Corruption

The rise and fall of just about everything continues to fascinate both the public and scholars. The ancients probably took as much joy out of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire as the modern western states did from the decline and fall of the Soviet Union.

The rise and fall of great powers are not the only decline of interest. The public seems to have an insatiable appetite for stories of the rise and fall of athletes and movie stars. Corporate giants and financial institutions report great products and earnings only to suddenly crash to the horror of trusting investors.

Public officials hold hasty hearings, which ignore underlying causes but quickly assign blame to pacify a now poorer public. The media seeks out obscure “experts” who pontificate that either it is the end of an era or that it is a situation that can never happen again. Academics conduct exhaustive research on the causes for declines and publish great tomes of their conclusions that are seldom read and often in error.

Public officials, the media and even academics seek to explain declines as simple single theoretical causations on which to build their reputations while fatten their own pocketbooks. The truth is of course much more complex as the various theories are often in conflict with each other. Just about every factor has been used to explain the declines of the star power of states, businesses, athletes and actors.

One area of research has escaped diligent study, that of the roll of corruption in an ultimate decline. In part this omission is the result of corruption itself. “We are not corrupt it is those other people that are taking bribes.” “We have a sterling society, it is those foreign societies that are corrupt.” “It is those politicians who are corrupting our system.” Reality is that corruption is as universal as are honorable people in every society. Corrupt CEOs and politicians are also universal and the honorable people keep them in power as long as their corruption doesn’t cost “me” too much. Isn’t that also a form of corruption?

Spin doctors, marketers, advertising agencies and self-deception are practitioners of corruption. Corruption however is much broader than taking a bribe or telling a lie, it is also failure of society to insure the integrity of their social order. Once the combined weight of corruption exceeds the honest strength of a social system then the decayed social structure collapses. The ultimate corruption is looking the other way and pretending that it does not exist.