Very insightful on how this corruption develops:
"How can a group hold a worldview so at odds with the wider culture and not appear to be greatly conflicted by it? The answer may lie in the distinction between particularism and universalism. An individual develops social identities specific to the social domains, groups and roles – and accompanying subcultures – that he or she occupies (e.g. manager, mother, parishioner, sports fan). [...]
In the case of corruption, this myopia means that an otherwise ethically-minded individual may forsake universalistic or dominant norms about ethical behavior in favor of particularistic behaviors that favor his or her group at the expense of outsiders. [...]
This tendency to always put the ingroup above all others clearly paves the way for collective corruption."
CS Lewis has a speech about the ingroups and corruption. His thesis is that the mere desire to be "in" is the greatest driver of immoral behavior:
"To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”"
Also Lord Acton - “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”
> "Half of the harm that is done in this world Is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; But the harm does not interest them."
-T.S. Eliot
The author cites Arendt a fair bit, whose claim to fame was that entirely ordinary people could become voluntary instruments of atrocity.
I think the belief of ordinary people most likely to dispose them to atrocity is that of prioritizing the ingroup. Once we believe that the members of one's own family, or company, or country, carry more moral value than others, we're doomed to a descent limited only by our ability to make these world-worsening trades.
When I was a child, my dad would sometimes engage in small acts of corruption to please me or my brother. Taking somebody else's spot, telling white lies to get more than his share of a rationed good, that sort of thing. It never sat right with me. "Family first" has a very ominous ring to me.
Yes, the slogan "America first" is a forerunner of the worst kind of imperialism.
also "Make America Great Again" states that America is not currently great, which given its geo-political and economic position is just dishonest. Combined with "America First" you get an entirely clean canvas to be incredibly radical while cosplaying conservative.
I would argue MAGA will be rather fitting campaign slogan for the democrat side come next election.
or maybe simply MAAA: Make America America again.
What you describe is deepest human nature. We are tribal, period. No amount of morales will change that, no matter how it sits with you personally.
Wouldn’t that be horrible? If great masses of humans did act morally, and you didn’t have this justification that everyone does it?
Yes, I was about to say this. A human is basically testicles with a brain attached, and the natural goal of life is to make sure that the genetically closest material survives and reproduces. That's why it's common to have stronger relationships with your family than with randoms on the internet. The more different the genetic material is, the less you care - individuals of different culture, of different race, of different species, of different kingdom of life, and finally viruses that are just strings of RNA floating around and nobody advocates about their rights because fuck that.
The brain actually has specific neurological system that compartmentalise reasoning contexts in different social contexts, so we operate according to different sets of assumptions and rules of behaviour and reasoning in different kinds of situations.
Can you share some resources on the above?
The situation in which people exchange favors within their mutually beneficial personal networks seems to be the basic and typical way things function. It’s actually remarkable that we are able to resist this tendency and normalize fair and impartial institutions.
It’s like they worked at my last workplace
As a counterexample, here is an example of a Singaporean officer refusing to accept a bribe, as reported by Lee Kuan Yew:
The US supreme court allowed thank you gifts for politicians to not be considered bribes somehow in a 2024 ruling, I think that alone might break the US.
Not really. SCOTUS did allow nothing, Congress did.
It is reasonable to assume some gratitude should be allowed, otherwise you'd have to ask how long a teacher should be tossed into jail for receiving a "Best teacher ever" mug from his students.
The whole idea that the courts should be a second legislative branch is absurd and henceforth also the dissenting opinion. To claim that no other legislative context could be relevant because the text could be interpreted in a certain way or the context should be derived from a related text, that has not received any previous scrutiny of it own, is a VERY dangerous precedent and that even experienced judges like Sotomayor or Kagan have joined it is VERY concerning.
The US Supreme Court is the very worst a supreme court could be. They've been thoroughly co-opted and will only start to see the light when it is their asses that are on the line.
The whole way the Judicial system in the US is beholden to politicians, and is thoroughly politicised looks completely horrific to me in the UK. Even the election officials responsible for overseeing voting are politicians.
Combined with this elected King George III presidential nonsense (not just king in general either, specifically the powers George III had in the 1780s) and I despair sometimes. Get yourselves a decent parliamentary system. If you avoid proportional representation it works fine. Unfortunately the US population is somehow convinced the current US system is modern and up to date. They'll probably still think that in another 200 years.
What do you have against proportional representation?
lest we forget luxury fishing trips, RVs, real-estate debt payoffs, or payoffs of relatives' tuition
Corruption is not a moral failure; it is a system architecture failure.
The normalization of deviance begins the moment constraints are treated as runtime guidelines rather than compile-time axioms. If an architecture cannot physically reject an invalid state, it is designed to collapse.
This sounds like an LLM-generated response. Care to confirm/deny?
See the diagram; A Systems Thinking model of Corruption from the article Evaluating the Impact of Institutional Improvement on Control of Corruption—A System Dynamics Approach - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-Systems-Thinking-model...
