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Very insightful on how this corruption develops:

"How can a group hold a worldview so at odds with the wider culture and not appear to be greatly conflicted by it? The answer may lie in the distinction between particularism and universalism. An individual develops social identities specific to the social domains, groups and roles – and accompanying subcultures – that he or she occupies (e.g. manager, mother, parishioner, sports fan). [...]

In the case of corruption, this myopia means that an otherwise ethically-minded individual may forsake universalistic or dominant norms about ethical behavior in favor of particularistic behaviors that favor his or her group at the expense of outsiders. [...]

This tendency to always put the ingroup above all others clearly paves the way for collective corruption."

CS Lewis has a speech about the ingroups and corruption. His thesis is that the mere desire to be "in" is the greatest driver of immoral behavior:

"To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”"

https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/

I'd note that it is common for fraudsters to prey on members of ingroups

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud

MLM vendors looove religious stay at home parents (usually, but not always, mothers) for precisely that reason.

And in my country there's been several ponzi schemes that targeted people through churches, because Dave is such a good Christian, he tithes every Sunday, he wouldn't at all mislead us about this exciting investment opportunity!

In undergrad I did a formal Philosophy / Sociology study, where we were looking at human motivations. The research indicated that prestige is the number 1 driver of human motivation. Gaining prestige "trumps" ethics. Nobody likes to hear that.

I think this is one reason it is important to cast unethical behavior in terms of lack of competency — that someone has to break the rules to get ahead because they're not competent enough to do things fairly or ethically.

Empathy, while important in my opinion personally, often doesn't matter to certain people. So you have to decrease the prestige associated with unethical behavior, above and beyond it being unethical per se.

> I think this is one reason it is important to cast unethical behavior in terms of lack of competency

That will result in feigned virtue and Pharisaical letter-of-the-law sophistry. You can't secure morality by system and incentive alone, as important as these may be (the law is a teacher). Indeed, if you try to attain virtue by appealing to crooked desires, then you've already subverted the very preconditions of the moral life.

But I will say this: today, we often view morality as some made-up "rules" and artificial constraints that usually don't have anything to do with much of life. Being intelligent is often seen as opposed to being good: the good man is imagined as a chump, while the intelligent man is crafty. But that's just an expression of ignorance, including ignorance of what is actually good for human beings. It is not good for a man to be immoral. Immorality is self-harm.

Morality is a matter of every decision we make. Ethics is practical philosophy concerned with how one lives. Every decision is a matter of morality. When making a decision, why choose one way or another? Well, at the very least, we make what we take to be a good or the best choice. Of course, the immoral man presents something bad or worse as good or better in his own mind in order to be able to choose it. That's why people rationalize the evil choices they intend to make. But the aim and orientation of the will is the good, and so the evil man must first bullshit himself.

In that sense, to choose the good is to choose wisely which is indeed a kind of competence that requires knowledge, wisdom, and humility (which is to say, a sober view of reality, and that includes oneself). Indeed, the first classical cardinal virtue is prudence, which is the habit (as in possessed and actualized excellence) of being able to determine the right decision in a situation. And the right decision is always a moral one.

Prudence itself is the cornerstone of the remaining cardinal virtues: one cannot be just without first being prudent; one cannot be courageous without first being just; and one cannot be temperate without first being courageous. You need to know what is right before you can be just, as what is wrong is never just; you need to be just before you can be courageous, as bravado or recklessness are not courage; and you need courage to be temperate, as you cannot act as you ought if you don't have the courage to do so.

So, what we really need is an authentic moral education and a culture that ceases to fear a robust and sound morality rooted in the objectively real, because it sees it as a threat to its misguided notion of "liberty". We must reconnect with classical tradition so that we can profit from its insights and its wisdom and return to a dialogue spanning centuries and millennia. We cannot do it alone, and things will never be perfect, but this will give us strength to face the immorality of the world - and above all, in ourselves - and a foundation for a healthier culture.

I agree with the fundamentals of what you're saying.

I don't mean to suggest that corruption should only be cast in terms of lack of competency, or that there aren't other issues of importance. But I also think sometimes the lack of competency perspective on corruption is overlooked, and people forget that appeals to empathy and similar values are of no relevance to certain individuals, for whatever reason.

