This article hints at, but doesn't fully dive into, the perspective of personal ethics. Many people who would never steal money from an individual would happily steal money from the government. As humans we tend to view these acts very differently.
Relatedly, such people are more likely to steal money from a government they see as evil/corrupt, than a government they see as good. This probably drives a large part of the "contextual" corruption effect the article discusses, where a non-corrupt individual starts working for a corrupt government and suddenly becomes corrupt.
> Many people who would never steal money from an individual would happily steal money from the government.
It's always said something to me that most people who wouldn't dream of making a profit selling something to a member of their family will spend all day trying to profit off of strangers.
It may just be a matter of proximity, with a instinctual heuristic of shared interests. Rather than people making a division of governments between "good" and "evil", it's more like a government that's with me or against me. I don't want to hurt what's helping me. Which honestly takes it completely out of the range of morality, and back into realpolitik and pragmatism.
'To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.' -- Abbie Hoffman
the acts are philosophically different. Stealing from a thief who has stolen from you is also pretty different from stealing from a stranger at the level of personal ethics.
> Few governments aren’t a massive net surplus for their citizens
If the baseline is a complete lack of social organization, yes. But that's a terrible baseline. You compare governments to other potential governments, not to anarchy. That would be like calling eating six ounces of oatmeal per day a massive net surplus to starving to death; of course it is, but that's the easiest curve in the world.
And the fact that you can only have one government at a time means that your current one is blocking all of the others.
Fair but it’s such a massive difference there’s steps up the ladder which are still worse.
I’d still be careful when suggesting anything but success is theft, because as you say internal transitions are risky. Migration however has improved the living standards of billions throughout history.
Meanwhile just about anywhere today is still better for the average person than living in say medieval Europe or antiquity etc. Falling birth rates provide a significant opportunity for improvement. China isn’t a great place to live, but it’s also now the 2nd most populous country.
I feel like you’re defending terrible governments for no particular reason. Of course it might be better to live in modern china than medieval europe, but this doesn’t defeat the notion that modern china could be made much better for its people if the structure of its government were altered.
The point of the argument isn’t, or doesn’t have to be, technicality (“bad governance constitutes theft”) but a statement about what one believes the people deserve.
Implicit in the argument is a belief in a social contract being voided by one party, wherein the government makes lacking effort to provide “the best possible governance” and the people respond with disobedience. I’d personally disagree with the notion of a social contract, and argue only from the idea that an alteration to the government could produce better outcomes, but that argument would produce the same sentiment as the one they’re expressing, so in what way would you disagree with their sentiment?
I’m defending social order not terrible government. Governments can be a pure net negative, but that’s really rare.
I disagree with the idea that ‘poor performance’ rather than ‘negative performance’ gives someone extra authority. Voiding the social contract by leaving is one thing, but “disobedience” is something else.
Anyone can disagree with how a government functions, but individuals who dislike something don’t inherently know how to build a better system. Even non violent means like tax evasion, protests, and voter suppression have real downsides. When people act with the assumption of authority they often result in serious negative consequences and only very rarely cause actual improvement.
Taken to the extreme the idea even supports wars of conquest. If your government is even mildly better than another why not ‘improve’ the situation.
PS: Which isn’t to say operating within a given system is useless. Convincing others, be that voters or a dictator, can also enact change with less risk. But again well supported arguments are safer than simply persuasive ones, because you can more easily adapt to changing conditions.
For example today we have more options, but in the mid 90’s the US environmentalists arguing for nuclear power could have been a meaningful contribution to climate change potentially offsetting ~10 billion tons of CO2 by now. That’s the kind of politics makes strange bedfellows compromise which you don’t see when everyone is throwing around emotionally charged rhetoric. Which sums up my argument, the perfect ideal is often the enemy of the practical.
I’d argue that the solution isn’t for people to avoid protest or disobedience though. The civil rights movement in the US was composed of a lot of different groups, plenty of which were unsatisfied with anything less than radical change. The tactic was then to unite these people under a leader smart enough to negotiate the meeting point of their interests and the pressures of practical political change in the US. The endless civil disobedience and threat of radical violence was then a powerful piece of leverage, really the sole source of leverage, in mlk’s negotiation with lbj.
Given that brain enhancement is a while away, it’s gonna be a while before most people are able to weigh the nuanced ripple effects of their actions in order to optimally resist bad leadership, or be able to see the impracticality of otherwise good ideas; these are difficult mental feats that require a lot of self reflection. I wouldn’t then suggest that these people do nothing. I’d suggest that they represent, in essence, a productive force to be taken up and wielded against the subject of their discontent by similarly motivated, but intelligent, leadership.
Its the same concept with environmentalism. You can’t expect Joe Environment to be smart enough and critical enough to reason his way around the panic-inducing coverage of nuclear scares, but maybe you can harness his frustration with environmental as a source of political power.
I don’t think we’re going to agree though; I think we’re motivated differently. I don’t really find myself enticed by social order in the same way, and I’d trade away much of that stability to get a good shot at change that could make society more pleasant.
I’d argue for many Americans in 1960 the existing system was an actual net negative, and for others it was close. There was ~100,000 young men risking prison for homosexual relationships, about to be sent to Vietnam, treated like dirt for being black, and under significant threat of nuclear war all at the same time. That’s being rather uniquely shat on by a system setup to benefit others.
I don’t expect random environmentalist to have a well reasoned stance, but holding activist groups to a higher standard feels reasonable to me. I get just as pissed when nuclear advocates conflate the cost of uranium ore as fuel cost when reactors are using vastly more expensive enriched uranium fuel rods. (Possibly because the fuel bit works.)
> I’d trade away much of that stability to get a good shot at change that could make society more pleasant.
I used to feel that way, but the more I learned about how the world works the more I understood just how delicate these systems are. Gerrymandering isn’t just a free way to political power, it erodes people’s trust in democracy. Elections dependent on swing states and us vs them ideology fed by Ecco chambers isn’t heading to a healthy place. At the other end, the amount of havoc just a single person damaging fuel pipelines and electrical transmission infrastructure could cause is shocking.
Now imagine a few thousand motivated people intelligently trying to damage the US.
Bad governments have a consistent internal logic, and operate at a local maxima. In some sense, they are "doing the best they can", and practically, most forms of resistance damage the social order without improvement.
But surely this wouldn’t argue against resistance itself. If you argue no resistance should take place because it’s too damaging, then you’ll lose the small portion of radicals with beneficial ideas.
You’re also assuming that change only happens in small steps, which would trap you in a local maxima, but what about a revolution? That’s more like a giant leap, potentially in the wrong direction, but it might be worth the risk if the local maxima sucks enough.
An especially corrupt government might be a net surplus compared to anarchy, yet simultaneously a significant net loss compared to a more typical government.
Put another way, the government is failing to give its citizens what it owes them. By analogy, suppose your employer pays you half the wage they agreed to pay. That’s still a form of theft, even if you are still at a surplus compared to the alternative of being unemployed.
Ed: When exactly did these governments agree to do better?
A restaurant consistently providing bad food isn’t theft, it’s just a poor place to go. I have a great deal of sympathy for people living in areas captured by Russia or locked into North Korea etc, but in general it’s decades to generations of poor performance at this point.
> Define “net”.
All personal costs vs all personal benefits. Militaries and public roads etc may be basic functions of government but someone needs to pay for them and your personal contribution isn’t enough to completely cover such expenses.
If you look at the criticisms section of your linked page, you'll also see why social contract theory is more popular in high-school than it is with actual philosophers (most of whom think it's wrong).
That’s not the fundamentals of political philosophy. It’s a western take on political philosophy, there’s many others both from the west and elsewhere.
I doubt very much they don’t know the potential philosophy.
Personally though, at some point theoretical vs practical takes precedence yeah. Or are we going to start going around ‘fixing’ everyone else’s political systems? Because historically, that hasn’t exactly helped has it?
Someone could take an underperforming investment to Vegas, happen to double the investment and return. However if they are using your money then you are taking more risk in that scenario than you’re expecting. Literally going to Vegas isn’t required, the same risk exists in many short term investments. Thus misrepresenting risk is considered fraud even if it happened to work out.
Not when economies of scale provide an ever larger surplus.
Guarding one house in a lawless environment takes less total manpower than guarding a town but not on a per property basis. Enforcing law and order in a country is even more efficient.
Governments don't produce anything. Taxing is only redistribution, not production. You can't tax your way into wealth.
Economies of scale are a facet of capitalism.
If you rob me but then give me back twice as much, the only way this action is not unfair to someone else is if it has the effect of undoing a robbery. I e the surplus I received in the end is actually restitution. Furthermore, it was taken back from the correctly identified robbers.
That's how your Bolsheviks and Leninists justified their ideas and actions: monarchs and capitalists are just parasites who have taken from the people, so if you take it away from them, it's just restitution.
Animal flocking behavior exists from what amounts to economies of scale. Each animal can spend less effort watching their surroundings when there exists a large group with similar motivations.
> the only way this action is not unfair to someone else is if it has the effect of undoing a robbery
The benefit of a road network grows with the total size of a road network and can therefore quickly exceed the cost of creating and maintaining it. That’s a surplus which has nothing to do with moving money from individual A to individual B. It’s a surplus derived from scale not the efficiency of construing individual segments of road.
People tend to judge their government by the standard of what it could be if it just exercised common decency and honesty, not by comparison to failed states or anarchy. Personally I think this is the correct standard.
In India it is systemic variable in every system the legal structure is made in such a way there is always provision for corruption and bribery at various levels the political system encourages it in large quantity when is the local small time system and official them takes it in in small quantities
> "The key to corruption is improving the quality of government. Without that, anti-corruption strategies are bound to fail".
> "If you put people in the right environment, with the right institutions, you can reduce corruption substantially, possibly because they quickly adapt to what’s going on in their environment".
The way you seem to be using the word "cultural" here and in your other comments seems to be to imply that corruption is, in some sense, "inbuilt" into certain people, based on their "culture", and not into others. I.e., Mexicans are inherently more corrupt, and Europeans inherently less corrupt. By their nature. Is that an accurate reading of what you're saying?
If it is, then the actual point of the article quite violently contradicts your view. If corruption were some inherent aspect of people's "being", based on their "culture", then changing governments or institutions would surely make no difference whatsoever to corruption levels, right? Their true nature would just continue, unperturbed, as prone to corruption as ever.
The article says clearly and repeatedly - as in the quotes I share above - that this isn't the reality of what happens.
Put differently, you could say that corruption is "cultural", if by "cultural" you meant specifically that it is dependent on one's environment, and isn't whatsoever inherent in a person's "nature".
You seem to be saying the opposite, though, and still claiming the article confirms that? Puzzling.
> Is that an accurate reading of what you're saying?
Not at all.
> I.e., Mexicans are inherently more corrupt, and Europeans inherently less corrupt. By their nature.
Not sure what you mean "by their nature" but it sounds like you're saying it's about genetics which is definitely NOT what I'm saying.
Culture is a context. It's not biological, it's artificial.
Europe has a different cultural context than Mexico. Mexicans in Europe will behave differently than in Mexico (and vice versa) which is what the experiment mentioned in the OP showed.