Systems Thinking provides a holistic view of the interactions contributing to an outcome expressed as a Causal Loop Diagram (CLD). The CLD developed using Systems Thinking shows the full complexity of the problem at hand, and then simplifications are necessary to create a working quantitative System Dynamics simulation. Figure 1 was developed based on 43 in-depth interviews and 155 survey interviews with government officials, aid agencies, civil society organizations, business people, lawyers, and the general public in Pakistan. It shows the complete set of relationships considered to represent the problem of corruption in a nation.
In the CLD, connections with directed arrows imply that a change in the tail variable leads to a change in the variable at the head of the arrow. An arrow labelled with polarity ‘+’ means changes in the same direction. Increasing the tail variable increases the head variable, and decreasing the tail variable decreases the head variable.
On the other hand, ‘-’ implies changes in the opposite direction. For example, increasing the tail variable decreases the head variable, and decreasing the tail variable increases the head variable.
These connections create highly non-linear behaviour because feedback loops develop where a change in one variable in the model will ripple through the cause-and-effect structure to return to its source and either reinforce or inhibit the change.
The reinforcing feedback loop is labelled with an ‘R’ and inhibiting or balancing feedback loops with a ‘B’.
Connecting these loops often leads to emergent and unexpected behaviours in the system.
There should be a checklist of simple rules of thumb that any created or reorganized entity should undergo.
For example if the organization is self-financing it breeds corruption.
If an entity mediates between buyers and sellers it can't be financed by sellers.
It should be fairly easy to compose that list by observing corrupt and underperforming setups that are already entrenched.
There are some great movies that deal with this: Wall Street, The Firm, The Big Short, Suicide Kings, Michael Clayton, among others.
One can even consider the never ending Ethics classes in college an ironic form of corruption that never teaches anything we don't already know by secondary school, but used to pad credit numbers and tuition revenue.
> Fear is induced by coercion, the threat of negative consequences such as ostracism and demotion. To be sure, blatant coercion facilitates the denial of responsibility and thereby compliance with corrupt directives. Such coercion, however, leaves less room for (perceived) volition, a key precondition for the dissonance reduction process discussed earlier. Newcomers subject to blatant coercion have a sufficient justification for their obedience – to avoid the threat – and thus do not need to realign their attitudes to accommodate the otherwise dissonant behavior. Indeed, blatant coercion may provoke resentment and reactance against the source of coercion and the targeted behavior (e.g. Nail, Van Leeuwen & Powell, 1996). The upshot is a greater likelihood of grudging compliance, whistle-blowing and voluntary turnover (and thus, risk of exposure). Further, coercion may affect behavior only as long as the pressure is applied. For these reasons, blatant coercion tends to be an ineffective means of sustaining corruption.
Astute. When the average person is asked to imagine how corrupt leaders operate, I think they tend to overemphasize the effectiveness of simple violence. To foster a corruption that will last, you have to mold the circumstances so that corruption is the only option that makes sense.
The 1972 Knapp Commission report is essential reading on the topic
Such an insightful article. Had to cover in 3 sittings though - the reading is a bit dense.
It's Gwern! He's like a combine harvester for data in all forms, digesting it and putting stuff out there that is usually bullet proof and extremely enlightening. I've yet to see him put out something that didn't meet that standard. Well worth your time, also on other subjects.
The actual linked PDF is not from Gwern, it's a 2003 paper from two sociologists Blake E. Ashforth and Vikas Anand.
Absolutely on point!
You need only look at the bureaucracies in countries which rank high on the corruption index. Most join to just earn a livelihood but are soon "socialized into corruption".
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption#Causes
Per R. Klitgaard corruption will occur if the corrupt gain is greater than the punitive damages multiplied by the likelihood of being caught and prosecuted.
Since a high degree of monopoly and discretion accompanied by a low degree of transparency does not automatically lead to corruption, a fourth variable of "morality" or "integrity" has been introduced by others. The moral dimension has an intrinsic component and refers to a "mentality problem", and an extrinsic component referring to circumstances like poverty, inadequate remuneration, inappropriate work conditions and inoperable or over-complicated procedures which demoralize people and let them search for "alternative" solutions.
The references section has lots of links for further study of which Robert Klitgaard's Controlling Corruption is a classic with case studies.
One thing i would like to know more of is how Technology either reduces or exacerbates corruption.
Well, I know of one technology whos primary use-case is corruption: Crypto.
With corruption, one needs to look at the overall system i.e. involving Society/Individual/Economics/Politics/Organizations/Processes/Technologies/etc. rather than narrow silos.
On the whole, i feel technology has been a corruption mitigater since it reduces the human factor (i.e. the motivation/cause) from the process chain. This has been validated in my own personal experience.
On the flip side, when used by people-in-control it concentrates power in the hands of the few and its non-linear disproportionate effects can exacerbate the problem tremendously eg. various Internet based scams.
PS: Are emerging technologies helping win the fight against corruption? A review of the state of evidence - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016762452...
Corruption is defined as deviation from universalism. Shouldn't orgs at least pretend to care about productivity or is that the ultimate sin for a universalist? Or is the ultimate sin not pretending that universalism is productive?
Another good read: https://www.scu.edu/ethics/focus-areas/business-ethics/resou...