When Corruption Grows [Joe Mannix]

Much ink has been spilled - including by me - about the deplorable state of integrity within the government and other institutions. The institutions are hopelessly corrupt and operate for their own benefit and without any checks or balances. They take as take can, and to hell with the consequences. Those consequences are largely paid for by the little people or those who fall out of favor. It's classical Party corruption and our institutions and systems are lousy with it.

Our institutions are so full of corruption that it isn't unreasonable to call it total. Every major institution from the government agencies and legislatures and courts to the universities to the major corporations to the NGOs to the school boards and so on down the line is hopelessly, even diabolically corrupt. What we have in this country (and what is present in many other countries) is essentially total institutional corruption. It is systemic corruption in that all official systems of size are corrupted. This is not good by any means, but it could be worse - and we'll get there if the trend continues.

The flip side of total systemic corruption is that some things - things outside the major power system - are not corrupt. Daily life is not too bad in this regard. You can go to the supermarket and be reasonably confident that you will get what it says you'll get on the tin. The odds of being ripped off by a random stranger aren't terribly worse now than they used to be. The level of fraud, theft, abuse, etc. between and among people and during the routine work of daily life is not the defining characteristic of everyday interactions. In this regard, our total systemic corruption intersects with the wider population arbitrarily and with no mercy, but things are okay until the evil eye of the corrupt falls on you.

The next stage from systemic corruption is what I call endemic corruption - the condition where all things are corrupt in all respects and between all people at all times. In such an environment, none of the normal honesty of daily life is present. You buy food and find that it is fake and the package is either empty or it contains some ersatz food. You buy a house and find that it falls apart moments after you move in. You buy goods and find that they are counterfeit. The reports you use at work are all doctored and the company transparently lies about everything they do. Everything from financial statements to pollution controls to mileage to the octane content of gasoline is fabricated. The machinery with which you interact is manipulated to count high for things you buy and low for things where you get paid. Your money is stolen and contracts are unfulfilled. You can spin the wheel in the courts, but then the official corruption intersects and if you're not in favor, you lose. Party favor gives some the right to behave with impunity in all aspects of life, and the rest just have to get abused.

And become abusers. In a world without morality in a condition of endemic corruption when everything from weights and measures to ingredient lists to business practices are a lie, only a sucker tries to follow the rules. You get ripped off, sure, but you're not above ripping someone else off. Survival is survival. You might not like it, but you'll probably do it - especially when your boss tells you to go ahead and use timber to reinforce concrete instead of steel, or else be fired. The problem compounds with each turn of the crank. The primary problem to be solved is no longer "how do I do the right thing" but rather "how do I not get caught?" Societies with endemic corruption are, in a word, exploitative. Everyone exploits everyone else at all times.

If you want a vision of how such a world looks, cast your sight across the Pacific to Red China. For as bad as a lot of the crap they export is, the domestic market is often worse. Fake food, fake construction, fake goods, fake measures, fake numbers, fake everything. If you're Party-connected (in the right faction), there are no rules in any venue. If you're not, your job is to be harvested until you tap out. We are not anything like that far along in this country. In terms of law, the Party-connected can do anything they want but it doesn't yet extend downstream to everything like it does in places further along the corruption curve.

And so what happens in such an environment? Universal pain, exploitation and hopelessness. That has its own consequences, which can be seen through some fringe movements in Red China like "lying flat" (doing nothing above intermittent subsistence labor - similar to the "anti-work" concept floated in this country, but with a wildly different motivation) to people referring to themselves as "leeks" or "chives," depending on translation (people who grow to be harvested and regrown and harvested again) and, more distressingly, arguing that the current generation should be the last. "I am the last generation" or "I will give birth to no more leeks" is the ultimate black-pill attitude. A quote I heard that was attributed to a young Chinese office worker seems to sum up the essential problem fairly well: "everyone hurts me and I hurt everyone."

Endemic corruption is evidence of general moral degradation along with with legal and institutional illegitimacy. The people who live in such a condition are regularly and routinely abused and regularly and routinely engage in abuse themselves. This will continue until hope is lost. For Red China's sake, I hope those fringe elements remain fringe and that some degree of honesty can emerge. For our sake, I hope we learn the lesson that Red China can provide and avoid the problems of endemic corruption. Our systemic corruption, if not contained and reversed, will flow downstream and take us to a very rotten place.

posted by Open Blogger at 12:00 PM

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