As to why this is... maybe the fact that Mexico has +95% rate of impunity might be a factor (sarcasm).
I think you're really underestimating Western European corruption. This might have been true in the early days after the end of the cold war and might still be true in non-EU Eastern Europe since Soviet bureaucracy was even more unaccountable than the West's, but within the EU we're quickly converging.
No country is corruption free but the difference between Europe and Mexico is shocking. At least the European countries I know first hand.
In Mexico it's blatant and it's everywhere. In Europe most people would never think of bribing a police man to escape a fine while in Mexico a mordida is business as usual. There are police men whose only job is to get money from all the people they stop.
Here's an anecdote from my early years in Mexico. You have to check your car once or twice ever year to get like a govt sticker otherwise the car cannot be used in some places. Well sometimes the queues to do this process are extremely long. I've seen first hand someone from the verification center going to every car in the queue and asking "with jump or without jump?". Meaning, if you want to jump in front of the queue you have to "pay extra".
> No country is corruption free but the difference between Europe and Mexico is shocking.
> In Europe most people would never think of bribing a police man
I would say that lack of petty corruption doesn't exclude big scale corruption which is very much alive in Europe.
Backdealing, lobbying, money laundering. I don't rememeber Mexican banks laundering hundreds of bilions etc. Mexican car manufactures cheating for years on car emissions.
These things are reserved for European countries from top of most transparent countries list (Hello Denmark, Hello Germany).. We just keep forgetting. And we are conditioned by propaganda to look down on other cultures.
Stoping petty officers from accepting bribes is just European establishment's way of "Don't steal - your goverment hates competition".
> Backdealing, lobbying, money laundering. I don't rememeber Mexican banks laundering hundreds of bilions etc. Mexican car manufactures cheating for years on car emissions.
EU politicians caught backdealing are being prosecuted. Bank money laundering wasn't done by the government's banks. Car emissions cheating also wasn't the government.
is with jump or without jump corruption? Depends if the money goes to the person asking or to the center. If the person is paid to let keep people in line, and keeps the money, it is corruption. If it goes to the center, it's probably called a vip pass or so somewhere. Skip the line doesn't strike me as corruption as much as actually "purchasing" your driving licence, or being let through a checkpoint with fruit you're not supposed to bring from one island onto another to avoid spreading tree disease...
Of course it's corruption. Most of the money goes to the boss of the center.
This happens on plenty of public offices (probably most). You need some permit to build something? You either pay or wait for years to get it, if ever.
Just read this comment on Reddit written by a Mexican:
> I built a manufacturing shop in Mexico, the area isn't zoned yet. This should tell you all you need to know, if any government official can find a way to get a "mordida" they will. I spent almost 10 grand in just bribes to get all the proper permits. If you get pulled over by the police, you're paying a bribe. A neighbor of mine had a pistol in his car. He paid almost 2 grand in a bribe to get released.
Even if the boss keeps the money, it may be tacitly part of his salary. Perhaps that motivates him to provide better service to the jump customers so they don't go to some other station and pay some other boss. This system might even work more effectively than one where the jump fee goes to the government. Even if it does go to the government, aren't you then bribing the whole government to get preferential service at the expense of non-jumpers? So I think it's morally a gray area.
Corruption is incredibly poisonous to countries. It’s closely correlated with a lack of development and tends to be self-reinforcing.
It erodes trust in institutions, encourages the breaking of other rules and generally keeps poor countries poor, especially when it comes to foreign investment.
Maybe that is ideal, but they are plenty of official jump fees that we don't think of as corrupt. In super-non-corrupt New Zealand, we can pay extra for faster processing of resource consent applications, passport applications, and visas. We can also pay a fee for a chance in a random draw for enrollment in desirable schools. Criminals can pay money to their victims in exchange for a chance at a lighter sentence.
Maybe in 50 years Mexicans will be honest and Europeans will be corrupt. I don't think anyone honestly thinks that corruption is inherent to anyone's genetics.
All human moral behavior straddles the line betweeen selflessness and selfishness, at some particular scale, from the personal to the societal/cultural.
Racism? Selfishness for the group.
Religious bigotry? Selfishness for the group.
Misogyny? Need I say?
Corruption? Selfishness for one's personal gain at the expense of the system, itself.
Goodness? Virtue? Honor? Positive cultural evolution? Selflessness in service to the whole.
That is why the world has been tending towards the negative for soooo long. We have been inculcated into belief systems that separate us from each other along some boundary, be it cultural, racial, religious, gender identification, sexual preference, country, neighborhood, ... whatever.
We are all one human race, of many ethnicities and cultures, but we will only begin to heal our blessed Earth and end all conflict, by recognizing that we are the only creatures capable of self-evolving a world culture of universal care.
The goal must be universal compassion towards one another, selflessly, except when such kind, selfless behavior would contradict the paradox of tolerance. In those instances, we must be unyielding, but as gentle as good outcomes allow. Only a compassionate society can know how and when to prosecute the vermin among us, who come from all walks of life. We must endeavor to teach the ignorant, while protecting the innocent.
Just systems of law, enforced fairly, are the bedrock of such a society.
I agree 100% with the values you espouse here, but I think it's a mistake to say the world has been trending negative for a long time. The values you've expressed here have been gaining ground for generations. (See Steven Pinker's ''The Better Angels of our Nature'' for an in-depth data-backed defense of this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...). Your statement "Just systems of law, enforced fairly, are the bedrock of such a society" is almost exactly the thesis of that book.
I was turned on to the idea that Pinker might be quite wrong on these claims by David Graeber and David Wengrow in "The Dawn of Everything". I haven't read Better Angels of our Nature, and I haven't spent hours carefully verifying the Davids claims, but I must say, they certainly made it sound very convincing. Enough for me to feel like not reading Better Angels would not be a major loss in my life.
I went to that wikipedia article you link there to see if that gets a mention, and the "Criticism" section is ginormous. So I'm not going to go out on a limb and say you shouldn't be recommending it at all, but I will say that based on the very large number of serious scholars who were apparently upset enough about many of the claims of the book that they then went on to write long serious things criticising it, perhaps in light of that you should reconsider whether it's as "data-backed" as you thought.
It could have crap data, or good data poorly interpreted. The many critics seem to think both.
You should also see the criticism of "The Dawn of Everything", ie way overstating the veracity of certain history that they're trying to use to support Graeber's polemics on anarchism.
In typical Graeber fashion, the book is very fun to read, but he's an unreliable narrator of history, which is why they could only get a no name historian to be involved in an attempt to add credibility.
I wasn't saying we should dismiss Pinker because of that one book by the Davids, rather that we should be very sceptical of his work because of the absolute chorus of academics seriously contesting his methods, motivations, and conclusions.
I have read one long criticism of The Dawn of Everything, I don't know if it's the one you're referring to, but I didn't find it very compelling.
I've read several critics of Graeber otherwise though, and to me they roughly seemed to amount to: "we don't like what this person is saying." I mean, I could not find anything substantive in there, some direct, blatant issue with the scholarly work. Perhaps there's a tendency to get "over-excited" about some idea or other in his work, but I think readers (academic and laypeople) could consider forgiving someone for presenting their work with sincere excitement.
The comment about David Wengrow you make there is especially odd - for one, you make it sound like he was thrown in to the project as an afterthought to add some clout, which is factually not what happened, they collaborated for years in emails for what was originally a small project, which grew larger organically in a sort of growing excitement.
I wouldn't be big on bandying about academic records as proof of anything much, but he'd twenty plus years professional academic experience as an archaeologist, three books, a suitably voluminous number of essays and papers, etc etc. The usual "impressive academic" things had been done. So I don't get your dig there at all.
The main critique of the book that I've seen is that they use history that's quite ambiguous to tell a polemic story that supports Graeber's anarchist views.
For instance, they take the upheavals at Teotihuacan as evidence that there was some kind of anarchist-ish revolution going on, when most scholarship believes that it's more likely an oligarchic system (with less emphasis on the monarch) who destroyed (from my memory) the temple/cult/district of the Feathered Serpent - a sub-group of their oligarchy.
This is interesting, but is pretty consistent with how other Mesoamerican ruling classes selected their rulers (Aztecs, etc.) ie there was often an oligarchy who picked them, not the populous as a whole via an anarchist / direct democratic method.
For Wengrow, I assume him working with the far-more-famous Graeber probably led to him to have some flexible interpretations of history, and I bet Graeber was pretty convincing + had a high power differential (implicitly) which could lead this to happen somewhat unknowingly.
The selfish / selfless binary is a bit simplistic to explain corruption.
If your brother killed someone, would you turn him over to the authorities? You can't answer this question by checking how selfish someone is - both options can be considered selfless acts.
If I remember correctly (can't find a source), places that answer yes to that question tend to have higher trust in institutions and lower rates of corruption
"The selfish / selfless binary is a bit simplistic to explain corruption."
Corruption is selfish gain. If one eschews corruption because they realize that it harms the society-at-large, then they are acting selflessly. If one eschews corruption because they're afraid of being caught and punished, then the legal system has prevented societal harm, by preventing corrupt selfishness by a public servant.
As to your hypothetical, I like my friend from Lousiana's saying, "If my aunt had a d*k, she'd be my uncle." Of course, in 2024, that saying is looking a bit ragged.
That said, extreme hypotheticals are not going to get to the bottom of this issue of corruption. It's the ordinary, everyday corruption that erodes society, not having to turn one's brother over to the authorities for murder. And ordinary, everyday corruption is both selfishness, pure and simple, and a failure of society to emplace the necessary checks to prevent it.
But most people misunderstand love as merely the feeling one has about another person or creature.
Love's highest manifestation is, however, an action that serves another person's happiness. It can be something that lessens a person misery or discomfort, or actually makes them happier in some way. It can be as simple as a warm smile on the street or giving something to them. Intention is important, and how it is received is irrelevant. The universe is sublime, and there is no end to our learning, if we so endeavor to plumb its depths.
Every human being's life is the result of such selflessly compassionate service, for, as infants, we must be given everything or we perish. For years. There is nothing tangible received for that giving, unless one understands how very tangible inner peace and happiness is. Understanding our place in this moral universe makes such happiness the only thing that matters, to those of us who actually understand. Know that no one is forced to comprehend or accept this most sublime of laws, just as there are flat-earth folks, too, who refuse to look through a telescope. We all have the choice to be as foolish (and unhappy) as we wish.
> That is why the world has been tending towards the negative for soooo long.
All evidence I've seen in the world is tending better. There are, and always have been concerning signs, but overall things have been getting better. But everyone places more emphasis on the concerning signs and doesn't really think of all the things that have gotten better.
Living standards have improved, but at vast cost the environment, and we show no signs of addressing this.
The amount of energy we spend on irrelevant stuff like the stock market & AI should instead be directed toward dealing with climate change, and not turning our oceans into lifeless garbage dumps. But our economical model can only handle things that make more money for rich people, so we won't.
The stock market is a good idea. Without it you wouldn't have most things you think are a good idea, nor probably half the things you think are a scandal because not everyone has them.
> But our economical model can only handle things that make more money for rich people, so we won't.