Corruption is problematic for a number of reasons; I think it's important to keep all of those reasons in mind.

Or not. Or what is in the flourishing of all living things, and especially in our species of ape, is evil. That only what is called "good" is the accident of there being a boundary up against you to stop you; or the imposition of a boundary which will destroy or constrain your living too much.

Perhaps morality is just the playpen boundaries of enfeebled apes, playing amongst themselves in luxury, thinking they've overcome some aspect of their nature since they barely need to move around at all.

Meh to this misanthropic disregard for other's experience. If you need external alignment to prevent you being evil your internal alignment is f'ed. Considering morality an arbitrary boundary is a major red flag for antisocial behaviors.

Structured interactions lead to better results, chaotic actions lead to chaos. Ethics/morality is part of that structure that lets us achieve more together than individually.

if you think living in that structure is enfeebling: I highly question what you desire to do that results in that feeling.

Fantastic logical analysis.

In my opinion you've drawn exactly the wrong conclusion.

Raising the stakes just increases the pressure to cheat (and not get caught).

This will just make fraud by skilled people more likely. Having skill will insulate them from the accusation - they cant be unethical, because unethical people dont have skill and they provably do.

This. I think so much of the fascism and corruption afoot in the world comes from people who believe they deserve things they are incompetent to get. Their sense of entitlement is in conflict with their competence and unrestrained by concern for others. To soothe their ego wound they project their faults onto the person who has what they want. "It isn't my failure; it's your trickery!" Now instead of shame and impotence they feel righteous anger.

I think you are correct. I've spent extended time in uber wealth circles, and this describes the offspring mindset of the generations after wealth acquisition. Their incompetence matches their entitlement, and then they walk into nepotism.

I don't know that it's necessarily incompetence. The idea of "overproduction of elites" pops up frequently:

https://www.niskanencenter.org/are-we-overproducing-elites-a...

You may be supremely competent but unlucky enough to be born at the wrong time, to the wrong family, competing with the wrong people, to rise to the level that you feel you deserve.

I look at this re-occurring overproduction of elites concept, and feel like it has good points but seems to be welded like a weapon, soon followed by statements like "you're just unlucky, get over it."

We must begin with the presuppositions. Begin with the questions:

1. What are elites?

2. What are elites for? Why do they exist?

We can't really talk about "overproduction" of elites without knowing the answers to these questions.

Elites are meant to be guardians and servants of the common good. This is why traditionally, we spoke of the nobility: they were supposed to protect the common good for the good of society and model virtue so that others had a point of tangible reference. In order to do that, you needed to be properly educated. Not technically trained, but educated, which is something relatively rare in proportion to the vast numbers who are pushed through compulsory schooling and even university.

So, are we "overproducing elites"? Given how mediocre our "elites" generally are, I would suspect that we have rather an underproduction of them, and instead an overproduction of the vacuously credentialed.

One obstacle, of course, is that in a modern liberal culture, we are forced into a kind of impotence when speaking about the common good. On the one hand, modern liberalism imposes its own measure of the good life that elevates liberty for its own sake - divorced from any tradition and any objective measure - as the end of human life. Indeed, tradition is caricatured as an obstacle that impedes liberty rather than as a liberating dialogue spanning centuries and millennia that helps us orient our lives by sharing with us the wisdom of out predecessors.

On the other, this very hostility toward tradition or any objective normative claims (which are unavoidable; see first point) acts as a corrosive agent that impoverishes and constrains the scope of legitimate political discussion. Over time, this scope has been whittled down to economics. Everything else is privatized. Of course, the inevitable effect is that economics them begins to swallow up everything else. Everything is recast as an economic issue, and the human good is confined to economic categories. This explains the rise of consumerism, because a society whose common good can only be a matter of economics, and one that recasts all of life and reduces it to economics, can only comprehend the good life as a matter of consumption. This is a recipe for misery and delusion, of course, but the is the necessary result.

In such a culture, wisdom and what counts as elite are measured in economic terms. Universities become institutions not for liberating human beings by developing reason, virtue, and understanding, but ostensibly tickets to "economic success". Billionaires are our aristocracy, not because they are excellent or virtuous or duty-bound to serve in that capacity by virtue of their rank, but because in a consumerist society, money is magical. This is interesting, because traditionally, the nobility was often prohibited from engaging in trade and commerce. It was seen as beneath their position. If an aristocrat was wealthy, his wealth was not what conferred onto him his rank.

