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The type of ignorance that is responsible for corruption
If you want to deal with corruption, the answer is not to single out people or groups who are known to have done something wrong. Corruption is a recurring theme of any type of organization and has been forever. Dealing with people involved is just a short term solution.
The real cause of corruption is ignorance. Ignorance of human morality, ignorance of the reason/source of power, ignorance of the importance of checks and balances.
The belief that power is a side effect of social status
Mostly this thread is about ignorance of the reason for power. Many people naively believe that power is a side effect of social status. These people believe that they can use their power however they want, as long as they do not violate social norms - the thing that got them the power in the first place. Sometimes this means they can do things in secret they wouldn't normally do, because they believe that doing that thing is the social norm but talking about it is not. For example, if they are really succesful they might believe they are entitled to cheat on their wife. Or if they are in the government, they might believe it is ok to do certain things that people would not approve of to accomplish some goal - as long as no one finds out about it.
Why this is wrong and the damage caused by this belief
The truth is that whole line of thinking is totally wrong. Any position of power exists for some reason. In general, people do not have power over one another, because of intelligence and enginuity.
People defer to others when they believe it is beneficial to do so - this automatically implies that no power can extend to the point of selfishly taking advantage of others. This will cause those people to fight back, and intelligent beings are dangerous adversaries. Especially since selfish behavior garners support from noone and opposition from all.
So every position of power is created to allow someone to better handle some responsibility. The second a person in that position uses the power in a selfish way to the detriment of the responsibility that the power came from, their power can be challenged and defeated. There is usually no need for physical confrontation, because you can simply appeal to the source of the person's power. It only becomes physical when the source of the person's power is physical in nature, which basically only occurs way up the latter.
For example, if your boss likes to throw his weight around, brag about how much money he makes, and threaten employees who don't appeal to his ego, and generally damaging employee morale you can easily get him in trouble by appealing to his boss. The most that can be said against you is that you should try to approach the boss directly about this instead of going over his head. If your boss's boss is also corrupt, just keep going up. If the highest person supports such behavior, it means that the company as a whole is inefficient and ineffective. The whole point of the business is to make money, and such traits go against this goal. In such a case, you stand to gain much more by working for a company that is more efficient and effective.
The implication is that there is a power structure in a corporation that starts with the clients. A business must attract clients, therefore must behave in a way that accomplishes this. Efficiency is a subgoal of this, and therefore so is employee morale. The boss was hired to better accomplish these goals, not to sabotage them. Therefore the boss's behavior contradicts the source of his power.
Social norms are not relevant at all in this model - at best social norms are dictated by the power structure defined here. At least, to the degree that people on average understand these power structures.
The typical belief that power comes from social status is the source of all corruption.
Because of the way social norms are defined, it is ok for people to do many things in secret that would be against social norms if people knew about them. The fact that we recognize this as wrong is evidence that the social status model is invalid.
A major truth of the power structure model is that information must flow freely to increase efficiency in all human endeavors. Such a model drives the implementation of checks and balances that prevent people from acting selfishly in secret. Furthermore, increasing understanding of this model and it's accuracy prevents people from ever becoming corrupt to begin with - because they will not be able to internally justify behaviors that would be ok under the social status model.
Last edited by Kriminal99; 04-27-2009 at 08:01 AM..
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