I think that might depend on how far you look to compare. Like 1700s to now, yeah we're better by any metric you can think of. But on a smaller scale there are some things tending down.
Even compared to the 1970s we are much better off. The ozone hole is in track. Lead has been removed from nearly everything. Nearly everyone has a cell phone. Much less world hunger.
In various ways, I completely agree with you, but there is a different level of negativity that is happening that is about the levers of power and wealth and what they are doing to the poor and the planet, itself. When a billionaire or government corruptly uses their power to press down on the populace for the gain of the wealthy, the effects are much more deleterious than the gains of we peasants, for example, learning how to no longer be racist or trans- or homophobic.
Those "small" gains are absolutely important, and are essential for our next societal level-up, but the corruption-in-the-large is an order-of-magnitude (or two) more physically destructive. I mean, look how many fools look up to Elmo and his cohort of kleptocrats. And look how the fossil-fuel industry buried the truth of global heating.
That's why I believe that RATM's self-titled debut album is the most important album of the 20th Century. And while I understand rage to be purely destructive, I firmly believe there's a time for righteous anger, especially in the face of oppression and wanton destruction.
This sort of outlook is very common in psychedelic experiences and community conversations. I'd like to see a scenario where someone clever from that community starts a propaganda campaign pushing such ideas as a serious proposition, and comes equipped to efficiently dismiss the classic normative dismissals or rhetorical topic avoidance techniques, forcing all the "good people" to seriously consider if their thoughts, prayers, secular platitudes, etc are adequate.
It would be nice if we could make some progress on this front for a change.
PS: your closing sentence severely rubs me the wrong way because it feels like it could be interpreted as support for the status quo.
What country do you live in where there is actual justice? I've never heard of such a one. From what I see, the powerful dominate the weak, abuse the Earth with no concern for future generations, and manipulate systems to ensure their own group's wealth and impunity.
So, Sir, I stand with Banksy, Bob Marley, MLK, RATM and other like-minded agents of change. But I understand that love is the only way to forge a better future for our Earth and ALL her peoples -- but a fierce, unyielding love, to be sure.
I love the sentiment, but are there some potential flaws in the analysis?
We mostly pay lip service to these things, but if you look around the world at things that get done (what you refer to!), there's a lot more than lip service and nice sentiments/intentions involved.
It depends on what you mean by that. We can choose how we perceive the objective reality we live in. But, the totality of the world is really just the sum-total of results of what we are all doing to it, for the simple reason that all our free wills are equal, no matter how positive or negative. It is really that simple, but the wealthy and powerful move levers that affect far more people than I can (yet) move by myself.
> but are there some potential flaws in the analysis?
If there are flaws in my analysis, I am open to learning how to correct them. That is the only way to get better at anything, right? That said, the correctness of my foundation of logic is evident after more than a half-century on this Earth. Most people do not understand, but we physically manifest our cumulative karma as we age, from our tone of voice, to choice of words, to eye shine, and -- most of all -- to our inner peace and happiness, sense of humor and delight in the small things of life. Life is beautiful, and what we choose to manifest in this world shows up in our being as surely as a tree's experiences show up in their rings. The problem is that most people are too confused and mired in their self to learn how to see others for who they are.
> there's a lot more than lip service and nice sentiments/intentions involved.
Absolutely, but intention is a multiplier for the karma we receive for our actions, which are of paramount importance. That is why the feeling of love is not nearly as important as the selfless doing of compassionate deeds to serve others' happiness.
One thing you should be certain to understand: the selfish fools of this world have always been the majority, and not just within extrema such as Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. Their dominant ignorance and my relative powerlessness do not diminish my family's efforts to create positive change in our every interaction with our fellow human beings. That our efforts mostly fall on deaf ears is not our failure, but theirs and theirs alone.
What we are doing is not sentiment, whether it is a kind word on the street or a couple of hours typing into HN. Teaching the truth of compassion is essential in this troubled world full of willfully ignorant human beings.
I like to phrase it as "people are so utterly selfish that they will even cooperate when it's in their interest" (where their interest includes simply feeling good because that's the training they went through - e.g. somebody gives up his life for his country may sound altruistic, but we might find it abhorrent if that means he kills a bunch of children).
I've never heard that saying before; I like it. Thanks for expanding my horizon.
The nature of human life is, however, that we feel good for making others feel good, and vice versa. We truly reap what we sow, but it is sublime and at odds with what most people value in life, namely wealth, pleasure, and power. And, along with our power to choose, we can choose to ignore our conscience's pleadings for better behavior.
So, in an odd (but accurate) way, making others happy is the most selfish thing we can do, because it is the only way to earn happiness, which is a mysterious flowing into ourselves from parts unknown.
We live in a subtly reflexive, karmic universe. Only we human beings inhabit this plane of existence, because only we have the choice between selfishness and selflessness, with a conscience to orient ourselves, and a mind to evaluate the potentialities of every move we make. And we are each absolutely free to value the horrific (vice-eous) and eschew the virtuous.
WWII is a deep example of how societies can go so completely wrong, and yet be so confident in their intentions and self-destructive actions. It is also an example of other folks uniting to do good in the world. Both paths are totally human; the question is which path do each of us choose, and by which moral ethic?
I'm not talking about physical things. I'm only talking about our inner world, where the sowing and reaping are connected across time in varying ways according to the designs of creation itself.
That is why I counsel that it is best to just do good as often as possible, but without any connection to reward. Let the universe reward you in its time and place; it knows best, always. Simply send out your deeds' good vibes; they will return. Every time. And, all the while, one's internal peace and happiness will only grow.
[Also, William Gibson is by far my favorite fiction author. "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed."]
> Goodness? Virtue? Honor? Positive cultural evolution? Selflessness in service to the whole.
"Selflessness" is itself selfishness. You act good, virtuous, honorable, etc to selfishly attain societal praise or esteem. Or even rewards in the afterlife.
> The goal must be universal compassion towards one another, selflessly
Not selflessly. Selfishly. After all, kant's categorical imperative is logically selfish. You would benefit from the realization of such a goal. Everyone would.
It's perceived selfishness that drives people toward good or evil. It's actually selfishness itself that defines good and evil.
While I largely agree, I was thinking about selfishness and selflessness in a different way.
In game theory, games have global optima and Nash equilibria, and they don't always coincide. Selfless people seek global maximum, selfish people seek Nash equilibrum (maximizing their gain given the others also maximize their gain).
As a society, we have choice to change the rules so that global maximum coincides with Nash equilibrium.
Here's a true relation that you can factor into your model, if you'd like, for, though I am a long-time programmer, I don't go in for the study of game theory. I am, however, familiar with some of the precepts. Here goes:
When a person causes negativity/unhappiness, the person(s) on the receiving end gets an equal positive amount of karma. Karma is what determines our long-term happiness or lack thereof.
When a person does something intended to cause positivity/happiness, there is no negative effect on the receiver, even if they refuse the gesture.
In other words, acts of selfish negativity incur a zero-sum negative karmic effect, every time, without fail, though often without being observed at the time (or even, ever). OTOH, acts of selfless positivity only incur positive internal karmic effect for the doer; nothing is lost by the receiver.
In yet more other words, we can only receive negative karma from our own actions; others' actions can only result in positive karma for ourselves (if we are on the receiving end of selfishly negativity). For example, a poor person loses no karma from accepting charity, though the giver definitely gains.
As such, karma is skewed asymmetrically towards easier positive creation; i.e. it's only a zero-sum game when the first choice is negative/selfish.
Why, then, have the world's populations not yet created a "Heaven on Earth"? Because we human beings are also free to ignore all notions of karma and the associated question of why we are happy/unhappy. If a person chooses to believe that they are just amoral animals competing for scarce resources, then they are fully authorized to live their lives that way. We are also free to believe that the Earth is flat. The universe is the sole arbiter of the truth, however, and we all reap what we sow. Every time, without fail, with perfect justice, however difficult it is for us to comprehend at any given time, given our state of moral undevelopment.
> Because we human beings are also free to ignore all notions of karma and the associated question of why we are happy/unhappy
A newborn can have a chronic disease that makes their life terribly difficult. Do you think negative karma caused that? Or can other things cause unhappiness?
Some people have been given greater challenges than others. Any difficulty given by the universe itself only counts positively for us, but we have to use it properly; i.e. we can't let it give us an excuse to be an ahole.
On the other end of the spectrum, most people feel that being born into wealth would be a great blessing, but look how those fools behave, wasting their blessings on themselves for meaningless pleasures that deplete the Earth, being callous in their treatment of those less fortunate, and generally working with their fellows to keep themselves on the top of the heap.
Being striken with disease is an effective way to go within oneself and connect with the Source of all creation, which is an essential part of the intent of the creation of our human nature. One way to look at the Unfathomable Creator is as the Ultimate Loner. It is a blessing to have been created as a human being, for only we can connect with It, and receive the blessing of reaching out for It.
That is the Ultimate Design of the human race, with our absolutely free will, but within a universe that rewards the seeker who connects with the sublime majesty of the Creator of all that will ever be. The Greatest Command is to, first, "Love God with all your being". That is not because we can add anything to It, nor because It is needy in any way. No. It is because the universe is designed to reward those of us who use our free will and energy to radiate love into the universe; it radiates that love back from within ourselves in happiness, clarity, and purpose.
Another way to look at the underprivileged (in money or health) is that they are rewarded for being where a person of means can prove their humanity, and thus giving them the chance to learn how happiness is gained from selflessly sharing, not from selfishly keeping.
Karma is a human-only dimension of the universe we inhabit. We alone have free will, a conscience, and a mind capable of discerning right and wrong, thus we alone lose and/or gain karma.
I would say that when there was only one human being, there was only positive karma, so I would say that there was no negative karma until there was a second person to do something wrong to the first person, thus facilitating the transfer that results from a negative deed.
From another perspective, I'd say that the first human being could sin against God, but that doesn't align with my understanding of how human beings were created. My understanding is that Adam was created in a state of grace, as a Prophet, free of negativity, but that as the population grew, our negative tendencies (to vice) established itself and the karma began to flow.
[I have some understanding of how the universe works, but I in no way claim to be authoritative. That said, I don't see any obvious errors in my reasoning.]
So, corruption can be fixed. Change the circumstances and people will stop being corrupt. Fairness is intrinsically human. Inequality and in general the perception of an unfair system makes people misbehave (as they try to compensate for injustices).
This is very important as corruption is one of the major causes of countries poverty. (Taking as base-line the country natural-resources).
Survival of the fittest is just the circumstances we find ourselves in. Our strategy to survive is cooperation. Human are amazing at cooperation, second only to eusocial insects. Fairness is an important mechanism in organizing this cooperation.
"Might makes right" will also force cooperation from those who are less fortunate. I'd argue there was almost never "fairness" in human relationships, from stronger warriors getting the best food to kings forcing their will upon their subjects to filthy rich individuals owning the greatest part of the world wealth today.
My point is in no way that this is right. Only that humans are not intrinsically fair.
Not just the circumstances you grew up in either. You can grow up with a silver spoon in your mouth, or poor as a church mouse. You get imparted the best morals in both cases. And you'll still be prone to participate in corruption given the correct circumstances when you reach that stage.
