Corruption, Greed, and Egoism

Part IV of the "Fundamental Problem" Series

The literary background for this post encompasses the works of Nietzsche, Rand, Campbell, Dostoevsky, and Hardy, with lectures from Peterson on hierarchy and utopia. Again, I don't claim that nobody else has written about what I'll be addressing here, but I do maintain that I derived these ideas on my own, with the aforementioned literary and lecture background.

Humanity cannot avoid corruption amongst any constructed organization of great size and complexity. It seems to be an inevitable consequence of a largely fractured morality coupled with a biological drive for gluttony and an insatiable and corrosive egoism, sharply divergent from the idyllic egoism posited by Rand and in a distilled sense by Buddhism. Philosophies which claim to provide utopia through the successful melding of millions, if not billions, of people into a doctrine are futile. The human psyche and spirit, two different things not always mutually exclusive, have such a proclivity for duplicity that we don't know how to combat it. Any large construct, such as governments, big corporations, and even sizable communities, will undoubtedly exhibit deceitful behavior, and while we (the masses), who are equally prone to corruption and simply haven't been given the opportunity to manifest it, cry out and denigrate what we perceive to be iniquitous, we fail to recognize the futility in attempting to curb it.

Corruption, like savagery and frames of reference, are inescapable results of our evolution, which ill prepared us for the modern world. Biologically, we know that evolution in large part can be described as the survival of the fittest. In our early days, this simply meant weeding out those with crippling disabilities and malformations, who were not able to hunt or gather effectively. However, as civilization developed, survival of the fittest turned into "survival of those with the most resources". This shift, which occurred almost simultaneously with the birth of the first human societies, was entirely obtuse with the hierarchical structures underlying said societies. In nomadic tribal existence, a hierarchy was still present, which we can observe in wolves and chimpanzees to some degree, but as the community was much smaller, and resources much more scarce, even those at the top weren't privy to opulence by any stretch of the imagination. Perhaps the best, strongest hunter or most powerful individual in the tribe would get an extra portion of the beast they slew for dinner, but that was it. Once we obtained a surplus of food, those at the top of the hierarchy began exhibiting survivalist greed, maybe subconsciously. They would take a much greater portion of the food than necessary, and would strictly control how much food other people received. Logically, if you were friends with this person, you'd get more to eat, and if you managed to irritate them in a significant way, you'd get less - perhaps you'd even be completely ostracized from the society if you really got on the controlling individual's nerves. 

As we shift the discussion to the modern world, we must make a clear distinction: Corruption is not equivalent to wealth disparity, and can't be conflated with any particular ideology or economic system, like Marxism or Capitalism - we can observe it in any society which has an ingrained hierarchical structure, meaning, in essence, all societies. It's also important to note that corruption doesn't stem from the hierarchy, but rather the innate greed in all humans coupled with a powerful and reptilian survival instinct.

In our society, we know there to be rampant corruption among even those institutions claiming to be beacons of free thought and equal representation. Looking at the United States government, we can easily see the damage monetized politics have done to the country. The people's vote matters less than the people's money, and corporate money seems to matter more than people's money. Gerrymandering, red lining, and other forms of voter suppression instantiate a deep insecurity of, and lust for, simple power. Virtue signaling, identity politics, and reprehensible moral compromises are also signs of the childlike desire for absolute power exhibited by politicians. These "public servants" make more in a year than the vast majority of the people they claim to altruistically "serve", and will be quick to point out corruption in their political opponents, ignoring the venom in their own blood.

Large corporations are also inherently corrupt, though their sickness differs from the political type in interesting ways, because there are mathematical distributions which describe the expected disparity between the top levels of a company and the bottom. These are chiefly the Pareto Principle and Price's Law. The former states that in any given domain of human design, 80% of the outputs will be generated by 20% of the inputs. The latter specifies that in any company, half the work will be done by the square root of the total number of employees, and seems to be a special case of the Pareto Principle. Essentially, as companies grow, incompetence grows exponentially, while competence grows linearly. The key when analyzing corporations is to determine how much of the inner discrepancies are a result of these inexorable laws, and how much stem from the individualistic corruptive factors which we previously discussed. The answer eludes me at the moment, and definitely varies from company to company, but a general rule may be to observe the quality of work at the top and bottom of the business, and compare the two, making special note of employee satisfaction, specific output, and essential duties. 

Even in small communities we can see corruption manifest itself in patronizing and tyrannical home owner's associations and local governments. Here, we can most easily observe how inadequacy, of the same nature as mentioned in the dissection of governments a little while ago, leads to widespread knavery. People who are unhappy with their own lives, who lack meaning and purpose, and who wish to experience as much power as they can in their meager present state, will attempt to subjugate and destroy the lives and happiness of others in a bureaucratic frenzy. Dostoevsky depicts the life of such a man in Notes from Underground, in which one can experience the lamentations and bitter failings of a man whose life was spent doing nothing but legally destroying people's happiness.

As you may have predicted at the start of this essay, we haven't found a scalable solution for corruption. Whenever an engine of human construct reaches a size in which incompetence has grown far beyond competence (though there are exceptions), fraudulence and delinquency will appear as swiftly as vultures descending upon a fresh carcass. One truly righteous person may be able to build a company where he or she does not compromise their ethics, but they can't ensure the virtues of their entire staff, not without debilitating their business. Similarly, one decent politician can refuse endorsements and corporate money, but when faced with the beastly conglomerate of diseased politicians, will either be thrown to the gallows of Capitol Hill, or will resign out of shear disgust. You can find your own meaning and happiness relatively simply, but you can't ensure the contentment of everyone in your neighborhood. To use a meme - you can keep yourself from becoming a Karen, but you can't prevent Karen's in your community. For that reason, corruption remains a key part of the fundamental problem.