An elite only exists in order to serve the common good. That is its only legitimate reason for being.

Now let us return to the original question...

I'm skeptical that the nobility were ever particularly noble in the eyes of the commoners.

Well, of course there would be a range, just like today. It seems like 1/3 will always be skeptical of authority, 1/3 will always literally worship authority, and then there's the spectrum between. I saw some "computational anthropology" paper some months ago saying that same ratio appears fairly consistent going back to the Greeks and the initial ratios of their early Democracy.

What if elites are more like cancer cells? They were not designed into the system — they spontaneously appeared, then metastasized.

I see what you did there with your choice of verb, and you're spot on.

No, but I don’t think ethics is #2. Someone intrinsically motivated might be technically competent, autonomous and self-confident about his/her goals. I might skip your meetings about ethics; I might be too busy.

Did that ever replicate?

Is prestige the number one motivator only statistically?

In other words is it the number one motivator for 31% percent of the college students that were tested and lets say empathy was at 29%?

Misanthropy and bald self interest gets overplayed I think. Often times because it allows bad actors to normalize and justify their own misanthropy.

Presenting this kind of unbacked, unqualified anecdotal data is great for "edgy truthtellers" but also deeply poisoning the well.

Scientific studies, particularly within the fields of evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and behavioral economics, identify prestige: the striving for respect, admiration, and high social rank; as a primary driver of human motivation. Unlike dominance, which relies on fear and coercion, prestige is based on the voluntary deference of others toward individuals who possess skills, knowledge, or success in locally valued domains. Key scientific studies and theories supporting this include:

    The Dual-Strategies Theory (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001; Cheng et al., 2013): This foundational theory posits that humans have evolved to use two distinct strategies to gain social rank: dominance (fear-based) and prestige (respect-based). Studies show prestige is a more stable, long-term motivator, associated with higher intelligence, conscientiousness, and social skills.
    "The Big Man Mechanism" (Brand et al., 2020): This study demonstrates that prestige-based hierarchies are a unique human adaptation. It shows that people willingly grant influence to high-prestige individuals in exchange for knowledge and skills. The research indicates that individuals are highly motivated to gain this respect to secure social capital.
    Evolutionary Perspective on Social Status (Maner & Case, 2016): Research suggests that the desire for prestige is an ancestral mechanism designed to boost social standing, leading to better access to resources and reproductive success.
    Prestige vs. Dominance Health Outcomes (2022 Studies): A study comparing the two paths to status found that prestige-seeking is associated with better physical and mental health, higher life satisfaction, and lower stress, whereas dominance is associated with negative health outcomes. 

These studies indicate that because prestige provides a mutually beneficial social structure, humans are heavily driven to obtain it through the demonstration of valued skills.

> "Half of the harm that is done in this world Is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; But the harm does not interest them."

-T.S. Eliot

I think this is absolutely spot on with the Epstein thing. Powerful individuals just helping each other, giving each other information and money, or facilitating or ignoring exploitation because it is "what we all do". Especially effective when the group believe (maybe implicitly) that they are "better" and entitled to put their interests before those of the public. Even more so when there is a huge advantage to be gained by being part of the group.

Join my networking group, pass on some info in return for money or vice-versa, turn a blind eye to abuse even if you are not involved....

Also Lord Acton - “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”

Acton was, by the way, an ardent supporter of the Confederacy. In his opinion, the federal government curtailing the independence of states was a more significant act of oppression than slavery.

If you're familiar with English history, then it's more understandable that Lord Acton (Catholic, and born a mere Baronet) was against powerful central authorities.

And at least according to Wikipedia, Acton's positions on the Confederacy and slavery were very mainstream for English Catholics of the day.

    positions on [...] slavery were very mainstream

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)

To clarify - John Brown was an American, with a Puritan/Calvinist background, born to fairly humble circumstances. Very unlike Acton.

And Britain's record on slavery is both far more complex, and far less bad, than many modern ideologues might have us believe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Africa_Squadron

He was pro powerful central authority, as long as that powerful central authority is pro-slavery.