It doesn't surprise me that we find participation in corruption increasing as news of corruption increases. Especially when you feel like people get away with it. One of the factors controlling whether or not people engage in these activities is how pervasive the activity is in society. Another is whether or not a person thinks they'll get away with it? If they believe they will, they're more likely to engage in corruption. And the more they see others get away with corruption, the more they think they themselves can get away with it.
I liken it to speeding. To many drivers it appears pervasive, and they often see many other drivers get away with speeding. So the circumstances one grew up in won't have nearly as big an impact on anti-speeding behavior as seeing the flashing blue lights of highway patrol vehicles every few miles.
Add to that in some cases, you might get in more "trouble" for not engaging in corruption.
To use pier25's example again, someone who does't pay to skip the line might not get a turn if many others do and waste a bunch of time, have to come back the next day, potentially to the same effect. Or if you don't pay the expected bribe at a checkpoint, cops might find something wrong with your car lands you a more expensive fine (actual fine with paper trail + bribe instead of just bribe). You could argue that's extortion and not corruption but same principle to me.
During Covid lockdown, a friend needed to pay bribes to get a pass for their family to be able to do their shopping. It was supposed to be one pass per house in their area, but the owner of the neighborhood held them back and kept several for the own family, so no bribe, no trip to the store... Better to pay the bribe to the owner than risk it with the cops checking permits on the street.
This is just to say, taking part in corruption may not be optional where it is the norm, regardless of a person's education or morals.
That is simply not true, for the vast majority of the world's cultures and societies.
Yes, we all have a conscience (inner moral compass), but few of us are taught how to hone and develop it over one's lifetime, using one's intellect to improve our thought processes to be better, more virtuous, human beings.
We are the only creatures that self-evolve, and it is precisely our moral nature that puts this severe responsibility upon us to nurture selfless universal compassion as a personal and societal imperative. Otherwise, we wreak destruction on our blessed Mother Earth and our fellow human beings. We are to use our gifts to create happiness for each other, not misery.
We have the free will to ignore this moral imperative. Look at the state of global heating to gauge its prevalence.
I was giving 2 hypothetical examples. If someone grows up rich, or if someone grows up poor. It won't matter what you teach them. Nor will it matter their morals if they go out into a world where corruption is pervasive and corruption is rarely, if ever, punished. Those two hypothetical people, and any other human, would fall into the pattern of engaging in corruption.
You're right; we all have the choice to be saints or demons, or anywhere in between! We can be one on one day and the other on others.
What is important is to teach empathy as the antidote to bullying, and then have those individuals construct their society's laws to prevent and/or punish bullying of all kinds. Same with govt corruption, of course.
"any other human, would fall into the pattern of engaging in corruption."
I wouldn't, because I honor my sense of honor, of truth. I can raise my voice and say, without hesitation, that I am incorruptible, because I choose to be this way, because it strengthens my inner peace and happiness. I was not always like this, but I have learned to be this way and appreciate feeling the joy of having self-evolved myself in this direction.
It is each person's choice. That most are choosing poorly is academic, if one sees what the world is becoming, and knows what the world could be, if only our design was based upon selfless, compassionate cooperation instead of selfish, callous competition.
> Peoples' entire behavior thought their life is largely influenced by their circumstances in which they grew up in.
From the article:
"But what they discovered is that the nationality of the other player was more important than their own and all — New Zealanders, Dutch and British — were willing to offer bribes to those they believed to be corrupt in what they defined as conditional bribery."
One of the core problems with human behavior comes from a lack of thinking.
If people would consider their actions in the context of, “what I do, others will do”, then they would realize that many actions they deem as insignificant or harmless (throwing a small piece of trash on the sidewalk, taking two items from the “take 1 free” basket, etc. cause real problems when everyone does it.
It may seem insignificant to the individual, but in principle if they do it, others are also doing it, and it has a large scale impact. This applies in the positive direction too, such as when people perform random acts of kindness (which encourages others to do the same).
Agree 100%. I recently found that Kant had pretty much introduced this concept as categorical imperative[0]: 'Act as if the maxims of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature.'
The article talks about corruption like it's just a clearly bad thing and people either do the bad thing or not, but it's a blurry line between engaging in corruption and the normal ways that organizations work. Examples:
If you pay a speeding ticket, isn't that like participating in corruption by buying your way out of punishment for endangering people? Is it really morally any different from paying a bribe to the policeman who catches you speeding in a country where that's the common way? In both cases, you pay for speeding and your money ends up going towards the policeman's income.
Forming a personal connection with the interviewer when applying for a government job. Now you're suddenly like his friend and he's more inclined to select you. Maybe he expects to have a good relationship with you in future and gain intangible benefits from that if he hires you.
In my country, teacher jobs have to be publicly advertised, presumably to combat nepotism. But schools regularly hire internally and their advertisement includes a statement like "no actual vacancy" telling people not to waste time applying. I guess they're following the law but still corrupting the ideal of not favoring your friends.
It seems like you have to have a deep understanding of how and why the systems works the way it does to figure out if a particular action is morally corrupt or not. You can just follow the law but that seems to allow some society-harming corruption and nobody feels guilty about it.
> The article talks about corruption like it's just a clearly bad thing and people either do the bad thing or not, but it's a blurry line between engaging in corruption and the normal ways that organizations work.
Until you have "cops" every 10 miles on the freeway all demanding a bribe at gunpoint.
"Corruption" is sand in the gears of everything.
You can't go from point A to point B in a consistent amount of time or money. You can't order something and expect it to work without triple checking everything yourself. etc.
We have a great example of the pernicious effects of corruption: Russia couldn't roll over Ukraine because corruption completely hollowed out their military.
I've lived for several years in parts of the world where bribing police is, unfortunately, normal.
There's a couple of places around the country where it's known that the police do shakedowns (although they certainly don't point guns at you). I guess especially corrupt police work in those areas.
But for the most part I am much less likely to get stopped for minor traffic violations than I would be back home, where bribing the police isn't a thing. I'm sure there are other countries where police shakedowns is a problem, but it's not just a simple equation of bribable police = shakedowns.
Yea I know it's generally bad most of the time. But I think the details of what is and isn't corruption are too complicated for ordinary people to decide based on morals because they'd have to understand all the implications. That's what the law is meant to be for, but does corruption magically stop being objectionable if it's made legal? I think we'd still call that corruption in obvious cases.
> If you pay a speeding ticket, isn't that like participating in corruption by buying your way out of punishment for endangering people? Is it really morally any different from paying a bribe to the policeman who catches you speeding in a country where that's the common way? In both cases, you pay for speeding and your money ends up going towards the policeman's income.
I mean, one goes to the government to help all citizens, one lines the pocket of a corrupt cop and does not benefit society in anyway.
So yes, there is a huge gulf of difference between the two.
Also an official ticket goes on record so the cop can tell if you've had many and maybe deserve a more severe punishment, the bribe is never recorded so we can't track the bad drives in this instance.
> pocket of a corrupt cop and does not benefit society in anyway.
It motivates him to stop speeding drivers which is good for society.
To your second point, maybe a better system would be the policeman gets paid a commission on the tickets he issues so they're still recorded. But if it's not set up that way, bribery might be more effective than not.
> It motivates him to stop speeding drivers which is good for society.
No, it motivates him to stop any driver that can't be confirmed to not be speeding under the level of 3d-party scrutiny the cop judges he risks to get under the circumstances.
And also the ones that are more likely to offer more money.
Is it really good for society? Germany has the safest highways in the world. Also the only highways where it's exciting to see a police car while going 250 km/h.
Some try to dismiss this by saying that there are areas with lower speeds - yes; they're placed where you need to slow down anyway, it's more like "hey buddy, beware of this sharp curve" rather than "we will milk your wallet if you go 1 km/h over this idiotically low speed". I go to Berlin regularly (500km) and my speed average including the slowdown areas is around 230 km/h and I'm not even close to the fastest one on the road.
The best thing about this? The German diesel engine - drinking less fuel at these speeds than an American truck on idle.
I think that depends on the place. I can imagine that US cities with straight wide streets and roads are very hard to judge. But I can't imagine anyone having trouble with that in any European city... The top speed would be your last problem in any capital - you celebrate when it's not 0.
In India the legal system is made in such a way including the top judiciary the political system takes over the labyrinthine ways of corruption and encourged
This article hints at, but doesn't fully dive into, the perspective of personal ethics. Many people who would never steal money from an individual would happily steal money from the government. As humans we tend to view these acts very differently.
Relatedly, such people are more likely to steal money from a government they see as evil/corrupt, than a government they see as good. This probably drives a large part of the "contextual" corruption effect the article discusses, where a non-corrupt individual starts working for a corrupt government and suddenly becomes corrupt.
> Many people who would never steal money from an individual would happily steal money from the government.
It's always said something to me that most people who wouldn't dream of making a profit selling something to a member of their family will spend all day trying to profit off of strangers.
It may just be a matter of proximity, with a instinctual heuristic of shared interests. Rather than people making a division of governments between "good" and "evil", it's more like a government that's with me or against me. I don't want to hurt what's helping me. Which honestly takes it completely out of the range of morality, and back into realpolitik and pragmatism.
'To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.' -- Abbie Hoffman
What is morality but a simplified approximation of realpolitik?
Your morals are my profit.
the acts are philosophically different. Stealing from a thief who has stolen from you is also pretty different from stealing from a stranger at the level of personal ethics.
Few governments aren’t a massive net surplus for their citizens, just look at any failed state to see the alternative.
So calling them a thief is almost always purely self serving nonsense.
> Few governments aren’t a massive net surplus for their citizens
If the baseline is a complete lack of social organization, yes. But that's a terrible baseline. You compare governments to other potential governments, not to anarchy. That would be like calling eating six ounces of oatmeal per day a massive net surplus to starving to death; of course it is, but that's the easiest curve in the world.
And the fact that you can only have one government at a time means that your current one is blocking all of the others.
> But that's a terrible baseline.
Fair but it’s such a massive difference there’s steps up the ladder which are still worse.
I’d still be careful when suggesting anything but success is theft, because as you say internal transitions are risky. Migration however has improved the living standards of billions throughout history.
Meanwhile just about anywhere today is still better for the average person than living in say medieval Europe or antiquity etc. Falling birth rates provide a significant opportunity for improvement. China isn’t a great place to live, but it’s also now the 2nd most populous country.
I feel like you’re defending terrible governments for no particular reason. Of course it might be better to live in modern china than medieval europe, but this doesn’t defeat the notion that modern china could be made much better for its people if the structure of its government were altered.
The point of the argument isn’t, or doesn’t have to be, technicality (“bad governance constitutes theft”) but a statement about what one believes the people deserve. Implicit in the argument is a belief in a social contract being voided by one party, wherein the government makes lacking effort to provide “the best possible governance” and the people respond with disobedience. I’d personally disagree with the notion of a social contract, and argue only from the idea that an alteration to the government could produce better outcomes, but that argument would produce the same sentiment as the one they’re expressing, so in what way would you disagree with their sentiment?
