Got the sex stuff out of my system for now, so on with the pontification!
The problem of corruption, unsurprisingly, has always been one of power. Nature abhors a power differential, especially a large one, and so the problem has always been one of enabling the low-powered gatekeepers to resist the power of the people the gate is supposed to keep out.
Like the literal gatekeepers of the Great Wall of China. The Chinese empire of the day spent enormous amounts of money to build this enormous Wall, and that left very little left to pay the thousands of people needed to guard the hundreds of gates in the thing.
Because people and goods still have to get through, ya know.
Ergo, you had the Empire being protected by half-starved, untrained people out in the middle of nowhere. All the barbarian hordes that the Wall was expressly built to keep ou of China had to do was offer the gatekeepers what I imagine were some quite hilariously (to the barbarians) paltry bribes and maybe a pat on the back and the gatekeepers would throw open the gates and let them through.
What’s more, because the Empire and its people had this childlike faith in the impenetrability of the Wall, they were completely unprepared when the barbarians attacked their undefended asses, and were utterly decimated.
A similar thing happened in WWII in France with the Maginot Line.
And that is always the problem. Call it the Gatekeeper Dilemma. In a modern context, you see bureaucrats who get paid $75k a year in charge of who gets contracts worth billions of dollars. That kind of money creates an enormous pressure on the individual bureaucrats and as far as I can tell, there is only one way to resist it, and that’s to be the exact kind of mindless, robotic, humorless bureaucrat who sees their job as implementing policy and that’s it that are so often the villains in popular media.
So in that sense, the purity of government rests entirely on the dullness of its bureaucrats. They have to be the sort of people who don’t think outside the box and don’t take personal issues into account and so forth in order to hold together the system’s only defense against the corrupting power of money and politics.
That’s why you hear about countries with rampant corruption where the only way to get anything done is to bribe people. These countries lack the kind of system that rewards their bureaucrats, both governmental and private, for being the boring kind of person that society demands.
In fact, in some places, they may not even have that kind of person. Cultures that are very emotionally open and socially broad may not produce enough of the very type of pressure-proof bureaucratic androids you need in order to keep the corruption out.
This may be a factor in the historical dominance of white European cultures over other, seemingly more emotionally robust cultures of, for instance, the Mediterranean. It takes a certain kind of emotionally repressive culture to even produce the sort of people for whom nothing is more important than faithfully executing their duties.
Those are the kind of people who can resist the charmismatic agents of wealth and power when they show up and give the bureaucrats a taste of a life of wealth and privilege and then offer to let the into the club if they only do what the rich people want them to do.
When there is a lot of money at stake, the rich can always come up with enough money to overwhelm most average people.
And sadly, money is not the only problem. It’s merely the easiest form of power to transfer and track. In truth, any kind of power corrupts. The USSR had a virtually worthless currency and yet the corruption came in just the same because there were people who had the ability to punish or reward people and that is all it took for their to be party leaders living in Western luxury while their people starved.
To a certain extent. rules and regulations can aid the bureaucrats in their fight to resist the temptations of the rich and powerful. When that bureaucrat can say “I can’t help you, my hands are tied” and mean it, that’s a good first step.
Peer pressure also helps. If the bureaucratic culture creates the feeling that the absolute worst thing that could happen would be for a bureaucrat to be humiliated in front of their peers, that also helps keep things pure.
And of course, the strongest defense against any kid of crime is the feeling that you will get caught. Ergo, there has to be a hell of a lot of mutual oversight in order to keep peope on the narrow path.
But even with all that in place, there will be corruption, because with enough money anything can be overcome.
That’s why the war on drugs is so futile. The inherent demand for narcotics is so absurdly high that it supports sky high prices, which in turn make the narcotic trade extremely profitable, and ensures that those in the trade always have lots of cash to use to compromise the system.
The exact same thing happened with Prohibition. Guys like Al Capone could get away with it all because they had enough cash to bribe all the gatekeepers they wanted, from the cop on the street to the politicians in the capital, and nobody has invented a form of government that can withstand that kind of power.
And the same thing happens today with modern petro-states. With billions of dollars in easy money on the line, the forces of corruption and anarchy always have plenty of cash to buy all the politicians they can eat.
And to hell with the people.
Thus, we see how the greatest enemy to public order is private wealth, and the argument can be made that either people simply should not be allowed to accumulate that much money. or an extremely powerful oversight body needs to be in place to make sure that money does not translate into political power.
To my mind, keeping people from getting too rich seems a lot more efficient.
And when they whine about their rights, remind them that all rights have limits, so why not the right to accumulate wealth?
Then tell me what their reply is…. I am dying to know.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.