He was against it when it prevented oppression.

I think there's a war about that wasn't there?

Yeah, and he didn't like the outcome. Salient quote (from a letter to Robert E. Lee):

"I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of your Republic have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics. Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo. "

There are several lies in this. The objective of a Confederate victory was to enforce slavery farther south. Mexico was a few years away from collapsing. Brazil would emancipate within 20 years. Would the Confederacy last 20 years as the last slave state in the western hemisphere?

Slavery would not have lasted, as the mechanization and industrialization of agriculture would soon make slave ownership uneconomical. Same with draft animals.

Control of elections is one of the last bastions of State's rights. The past year has really illustrated why states' independence from the US federal government benefit their residents.

Well, he wasn't wrong.

Whining about States rights to enslave people is certainly a take.

Particularly when in context, the war was caused by the South acting to usurp abolition in the North via the legal system (i.e. Dredd Scott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott)

The importance and applicability of "states rights" is always oddly narrow.

    The importance and applicability of "states rights" is always oddly narrow.

The Confederate Constitution was mostly a copy of the US Constitution. One place where it differed is that it forbade any state from abolishing slavery. So the whole "states' rights" thing is obvious baloney.

Corruption empowers, and absolute corruption empowers absolutely. It seems to me that some people adopt this perspective.

Absolutely. In an ideal setting, elites model excellence and serve as an example for others to follow. In practice, things are never so pure, and in bad cases, quite bad. This is why we may speak of the fish rotting from the head down. The general populace takes its example from what is taken to be its elite, even if in objective terms, that "elite" is a total failure.

You see this with political opinions. People generally don't think very deeply about politics. They generally reflect the political sensibilities of the in-group they aspire to remain part of or aspire to join. It's a signal. A reasonably intelligent person can make the distinction between signal and genuinely informed opinion, but often, and especially among the poseurs, it's not about the truth value of an opinion. It is about the signal. This is the very definition of bullshit: something said with total indifference to its truth value, and only valued for its instrumental usefulness.

I grew up with a very strong sentimental sense of moral universalism. I loved Beethoven's Ode to Joy and the romantic idea of universal brotherhood.

But as I bank years in the adult world, as a worker and a neighbor, I've been progressively disillusioned. I don't find universalism to be a common viewpoint. I've found it to be very rare that anyone wants to be my "brother" or "sister". And sometimes those that seem to, end up being exploitative, callous, or strictly fair-weather.

I'm not resentful or anything. I have a happy family and a few close-ish friends, and life feels full. But I can understand how the loneliness and coldness of the world makes people more particularist. People may think: "if the world acts like it owes me nothing, then what do I owe the world?"

As an ideal, I have little doubt that most people believe this, it's just that it's something that's very easy to exploit, and you stand to gain a massive amount if you do. Its a real tragedy of the commons scenerio. With millions and billions of people and just one commons, there's plenty of tragedy to go around.

It's still worth it to try - I find it difficult to give up completely. Most people I meet are not evil, and it's not like you're going to make it out alive at the end regardless.

But isn't it just a failure to communicate it? What if almost all other people are similarly disillusioned?

Also, according to psychologists, one negative experience outweighs roughly five positive experiences of the same magnitude. So, as we get older, we might have tendency to accumulate negative experiences, and as a result become more cynical and less idealistic. And so it kind of perpetuates.

That…. Just provides more evidence their world view is likely more objectively true?

> But I can understand how the loneliness and coldness of the world makes people more particularist

I am like that, I stand more on the disillusioned/disappointed side but on the other hand let's not for forget that individuals diverge quite a lot from one another and that for some "Everyone's in it for themselves" has not been a sad conclusion but happy justification for their behavior.

I realized as I got older that the ambient air of socialist/collectivist virtues that filled the all young people spaces wasn't because of some kind of special enlightenment achieved by the contemporary youth (as I deeply believed as a millennial riding high on the rise of the internet), but instead was just an easy ideology for a group of people with little to lose and a lot to gain.

Underneath, people are overwhelmingly just in it for themselves, and judge others by how closely they align with their personal set of "whats best for me" ideals.

As someone from a constitutionally socialist and culturally collectivist society, the idea of American millennials embodying either seems to me like cosplay. You guys are so allergic to imposed social obligation you won’t even care for your own parents in their old age. What kind of “collectivism” could you possibly practice?