I’m defending social order not terrible government. Governments can be a pure net negative, but that’s really rare.
I disagree with the idea that ‘poor performance’ rather than ‘negative performance’ gives someone extra authority. Voiding the social contract by leaving is one thing, but “disobedience” is something else.
Anyone can disagree with how a government functions, but individuals who dislike something don’t inherently know how to build a better system. Even non violent means like tax evasion, protests, and voter suppression have real downsides. When people act with the assumption of authority they often result in serious negative consequences and only very rarely cause actual improvement.
Taken to the extreme the idea even supports wars of conquest. If your government is even mildly better than another why not ‘improve’ the situation.
PS: Which isn’t to say operating within a given system is useless. Convincing others, be that voters or a dictator, can also enact change with less risk. But again well supported arguments are safer than simply persuasive ones, because you can more easily adapt to changing conditions.
For example today we have more options, but in the mid 90’s the US environmentalists arguing for nuclear power could have been a meaningful contribution to climate change potentially offsetting ~10 billion tons of CO2 by now. That’s the kind of politics makes strange bedfellows compromise which you don’t see when everyone is throwing around emotionally charged rhetoric. Which sums up my argument, the perfect ideal is often the enemy of the practical.
I’d argue that the solution isn’t for people to avoid protest or disobedience though. The civil rights movement in the US was composed of a lot of different groups, plenty of which were unsatisfied with anything less than radical change. The tactic was then to unite these people under a leader smart enough to negotiate the meeting point of their interests and the pressures of practical political change in the US. The endless civil disobedience and threat of radical violence was then a powerful piece of leverage, really the sole source of leverage, in mlk’s negotiation with lbj.
Given that brain enhancement is a while away, it’s gonna be a while before most people are able to weigh the nuanced ripple effects of their actions in order to optimally resist bad leadership, or be able to see the impracticality of otherwise good ideas; these are difficult mental feats that require a lot of self reflection. I wouldn’t then suggest that these people do nothing. I’d suggest that they represent, in essence, a productive force to be taken up and wielded against the subject of their discontent by similarly motivated, but intelligent, leadership.
Its the same concept with environmentalism. You can’t expect Joe Environment to be smart enough and critical enough to reason his way around the panic-inducing coverage of nuclear scares, but maybe you can harness his frustration with environmental as a source of political power.
I don’t think we’re going to agree though; I think we’re motivated differently. I don’t really find myself enticed by social order in the same way, and I’d trade away much of that stability to get a good shot at change that could make society more pleasant.
I’d argue for many Americans in 1960 the existing system was an actual net negative, and for others it was close. There was ~100,000 young men risking prison for homosexual relationships, about to be sent to Vietnam, treated like dirt for being black, and under significant threat of nuclear war all at the same time. That’s being rather uniquely shat on by a system setup to benefit others.
I don’t expect random environmentalist to have a well reasoned stance, but holding activist groups to a higher standard feels reasonable to me. I get just as pissed when nuclear advocates conflate the cost of uranium ore as fuel cost when reactors are using vastly more expensive enriched uranium fuel rods. (Possibly because the fuel bit works.)
> I’d trade away much of that stability to get a good shot at change that could make society more pleasant.
I used to feel that way, but the more I learned about how the world works the more I understood just how delicate these systems are. Gerrymandering isn’t just a free way to political power, it erodes people’s trust in democracy. Elections dependent on swing states and us vs them ideology fed by Ecco chambers isn’t heading to a healthy place. At the other end, the amount of havoc just a single person damaging fuel pipelines and electrical transmission infrastructure could cause is shocking.
Now imagine a few thousand motivated people intelligently trying to damage the US.
Bad governments have a consistent internal logic, and operate at a local maxima. In some sense, they are "doing the best they can", and practically, most forms of resistance damage the social order without improvement.
But surely this wouldn’t argue against resistance itself. If you argue no resistance should take place because it’s too damaging, then you’ll lose the small portion of radicals with beneficial ideas.
You’re also assuming that change only happens in small steps, which would trap you in a local maxima, but what about a revolution? That’s more like a giant leap, potentially in the wrong direction, but it might be worth the risk if the local maxima sucks enough.
Why did you say "Modern China" instead of "Modern USA" or some other country?
Read the end of what i responded to
Define “net”.
An especially corrupt government might be a net surplus compared to anarchy, yet simultaneously a significant net loss compared to a more typical government.
Put another way, the government is failing to give its citizens what it owes them. By analogy, suppose your employer pays you half the wage they agreed to pay. That’s still a form of theft, even if you are still at a surplus compared to the alternative of being unemployed.
Ed: When exactly did these governments agree to do better?
A restaurant consistently providing bad food isn’t theft, it’s just a poor place to go. I have a great deal of sympathy for people living in areas captured by Russia or locked into North Korea etc, but in general it’s decades to generations of poor performance at this point.
> Define “net”.
All personal costs vs all personal benefits. Militaries and public roads etc may be basic functions of government but someone needs to pay for them and your personal contribution isn’t enough to completely cover such expenses.
You might do well to read about the fundamentals of political philosophy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract
Social contract theory is not the basis of political philosophy, it is one response to the problem of political authority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_authority
If you look at the criticisms section of your linked page, you'll also see why social contract theory is more popular in high-school than it is with actual philosophers (most of whom think it's wrong).
That’s not the fundamentals of political philosophy. It’s a western take on political philosophy, there’s many others both from the west and elsewhere.
I doubt very much they don’t know the potential philosophy.
Personally though, at some point theoretical vs practical takes precedence yeah. Or are we going to start going around ‘fixing’ everyone else’s political systems? Because historically, that hasn’t exactly helped has it?
If I rob Peter, but give every penny to Paul, I'm a thief from Peter's perspective.
The question is if I rob Peter, then give him twice as much in return am I still a thief?
According to the US Government, yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli
> According to the US Government, yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli
According to the government he did NOT commit theft.
He was instead “convicted in federal court on two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy.”
If nobody is robbed in a securities fraud, what makes it fraud?
Risk.
Someone could take an underperforming investment to Vegas, happen to double the investment and return. However if they are using your money then you are taking more risk in that scenario than you’re expecting. Literally going to Vegas isn’t required, the same risk exists in many short term investments. Thus misrepresenting risk is considered fraud even if it happened to work out.
Obviously yes; the surplus had to be taken from someone else.
Not when economies of scale provide an ever larger surplus.
Guarding one house in a lawless environment takes less total manpower than guarding a town but not on a per property basis. Enforcing law and order in a country is even more efficient.
Governments don't produce anything. Taxing is only redistribution, not production. You can't tax your way into wealth.
Economies of scale are a facet of capitalism.
If you rob me but then give me back twice as much, the only way this action is not unfair to someone else is if it has the effect of undoing a robbery. I e the surplus I received in the end is actually restitution. Furthermore, it was taken back from the correctly identified robbers.
That's how your Bolsheviks and Leninists justified their ideas and actions: monarchs and capitalists are just parasites who have taken from the people, so if you take it away from them, it's just restitution.
> Economies of scale are a facet of capitalism
Animal flocking behavior exists from what amounts to economies of scale. Each animal can spend less effort watching their surroundings when there exists a large group with similar motivations.
> the only way this action is not unfair to someone else is if it has the effect of undoing a robbery
The benefit of a road network grows with the total size of a road network and can therefore quickly exceed the cost of creating and maintaining it. That’s a surplus which has nothing to do with moving money from individual A to individual B. It’s a surplus derived from scale not the efficiency of construing individual segments of road.
People tend to judge their government by the standard of what it could be if it just exercised common decency and honesty, not by comparison to failed states or anarchy. Personally I think this is the correct standard.
It's not stealing until you've recovered what was taken from you plus some discretionary punitive amount. Beyond that it swings into theft.
In India it is systemic variable in every system the legal structure is made in such a way there is always provision for corruption and bribery at various levels the political system encourages it in large quantity when is the local small time system and official them takes it in in small quantities
I am not Czech but I did see a quote about life under communist rule that you made me remember: He who does not steal, steals from his family.
I always liked: "We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us" - leading to rampant stealing of course.
As Roger Moore said “Just because a man cheats his government does not mean he will betray his country”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_to_Athena
Some government employees even feel the need of a union for collective bargaining against the government.
So corruption is cultural.
I'm a European currently living in Mexico and this has always been obvious.
> "The key to corruption is improving the quality of government. Without that, anti-corruption strategies are bound to fail".
> "If you put people in the right environment, with the right institutions, you can reduce corruption substantially, possibly because they quickly adapt to what’s going on in their environment".
The way you seem to be using the word "cultural" here and in your other comments seems to be to imply that corruption is, in some sense, "inbuilt" into certain people, based on their "culture", and not into others. I.e., Mexicans are inherently more corrupt, and Europeans inherently less corrupt. By their nature. Is that an accurate reading of what you're saying?
If it is, then the actual point of the article quite violently contradicts your view. If corruption were some inherent aspect of people's "being", based on their "culture", then changing governments or institutions would surely make no difference whatsoever to corruption levels, right? Their true nature would just continue, unperturbed, as prone to corruption as ever.
The article says clearly and repeatedly - as in the quotes I share above - that this isn't the reality of what happens.
Put differently, you could say that corruption is "cultural", if by "cultural" you meant specifically that it is dependent on one's environment, and isn't whatsoever inherent in a person's "nature".
You seem to be saying the opposite, though, and still claiming the article confirms that? Puzzling.
> Is that an accurate reading of what you're saying?
Not at all.
> I.e., Mexicans are inherently more corrupt, and Europeans inherently less corrupt. By their nature.
Not sure what you mean "by their nature" but it sounds like you're saying it's about genetics which is definitely NOT what I'm saying.
Culture is a context. It's not biological, it's artificial.
Europe has a different cultural context than Mexico. Mexicans in Europe will behave differently than in Mexico (and vice versa) which is what the experiment mentioned in the OP showed.
As to why this is... maybe the fact that Mexico has +95% rate of impunity might be a factor (sarcasm).
https://www.impunidadcero.org/impunidad-en-mexico/ (in Spanish)
Ah, ok, well then I was misunderstanding what you were saying, sorry about that.
Culture emerges from underlying biology.
When you say it like that it sounds like you're implying that Europeans are honest and Mexicans are corrupt.
As an Eastern European, I can agree that we're simply much more corrupt than Western Europeans, and it indeed is a cultural phenomenon.
I think you're really underestimating Western European corruption. This might have been true in the early days after the end of the cold war and might still be true in non-EU Eastern Europe since Soviet bureaucracy was even more unaccountable than the West's, but within the EU we're quickly converging.
No country is corruption free but the difference between Europe and Mexico is shocking. At least the European countries I know first hand.
In Mexico it's blatant and it's everywhere. In Europe most people would never think of bribing a police man to escape a fine while in Mexico a mordida is business as usual. There are police men whose only job is to get money from all the people they stop.
Here's an anecdote from my early years in Mexico. You have to check your car once or twice ever year to get like a govt sticker otherwise the car cannot be used in some places. Well sometimes the queues to do this process are extremely long. I've seen first hand someone from the verification center going to every car in the queue and asking "with jump or without jump?". Meaning, if you want to jump in front of the queue you have to "pay extra".
