (which encourages others to do the same).
If you pay a speeding ticket, isn't that like participating in corruption by buying your way out of punishment for endangering people? Is it really morally any different from paying a bribe to the policeman who catches you speeding in a country where that's the common way? In both cases, you pay for speeding and your money ends up going towards the policeman's income.
Forming a personal connection with the interviewer when applying for a government job. Now you're suddenly like his friend and he's more inclined to select you. Maybe he expects to have a good relationship with you in future and gain intangible benefits from that if he hires you.
In my country, teacher jobs have to be publicly advertised, presumably to combat nepotism. But schools regularly hire internally and their advertisement includes a statement like "no actual vacancy" telling people not to waste time applying. I guess they're following the law but still corrupting the ideal of not favoring your friends.
It seems like you have to have a deep understanding of how and why the systems works the way it does to figure out if a particular action is morally corrupt or not. You can just follow the law but that seems to allow some society-harming corruption and nobody feels guilty about it.
Until you have "cops" every 10 miles on the freeway all demanding a bribe at gunpoint.
"Corruption" is sand in the gears of everything.
You can't go from point A to point B in a consistent amount of time or money. You can't order something and expect it to work without triple checking everything yourself. etc.
We have a great example of the pernicious effects of corruption: Russia couldn't roll over Ukraine because corruption completely hollowed out their military.
There's a couple of places around the country where it's known that the police do shakedowns (although they certainly don't point guns at you). I guess especially corrupt police work in those areas.
But for the most part I am much less likely to get stopped for minor traffic violations than I would be back home, where bribing the police isn't a thing. I'm sure there are other countries where police shakedowns is a problem, but it's not just a simple equation of bribable police = shakedowns.
I mean, one goes to the government to help all citizens, one lines the pocket of a corrupt cop and does not benefit society in anyway.
So yes, there is a huge gulf of difference between the two.
Also an official ticket goes on record so the cop can tell if you've had many and maybe deserve a more severe punishment, the bribe is never recorded so we can't track the bad drives in this instance.
It motivates him to stop speeding drivers which is good for society.
To your second point, maybe a better system would be the policeman gets paid a commission on the tickets he issues so they're still recorded. But if it's not set up that way, bribery might be more effective than not.
No, it motivates him to stop any driver that can't be confirmed to not be speeding under the level of 3d-party scrutiny the cop judges he risks to get under the circumstances.
And also the ones that are more likely to offer more money.
Some try to dismiss this by saying that there are areas with lower speeds - yes; they're placed where you need to slow down anyway, it's more like "hey buddy, beware of this sharp curve" rather than "we will milk your wallet if you go 1 km/h over this idiotically low speed". I go to Berlin regularly (500km) and my speed average including the slowdown areas is around 230 km/h and I'm not even close to the fastest one on the road.
The best thing about this? The German diesel engine - drinking less fuel at these speeds than an American truck on idle.