Collectivism means the subordination of individual autonomy to the governance of the collective according to the needs of the collective. You’re a cog in a machine and your purpose is to serve the collective—starting with your family and radiating in rings out from there. I’m not sure Americans can even understand the collective mindset, much less practice it.

On the one hand I want to agree with you but on the other hand you went from "some people just cannot tolerate any social obligation" to "You’re a cog in a machine and your purpose is to serve the collective—starting with your family" makes me extremely distrustful and not want to share a society with you. What if the machine is running for a very few at the top ? What if the collective is oppressive and does not respect your bodily autonomy ? What if your family is a bunch of authoritarian psychopaths ? Then what are my resources as an individual ?

> What if the machine is running for a very few at the top ? What if the collective is oppressive and does not respect your bodily autonomy ? What if your family is a bunch of authoritarian psychopaths ? Then what are my resources as an individual ?

In my collectivist culture, the answer to those questions is "just deal with it." That's the bargain of a collectivist society. The collective will support you, but in return you owe the collective a complex web of social obligations from birth. I happen to think it makes sense,[1] but I'm not trying to persuade you to live in a collectivist society. I'm just explaining the concept.

[1] I'm married to someone from the polar opposite culture: an Anglo-Protestant from the west coast of the U.S. She once explained to our kids that they didn't have to give family members hugs if they didn't want to. She called it "bodily autonomy." I found this concept extremely bizarre.

We don't embody it, not by a long shot. We're old now.

I'm speaking about 20 years ago, when getting any kind of peer or social circle respect had the prerequisite of subscribing to socialist utopian ideals, and it wasn't something that was hard to foster in America's dead-end job work culture (which is where you work when you are young). This is urban/suburban America, where most people live.

From what I can tell this was the same with Boomers (they were the OG hippies afterall) and I see the same ideas in today's crop of young people.

The youth however hold little sway over the direction of the country, they're not actually that invested, so by the time they are having an impact, many have already received their first shots of the euphoric side of American capitalism, a career that gives them power and money (after years of wading through dead-end/entry level hell).

My point is that they didn't meaningfully embody collectivism even when they were younger. Collectivism is rice farming culture. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00142.... You work together within a rigid social structure and share communally in the proceeds. But you have to precisely follow your socially prescribed roles because that system only works when everyone does what they're supposed to be doing. This is true even in developed countries that are more collectivist. Subordination of the individual to the collective is a big deal in Japan and Scandinavia. In both places, it's taboo to stand out in the crowd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante. Individualism is necessarily in tension with collectivism and socialism. Individualism promotes status competition, and when status competition exists, communal sharing in the proceeds of collective labor becomes impossible.

American millennials were hyper-individualistic and rejected socially prescribed roles even when they were young. What they wanted wasn't collectivism, it was a higher status within capitalism. Which is why, as you observed, the sentiment evaporated once they achieved that status. I'd make the same point about Gen Z. They want to think they're socialist and collectivist. But they all want to be online content creators and influencers--jobs that only exist in hyper-consumerist, capitalist societies!

This is not a criticism either of collectivism or millennials, by the way. I think Republicans screwed up the concepts during the Cold War era by successfully labeling Democrats as collectivist. What you have in the U.S. is more accurately described as two strains of libertarianism, one that emphasizes social liberty and the other that emphasizes economic liberty.

I think you may be focusing on this with a lens that isn't incorrect—and is in fact very worldly—but which fails to account for individuals' behavior on their own terms.

You define your own notion of collectivism and make claims about how it is necessarily in conflict with other principles, when in reality millennials aren't a monolith, collectivism isn't a monolith, and individualism isn't a monolith. Cultures and subcultures renegotiate the meaning of every -ism they import, and they practice these -isms only as bundles of other, historically correlated -isms.

When the American youth say they want collectivism, they are not saying they want a return to authentic rice farming culture. Most of the time, they are mourning the systematic loss of third places, they are mourning the obliteration of social safety nets, they are mourning the lack of public projects, they are mourning the death of individually influenceable local politics. At the same time, they do not want rigid social roles ordained from above (because "above" is powerful and corrupt). They also do not want a parochial existence taking care of grandma (because the elderly are in greater number and need than ever, and our infrastructure and way of life is ill suited to efficiently meeting these needs). None of this is contradictory cosplay. It is simply a fusion of individualism and collectivism that is unlike that which has existed before, as a result of cultural factors that are themselves unlike that which has existed before.