All of this shouldn't be a surprise.
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2023
> No country is corruption free but the difference between Europe and Mexico is shocking.
> In Europe most people would never think of bribing a police man
I would say that lack of petty corruption doesn't exclude big scale corruption which is very much alive in Europe.
Backdealing, lobbying, money laundering. I don't rememeber Mexican banks laundering hundreds of bilions etc. Mexican car manufactures cheating for years on car emissions.
These things are reserved for European countries from top of most transparent countries list (Hello Denmark, Hello Germany).. We just keep forgetting. And we are conditioned by propaganda to look down on other cultures.
Stoping petty officers from accepting bribes is just European establishment's way of "Don't steal - your goverment hates competition".
> Backdealing, lobbying, money laundering. I don't rememeber Mexican banks laundering hundreds of bilions etc. Mexican car manufactures cheating for years on car emissions.
EU politicians caught backdealing are being prosecuted. Bank money laundering wasn't done by the government's banks. Car emissions cheating also wasn't the government.
Bribing police is government corruption.
is with jump or without jump corruption? Depends if the money goes to the person asking or to the center. If the person is paid to let keep people in line, and keeps the money, it is corruption. If it goes to the center, it's probably called a vip pass or so somewhere. Skip the line doesn't strike me as corruption as much as actually "purchasing" your driving licence, or being let through a checkpoint with fruit you're not supposed to bring from one island onto another to avoid spreading tree disease...
Of course it's corruption. Most of the money goes to the boss of the center.
This happens on plenty of public offices (probably most). You need some permit to build something? You either pay or wait for years to get it, if ever.
Just read this comment on Reddit written by a Mexican:
> I built a manufacturing shop in Mexico, the area isn't zoned yet. This should tell you all you need to know, if any government official can find a way to get a "mordida" they will. I spent almost 10 grand in just bribes to get all the proper permits. If you get pulled over by the police, you're paying a bribe. A neighbor of mine had a pistol in his car. He paid almost 2 grand in a bribe to get released.
https://www.reddit.com/r/asklatinamerica/comments/1gpznln/ho...
Hell, 2 grand to get released from a felony is a steal!
Amusingly, I bet it also scales based on apparent wealth/income, so is a type of [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine].
Even if the boss keeps the money, it may be tacitly part of his salary. Perhaps that motivates him to provide better service to the jump customers so they don't go to some other station and pay some other boss. This system might even work more effectively than one where the jump fee goes to the government. Even if it does go to the government, aren't you then bribing the whole government to get preferential service at the expense of non-jumpers? So I think it's morally a gray area.
Corruption is incredibly poisonous to countries. It’s closely correlated with a lack of development and tends to be self-reinforcing.
It erodes trust in institutions, encourages the breaking of other rules and generally keeps poor countries poor, especially when it comes to foreign investment.
The alternative isn't a jump fee that goes to the government. It's no jumping at all.
Maybe that is ideal, but they are plenty of official jump fees that we don't think of as corrupt. In super-non-corrupt New Zealand, we can pay extra for faster processing of resource consent applications, passport applications, and visas. We can also pay a fee for a chance in a random draw for enrollment in desirable schools. Criminals can pay money to their victims in exchange for a chance at a lighter sentence.
You should visit Eastern Europe lol
Yes this is correct.
Maybe in 50 years Mexicans will be honest and Europeans will be corrupt. I don't think anyone honestly thinks that corruption is inherent to anyone's genetics.
But today? It's simply the case.
I wonder if it somehow evens out perfectly across all cultures/countries on the planet, and stays even as variables on the ground change.
It said "context dependent", not "cultural". These are related, but not the same.
Yes but what enables corruption in particular context?
Culture.
You guys need to agree on a definition of context and a definition of culture before this thread can make any sense.
Can you please, for the life of me, tell me how they make those authentic amazing Totopos.
Do they have like shops where someone live fries the tortilla chips in front of you? Like authentic Totopos, not whatever Chipotle serves.
Do they dry the corn tortillas out first then fry them? Are the corn tortillas for Totopos extra thin?
Thank you Pier25.
Yes, that's basically it. They simply fry tortillas cut into triangles.
You can make them at home if you have access to fresh tortillas from a tortillería.
All human moral behavior straddles the line betweeen selflessness and selfishness, at some particular scale, from the personal to the societal/cultural.
Racism? Selfishness for the group. Religious bigotry? Selfishness for the group. Misogyny? Need I say? Corruption? Selfishness for one's personal gain at the expense of the system, itself.
Goodness? Virtue? Honor? Positive cultural evolution? Selflessness in service to the whole.
That is why the world has been tending towards the negative for soooo long. We have been inculcated into belief systems that separate us from each other along some boundary, be it cultural, racial, religious, gender identification, sexual preference, country, neighborhood, ... whatever.
We are all one human race, of many ethnicities and cultures, but we will only begin to heal our blessed Earth and end all conflict, by recognizing that we are the only creatures capable of self-evolving a world culture of universal care.
The goal must be universal compassion towards one another, selflessly, except when such kind, selfless behavior would contradict the paradox of tolerance. In those instances, we must be unyielding, but as gentle as good outcomes allow. Only a compassionate society can know how and when to prosecute the vermin among us, who come from all walks of life. We must endeavor to teach the ignorant, while protecting the innocent.
Just systems of law, enforced fairly, are the bedrock of such a society.
I agree 100% with the values you espouse here, but I think it's a mistake to say the world has been trending negative for a long time. The values you've expressed here have been gaining ground for generations. (See Steven Pinker's ''The Better Angels of our Nature'' for an in-depth data-backed defense of this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...). Your statement "Just systems of law, enforced fairly, are the bedrock of such a society" is almost exactly the thesis of that book.
I was turned on to the idea that Pinker might be quite wrong on these claims by David Graeber and David Wengrow in "The Dawn of Everything". I haven't read Better Angels of our Nature, and I haven't spent hours carefully verifying the Davids claims, but I must say, they certainly made it sound very convincing. Enough for me to feel like not reading Better Angels would not be a major loss in my life.
I went to that wikipedia article you link there to see if that gets a mention, and the "Criticism" section is ginormous. So I'm not going to go out on a limb and say you shouldn't be recommending it at all, but I will say that based on the very large number of serious scholars who were apparently upset enough about many of the claims of the book that they then went on to write long serious things criticising it, perhaps in light of that you should reconsider whether it's as "data-backed" as you thought.
It could have crap data, or good data poorly interpreted. The many critics seem to think both.
You should also see the criticism of "The Dawn of Everything", ie way overstating the veracity of certain history that they're trying to use to support Graeber's polemics on anarchism.
In typical Graeber fashion, the book is very fun to read, but he's an unreliable narrator of history, which is why they could only get a no name historian to be involved in an attempt to add credibility.
And FWIW, I'm also very skeptical of Pinker.
I wasn't saying we should dismiss Pinker because of that one book by the Davids, rather that we should be very sceptical of his work because of the absolute chorus of academics seriously contesting his methods, motivations, and conclusions.
I have read one long criticism of The Dawn of Everything, I don't know if it's the one you're referring to, but I didn't find it very compelling.
I've read several critics of Graeber otherwise though, and to me they roughly seemed to amount to: "we don't like what this person is saying." I mean, I could not find anything substantive in there, some direct, blatant issue with the scholarly work. Perhaps there's a tendency to get "over-excited" about some idea or other in his work, but I think readers (academic and laypeople) could consider forgiving someone for presenting their work with sincere excitement.
The comment about David Wengrow you make there is especially odd - for one, you make it sound like he was thrown in to the project as an afterthought to add some clout, which is factually not what happened, they collaborated for years in emails for what was originally a small project, which grew larger organically in a sort of growing excitement.
I wouldn't be big on bandying about academic records as proof of anything much, but he'd twenty plus years professional academic experience as an archaeologist, three books, a suitably voluminous number of essays and papers, etc etc. The usual "impressive academic" things had been done. So I don't get your dig there at all.
Here, for the brave of heart:
https://ucl.academia.edu/DavidWengrow
Even so "Pinker is wrong" does not mean "opposite of Pinker is right". It means "we don't know."
Proving that humanity was better at some specific era in history is a very tall order. Discrediting one claim does not credit any other.
The main critique of the book that I've seen is that they use history that's quite ambiguous to tell a polemic story that supports Graeber's anarchist views.
For instance, they take the upheavals at Teotihuacan as evidence that there was some kind of anarchist-ish revolution going on, when most scholarship believes that it's more likely an oligarchic system (with less emphasis on the monarch) who destroyed (from my memory) the temple/cult/district of the Feathered Serpent - a sub-group of their oligarchy.
This is interesting, but is pretty consistent with how other Mesoamerican ruling classes selected their rulers (Aztecs, etc.) ie there was often an oligarchy who picked them, not the populous as a whole via an anarchist / direct democratic method.
For Wengrow, I assume him working with the far-more-famous Graeber probably led to him to have some flexible interpretations of history, and I bet Graeber was pretty convincing + had a high power differential (implicitly) which could lead this to happen somewhat unknowingly.
The selfish / selfless binary is a bit simplistic to explain corruption.
If your brother killed someone, would you turn him over to the authorities? You can't answer this question by checking how selfish someone is - both options can be considered selfless acts.
If I remember correctly (can't find a source), places that answer yes to that question tend to have higher trust in institutions and lower rates of corruption
"The selfish / selfless binary is a bit simplistic to explain corruption."
Corruption is selfish gain. If one eschews corruption because they realize that it harms the society-at-large, then they are acting selflessly. If one eschews corruption because they're afraid of being caught and punished, then the legal system has prevented societal harm, by preventing corrupt selfishness by a public servant.
As to your hypothetical, I like my friend from Lousiana's saying, "If my aunt had a d*k, she'd be my uncle." Of course, in 2024, that saying is looking a bit ragged.
That said, extreme hypotheticals are not going to get to the bottom of this issue of corruption. It's the ordinary, everyday corruption that erodes society, not having to turn one's brother over to the authorities for murder. And ordinary, everyday corruption is both selfishness, pure and simple, and a failure of society to emplace the necessary checks to prevent it.
"Trust the universe, but tie your donkey."
> Of course, in 2024, that saying is looking a bit ragged
"If my grandma had wheels, she would be a bike"
I wouldn't say this around your grandpa ;-)
No worries, he's been dead since 1943. Thanks, Hitler!
> If one eschews corruption because they realize that it harms the society-at-large, then they are acting selflessly.
Or selfishly + long-term. Especially if you include your family's offspring in your "self", which is a phenomenon we call "love".
Point taken.
But most people misunderstand love as merely the feeling one has about another person or creature.
Love's highest manifestation is, however, an action that serves another person's happiness. It can be something that lessens a person misery or discomfort, or actually makes them happier in some way. It can be as simple as a warm smile on the street or giving something to them. Intention is important, and how it is received is irrelevant. The universe is sublime, and there is no end to our learning, if we so endeavor to plumb its depths.
Every human being's life is the result of such selflessly compassionate service, for, as infants, we must be given everything or we perish. For years. There is nothing tangible received for that giving, unless one understands how very tangible inner peace and happiness is. Understanding our place in this moral universe makes such happiness the only thing that matters, to those of us who actually understand. Know that no one is forced to comprehend or accept this most sublime of laws, just as there are flat-earth folks, too, who refuse to look through a telescope. We all have the choice to be as foolish (and unhappy) as we wish.
> That is why the world has been tending towards the negative for soooo long.
All evidence I've seen in the world is tending better. There are, and always have been concerning signs, but overall things have been getting better. But everyone places more emphasis on the concerning signs and doesn't really think of all the things that have gotten better.
Living standards have improved, but at vast cost the environment, and we show no signs of addressing this.
The amount of energy we spend on irrelevant stuff like the stock market & AI should instead be directed toward dealing with climate change, and not turning our oceans into lifeless garbage dumps. But our economical model can only handle things that make more money for rich people, so we won't.
> irrelevant stuff like the stock market
The stock market is a good idea. Without it you wouldn't have most things you think are a good idea, nor probably half the things you think are a scandal because not everyone has them.
> But our economical model can only handle things that make more money for rich people, so we won't.
No, it handles all sorts of things.
I think that might depend on how far you look to compare. Like 1700s to now, yeah we're better by any metric you can think of. But on a smaller scale there are some things tending down.
Even compared to the 1970s we are much better off. The ozone hole is in track. Lead has been removed from nearly everything. Nearly everyone has a cell phone. Much less world hunger.
on some metrics (idk if everyone having a cell phone is a good thing in hind sight?)
But also things like suicides are up in certain demographics, expected life span is down, nutrition in vegetables are trending down.
In various ways, I completely agree with you, but there is a different level of negativity that is happening that is about the levers of power and wealth and what they are doing to the poor and the planet, itself. When a billionaire or government corruptly uses their power to press down on the populace for the gain of the wealthy, the effects are much more deleterious than the gains of we peasants, for example, learning how to no longer be racist or trans- or homophobic.
Those "small" gains are absolutely important, and are essential for our next societal level-up, but the corruption-in-the-large is an order-of-magnitude (or two) more physically destructive. I mean, look how many fools look up to Elmo and his cohort of kleptocrats. And look how the fossil-fuel industry buried the truth of global heating.
That's why I believe that RATM's self-titled debut album is the most important album of the 20th Century. And while I understand rage to be purely destructive, I firmly believe there's a time for righteous anger, especially in the face of oppression and wanton destruction.
This sort of outlook is very common in psychedelic experiences and community conversations. I'd like to see a scenario where someone clever from that community starts a propaganda campaign pushing such ideas as a serious proposition, and comes equipped to efficiently dismiss the classic normative dismissals or rhetorical topic avoidance techniques, forcing all the "good people" to seriously consider if their thoughts, prayers, secular platitudes, etc are adequate.
It would be nice if we could make some progress on this front for a change.
PS: your closing sentence severely rubs me the wrong way because it feels like it could be interpreted as support for the status quo.
What country do you live in where there is actual justice? I've never heard of such a one. From what I see, the powerful dominate the weak, abuse the Earth with no concern for future generations, and manipulate systems to ensure their own group's wealth and impunity.
So, Sir, I stand with Banksy, Bob Marley, MLK, RATM and other like-minded agents of change. But I understand that love is the only way to forge a better future for our Earth and ALL her peoples -- but a fierce, unyielding love, to be sure.
I love the sentiment, but are there some potential flaws in the analysis?
We mostly pay lip service to these things, but if you look around the world at things that get done (what you refer to!), there's a lot more than lip service and nice sentiments/intentions involved.
Is the world what we make it?
> Is the world what we make it?
It depends on what you mean by that. We can choose how we perceive the objective reality we live in. But, the totality of the world is really just the sum-total of results of what we are all doing to it, for the simple reason that all our free wills are equal, no matter how positive or negative. It is really that simple, but the wealthy and powerful move levers that affect far more people than I can (yet) move by myself.
> but are there some potential flaws in the analysis?
If there are flaws in my analysis, I am open to learning how to correct them. That is the only way to get better at anything, right? That said, the correctness of my foundation of logic is evident after more than a half-century on this Earth. Most people do not understand, but we physically manifest our cumulative karma as we age, from our tone of voice, to choice of words, to eye shine, and -- most of all -- to our inner peace and happiness, sense of humor and delight in the small things of life. Life is beautiful, and what we choose to manifest in this world shows up in our being as surely as a tree's experiences show up in their rings. The problem is that most people are too confused and mired in their self to learn how to see others for who they are.
> there's a lot more than lip service and nice sentiments/intentions involved.
Absolutely, but intention is a multiplier for the karma we receive for our actions, which are of paramount importance. That is why the feeling of love is not nearly as important as the selfless doing of compassionate deeds to serve others' happiness.
One thing you should be certain to understand: the selfish fools of this world have always been the majority, and not just within extrema such as Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. Their dominant ignorance and my relative powerlessness do not diminish my family's efforts to create positive change in our every interaction with our fellow human beings. That our efforts mostly fall on deaf ears is not our failure, but theirs and theirs alone.
What we are doing is not sentiment, whether it is a kind word on the street or a couple of hours typing into HN. Teaching the truth of compassion is essential in this troubled world full of willfully ignorant human beings.
I like to phrase it as "people are so utterly selfish that they will even cooperate when it's in their interest" (where their interest includes simply feeling good because that's the training they went through - e.g. somebody gives up his life for his country may sound altruistic, but we might find it abhorrent if that means he kills a bunch of children).
I've never heard that saying before; I like it. Thanks for expanding my horizon.
The nature of human life is, however, that we feel good for making others feel good, and vice versa. We truly reap what we sow, but it is sublime and at odds with what most people value in life, namely wealth, pleasure, and power. And, along with our power to choose, we can choose to ignore our conscience's pleadings for better behavior.
So, in an odd (but accurate) way, making others happy is the most selfish thing we can do, because it is the only way to earn happiness, which is a mysterious flowing into ourselves from parts unknown.
We live in a subtly reflexive, karmic universe. Only we human beings inhabit this plane of existence, because only we have the choice between selfishness and selflessness, with a conscience to orient ourselves, and a mind to evaluate the potentialities of every move we make. And we are each absolutely free to value the horrific (vice-eous) and eschew the virtuous.
WWII is a deep example of how societies can go so completely wrong, and yet be so confident in their intentions and self-destructive actions. It is also an example of other folks uniting to do good in the world. Both paths are totally human; the question is which path do each of us choose, and by which moral ethic?
> We truly reap what we sow
In the aggregate yes, but the distribution is very unjust.
I'm not talking about physical things. I'm only talking about our inner world, where the sowing and reaping are connected across time in varying ways according to the designs of creation itself.
That is why I counsel that it is best to just do good as often as possible, but without any connection to reward. Let the universe reward you in its time and place; it knows best, always. Simply send out your deeds' good vibes; they will return. Every time. And, all the while, one's internal peace and happiness will only grow.
[Also, William Gibson is by far my favorite fiction author. "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed."]
> Goodness? Virtue? Honor? Positive cultural evolution? Selflessness in service to the whole.
"Selflessness" is itself selfishness. You act good, virtuous, honorable, etc to selfishly attain societal praise or esteem. Or even rewards in the afterlife.
> The goal must be universal compassion towards one another, selflessly
Not selflessly. Selfishly. After all, kant's categorical imperative is logically selfish. You would benefit from the realization of such a goal. Everyone would.
It's perceived selfishness that drives people toward good or evil. It's actually selfishness itself that defines good and evil.
While I largely agree, I was thinking about selfishness and selflessness in a different way.
In game theory, games have global optima and Nash equilibria, and they don't always coincide. Selfless people seek global maximum, selfish people seek Nash equilibrum (maximizing their gain given the others also maximize their gain).
As a society, we have choice to change the rules so that global maximum coincides with Nash equilibrium.
Here's a true relation that you can factor into your model, if you'd like, for, though I am a long-time programmer, I don't go in for the study of game theory. I am, however, familiar with some of the precepts. Here goes:
When a person causes negativity/unhappiness, the person(s) on the receiving end gets an equal positive amount of karma. Karma is what determines our long-term happiness or lack thereof.
When a person does something intended to cause positivity/happiness, there is no negative effect on the receiver, even if they refuse the gesture.
In other words, acts of selfish negativity incur a zero-sum negative karmic effect, every time, without fail, though often without being observed at the time (or even, ever). OTOH, acts of selfless positivity only incur positive internal karmic effect for the doer; nothing is lost by the receiver.
In yet more other words, we can only receive negative karma from our own actions; others' actions can only result in positive karma for ourselves (if we are on the receiving end of selfishly negativity). For example, a poor person loses no karma from accepting charity, though the giver definitely gains.
As such, karma is skewed asymmetrically towards easier positive creation; i.e. it's only a zero-sum game when the first choice is negative/selfish.
Why, then, have the world's populations not yet created a "Heaven on Earth"? Because we human beings are also free to ignore all notions of karma and the associated question of why we are happy/unhappy. If a person chooses to believe that they are just amoral animals competing for scarce resources, then they are fully authorized to live their lives that way. We are also free to believe that the Earth is flat. The universe is the sole arbiter of the truth, however, and we all reap what we sow. Every time, without fail, with perfect justice, however difficult it is for us to comprehend at any given time, given our state of moral undevelopment.
> Because we human beings are also free to ignore all notions of karma and the associated question of why we are happy/unhappy
A newborn can have a chronic disease that makes their life terribly difficult. Do you think negative karma caused that? Or can other things cause unhappiness?
[Sorry for answering so late.]
Some people have been given greater challenges than others. Any difficulty given by the universe itself only counts positively for us, but we have to use it properly; i.e. we can't let it give us an excuse to be an ahole.
On the other end of the spectrum, most people feel that being born into wealth would be a great blessing, but look how those fools behave, wasting their blessings on themselves for meaningless pleasures that deplete the Earth, being callous in their treatment of those less fortunate, and generally working with their fellows to keep themselves on the top of the heap.
Being striken with disease is an effective way to go within oneself and connect with the Source of all creation, which is an essential part of the intent of the creation of our human nature. One way to look at the Unfathomable Creator is as the Ultimate Loner. It is a blessing to have been created as a human being, for only we can connect with It, and receive the blessing of reaching out for It.
That is the Ultimate Design of the human race, with our absolutely free will, but within a universe that rewards the seeker who connects with the sublime majesty of the Creator of all that will ever be. The Greatest Command is to, first, "Love God with all your being". That is not because we can add anything to It, nor because It is needy in any way. No. It is because the universe is designed to reward those of us who use our free will and energy to radiate love into the universe; it radiates that love back from within ourselves in happiness, clarity, and purpose.
Another way to look at the underprivileged (in money or health) is that they are rewarded for being where a person of means can prove their humanity, and thus giving them the chance to learn how happiness is gained from selflessly sharing, not from selfishly keeping.
When was the first amount of ‘karma’ created?
Clearly no one had any ‘karma’ 3 billion years ago, since living organisms did not exist.
Karma is a human-only dimension of the universe we inhabit. We alone have free will, a conscience, and a mind capable of discerning right and wrong, thus we alone lose and/or gain karma.
When was it first created then?
I would say that when there was only one human being, there was only positive karma, so I would say that there was no negative karma until there was a second person to do something wrong to the first person, thus facilitating the transfer that results from a negative deed.
From another perspective, I'd say that the first human being could sin against God, but that doesn't align with my understanding of how human beings were created. My understanding is that Adam was created in a state of grace, as a Prophet, free of negativity, but that as the population grew, our negative tendencies (to vice) established itself and the karma began to flow.
[I have some understanding of how the universe works, but I in no way claim to be authoritative. That said, I don't see any obvious errors in my reasoning.]
‘The first human being’? Who or when was this ‘first human being?
Such info has been lost to time, but there is a weak trail in the mitochondrial DNA, i.e. "ancestral Eve".
So then what were the parents?
How could they have karma if they predated the first human being?
So, corruption can be fixed. Change the circumstances and people will stop being corrupt. Fairness is intrinsically human. Inequality and in general the perception of an unfair system makes people misbehave (as they try to compensate for injustices).
This is very important as corruption is one of the major causes of countries poverty. (Taking as base-line the country natural-resources).
> Fairness is intrinsically human
Is it though? Survival of the fittest doesn't sound particularly fair to me.
Survival of the fittest is just the circumstances we find ourselves in. Our strategy to survive is cooperation. Human are amazing at cooperation, second only to eusocial insects. Fairness is an important mechanism in organizing this cooperation.
So, yes. Fairness is intrinsically human.
I don't think there's a direct line.
"Might makes right" will also force cooperation from those who are less fortunate. I'd argue there was almost never "fairness" in human relationships, from stronger warriors getting the best food to kings forcing their will upon their subjects to filthy rich individuals owning the greatest part of the world wealth today.
My point is in no way that this is right. Only that humans are not intrinsically fair.
Research shows that the willingness to incur personal cost to punish unfairness is prevalent in all cultures.
I can dig up the relevant studies if you are interested.
>change the circumstances
Sometimes you can't change the circumstances.
>largely subject to circumstance
Peoples' entire behavior thought their life is largely influenced by their circumstances in which they grew up in. Corruption is just one of them.
Not just the circumstances you grew up in either. You can grow up with a silver spoon in your mouth, or poor as a church mouse. You get imparted the best morals in both cases. And you'll still be prone to participate in corruption given the correct circumstances when you reach that stage.
It doesn't surprise me that we find participation in corruption increasing as news of corruption increases. Especially when you feel like people get away with it. One of the factors controlling whether or not people engage in these activities is how pervasive the activity is in society. Another is whether or not a person thinks they'll get away with it? If they believe they will, they're more likely to engage in corruption. And the more they see others get away with corruption, the more they think they themselves can get away with it.
I liken it to speeding. To many drivers it appears pervasive, and they often see many other drivers get away with speeding. So the circumstances one grew up in won't have nearly as big an impact on anti-speeding behavior as seeing the flashing blue lights of highway patrol vehicles every few miles.
Add to that in some cases, you might get in more "trouble" for not engaging in corruption. To use pier25's example again, someone who does't pay to skip the line might not get a turn if many others do and waste a bunch of time, have to come back the next day, potentially to the same effect. Or if you don't pay the expected bribe at a checkpoint, cops might find something wrong with your car lands you a more expensive fine (actual fine with paper trail + bribe instead of just bribe). You could argue that's extortion and not corruption but same principle to me. During Covid lockdown, a friend needed to pay bribes to get a pass for their family to be able to do their shopping. It was supposed to be one pass per house in their area, but the owner of the neighborhood held them back and kept several for the own family, so no bribe, no trip to the store... Better to pay the bribe to the owner than risk it with the cops checking permits on the street.
This is just to say, taking part in corruption may not be optional where it is the norm, regardless of a person's education or morals.
"You get imparted the best morals in both cases."
That is simply not true, for the vast majority of the world's cultures and societies.
Yes, we all have a conscience (inner moral compass), but few of us are taught how to hone and develop it over one's lifetime, using one's intellect to improve our thought processes to be better, more virtuous, human beings.
We are the only creatures that self-evolve, and it is precisely our moral nature that puts this severe responsibility upon us to nurture selfless universal compassion as a personal and societal imperative. Otherwise, we wreak destruction on our blessed Mother Earth and our fellow human beings. We are to use our gifts to create happiness for each other, not misery.
We have the free will to ignore this moral imperative. Look at the state of global heating to gauge its prevalence.
I was giving 2 hypothetical examples. If someone grows up rich, or if someone grows up poor. It won't matter what you teach them. Nor will it matter their morals if they go out into a world where corruption is pervasive and corruption is rarely, if ever, punished. Those two hypothetical people, and any other human, would fall into the pattern of engaging in corruption.
You can't stop it with upbringing.
"You can't stop it with upbringing."
You're right; we all have the choice to be saints or demons, or anywhere in between! We can be one on one day and the other on others.
What is important is to teach empathy as the antidote to bullying, and then have those individuals construct their society's laws to prevent and/or punish bullying of all kinds. Same with govt corruption, of course.
"any other human, would fall into the pattern of engaging in corruption."
I wouldn't, because I honor my sense of honor, of truth. I can raise my voice and say, without hesitation, that I am incorruptible, because I choose to be this way, because it strengthens my inner peace and happiness. I was not always like this, but I have learned to be this way and appreciate feeling the joy of having self-evolved myself in this direction.
It is each person's choice. That most are choosing poorly is academic, if one sees what the world is becoming, and knows what the world could be, if only our design was based upon selfless, compassionate cooperation instead of selfish, callous competition.
> Peoples' entire behavior thought their life is largely influenced by their circumstances in which they grew up in.
From the article:
"But what they discovered is that the nationality of the other player was more important than their own and all — New Zealanders, Dutch and British — were willing to offer bribes to those they believed to be corrupt in what they defined as conditional bribery."
One of the core problems with human behavior comes from a lack of thinking.
If people would consider their actions in the context of, “what I do, others will do”, then they would realize that many actions they deem as insignificant or harmless (throwing a small piece of trash on the sidewalk, taking two items from the “take 1 free” basket, etc. cause real problems when everyone does it.
It may seem insignificant to the individual, but in principle if they do it, others are also doing it, and it has a large scale impact. This applies in the positive direction too, such as when people perform random acts of kindness (which encourages others to do the same).
Agree 100%. I recently found that Kant had pretty much introduced this concept as categorical imperative[0]: 'Act as if the maxims of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature.'
[0] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
The article talks about corruption like it's just a clearly bad thing and people either do the bad thing or not, but it's a blurry line between engaging in corruption and the normal ways that organizations work. Examples:
If you pay a speeding ticket, isn't that like participating in corruption by buying your way out of punishment for endangering people? Is it really morally any different from paying a bribe to the policeman who catches you speeding in a country where that's the common way? In both cases, you pay for speeding and your money ends up going towards the policeman's income.
Forming a personal connection with the interviewer when applying for a government job. Now you're suddenly like his friend and he's more inclined to select you. Maybe he expects to have a good relationship with you in future and gain intangible benefits from that if he hires you.
In my country, teacher jobs have to be publicly advertised, presumably to combat nepotism. But schools regularly hire internally and their advertisement includes a statement like "no actual vacancy" telling people not to waste time applying. I guess they're following the law but still corrupting the ideal of not favoring your friends.
It seems like you have to have a deep understanding of how and why the systems works the way it does to figure out if a particular action is morally corrupt or not. You can just follow the law but that seems to allow some society-harming corruption and nobody feels guilty about it.
> The article talks about corruption like it's just a clearly bad thing and people either do the bad thing or not, but it's a blurry line between engaging in corruption and the normal ways that organizations work.
Until you have "cops" every 10 miles on the freeway all demanding a bribe at gunpoint.
"Corruption" is sand in the gears of everything.
You can't go from point A to point B in a consistent amount of time or money. You can't order something and expect it to work without triple checking everything yourself. etc.
We have a great example of the pernicious effects of corruption: Russia couldn't roll over Ukraine because corruption completely hollowed out their military.
I've lived for several years in parts of the world where bribing police is, unfortunately, normal.
There's a couple of places around the country where it's known that the police do shakedowns (although they certainly don't point guns at you). I guess especially corrupt police work in those areas.
But for the most part I am much less likely to get stopped for minor traffic violations than I would be back home, where bribing the police isn't a thing. I'm sure there are other countries where police shakedowns is a problem, but it's not just a simple equation of bribable police = shakedowns.
Yea I know it's generally bad most of the time. But I think the details of what is and isn't corruption are too complicated for ordinary people to decide based on morals because they'd have to understand all the implications. That's what the law is meant to be for, but does corruption magically stop being objectionable if it's made legal? I think we'd still call that corruption in obvious cases.
> If you pay a speeding ticket, isn't that like participating in corruption by buying your way out of punishment for endangering people? Is it really morally any different from paying a bribe to the policeman who catches you speeding in a country where that's the common way? In both cases, you pay for speeding and your money ends up going towards the policeman's income.
I mean, one goes to the government to help all citizens, one lines the pocket of a corrupt cop and does not benefit society in anyway.
So yes, there is a huge gulf of difference between the two.
Also an official ticket goes on record so the cop can tell if you've had many and maybe deserve a more severe punishment, the bribe is never recorded so we can't track the bad drives in this instance.
> pocket of a corrupt cop and does not benefit society in anyway.
It motivates him to stop speeding drivers which is good for society.
To your second point, maybe a better system would be the policeman gets paid a commission on the tickets he issues so they're still recorded. But if it's not set up that way, bribery might be more effective than not.
> It motivates him to stop speeding drivers which is good for society.
No, it motivates him to stop any driver that can't be confirmed to not be speeding under the level of 3d-party scrutiny the cop judges he risks to get under the circumstances.
And also the ones that are more likely to offer more money.
Is it really good for society? Germany has the safest highways in the world. Also the only highways where it's exciting to see a police car while going 250 km/h.
Some try to dismiss this by saying that there are areas with lower speeds - yes; they're placed where you need to slow down anyway, it's more like "hey buddy, beware of this sharp curve" rather than "we will milk your wallet if you go 1 km/h over this idiotically low speed". I go to Berlin regularly (500km) and my speed average including the slowdown areas is around 230 km/h and I'm not even close to the fastest one on the road.
The best thing about this? The German diesel engine - drinking less fuel at these speeds than an American truck on idle.
Of course you can design a road to be safe at high speeds but normal roads aren't and normal people can't judge the safe speed.
I think that depends on the place. I can imagine that US cities with straight wide streets and roads are very hard to judge. But I can't imagine anyone having trouble with that in any European city... The top speed would be your last problem in any capital - you celebrate when it's not 0.
Corruption is inherently bad because it undermines the rule of law and people's trust in the the government.
In India the legal system is made in such a way including the top judiciary the political system takes over the labyrinthine ways of corruption and encourged
I'm pretty sure that such a legal system does quite a bit of work to destroy trust in the legal system and institutions.