I agree that terms don't have fixed meaning, but the terms still have certain essential characteristics. I'd argue that what millenials want is more accurately described as a form of hyper-individualism. It seems superficially collectivist because they want more government spending, and the GOP convinced everyone that anytime the government pays for something that's communism. But the spending is actually in service of individualism. It's directed to freeing individuals from the social obligations they would have in a more collectivist society. E.g., they want social security to free them from the obligation of caring for their parents. Then they want free child care to free them from the reciprocal obligations they would incur if they relied on their parents for childcare. They want payments for kids, so they can be freed from the obligations of marriage. They want free education, but they want to choose their course of study, not receive training in whatever jobs the government determines need to be filled in the economy.

And the reason I'm quibbling about whether you label this "individualist" or "collectivist" is that it helps explain what happens as these people get older. Why did the seeming collectivism of the baby boomers in the 1960s give rise to a period of extreme libertarian individualism in the 1980s? I think that makes more sense when you realize that what happened in the 1960s was not collectivist, but instead a surge of individualism coupled with a rejection of obligations imposed by traditional society. Viewed that way, it makes total sense how the baby boomers went on to create an economy that was characterized by the rejection of social obligation.

Fair enough. I disagree somewhat with your characterization of why the youth wants these things (for example, I have never, not once heard of an American advocating for child benefits in order to "be freed from the obligations of marriage"; it typically comes from people anxious that you cannot support a family on a single earner, and wanting to spend more time with kids), but I'll grant that individualism is alive and well in the US, and has been at least since the boomers.

Sounds like the farce of modern liberté, égalité, fraternité, as in fraternité ou la mort. Just try not to be my brother!

Moral sentimentalism is a fool's errand, because it isn't morality. It's a superficial emotional ersatz, not something rooted in sound reason and reality. And so "universal brotherhood of Man" was always farcical. It's like those people who "love humanity", but can't be bothered to feed the homeless guy on the corner, or treat his wife decently and with due care. It always has to be something "grand" and "out there". It replaces authentic, concrete local allegiances - all relationships are local - with abstract, impersonal "brotherhood", which ultimately destroys real social cohesion.

Yes, there is a "human family". But family and community are not some undifferentiated, homogeneous mass. Society is ordered and composite. While we can love all as a matter of general disposition and wishing them well, love as such is manifested in the concrete and the active, not mere affect or the abstract. Our priorities and duties of love must concern concrete persons. They radiate outward and diminish with distance (by nature, but obviously there is an obvious impracticality to "loving everyone" in any meaningful and substantive way). Your duties toward your wife are greater than those toward your brother; toward your brother greater than your cousin; toward your neighborhood than the next one over. This priority is not either/or, and they do not preclude aiding more distant siblings in an hour of need. Loving one person more than another does not mean hating the other or some kind of license to disrespect the dignity as that person. It does not give permission for jingoism or chauvinism.

In the hyperindividualistic, consumerist liberal developed world, the trouble is that we've become atomized. We have denied our intrinsically social nature (just as collectivism warps it and denies our individuality). In doing so, the social order has been thrown into chaos. That's the chief reason for our social ills. In our misguided desire for "liberty", we have throw away objective morality and the notion of pre-consensual duties. We live to consume, and even our relationships are reduced to transactional conduits of consumption. Our culture is nihilistic; all it knows is consumption. There is no greater horizon. It cannot understand the social truly and in a healthy way, only according to the language of consumption. And all that obstructs unbridled consumption is taken to be opposed to "liberty" and therefore something that must be destroyed.

It's the revolutionary ethos of destruction.

I agree. One way to sum up what you've said: love in any substantial sense is a commitment of effort, and all such commitments are economic in nature - that is, inherently limited and subject to tradeoffs. And these commitments will follow a natural order favoring family and kin, according to our nature as evolved organisms.

The key here is that favoring doesn't need to mean excluding anything else!

No need for the romance. We don't have to be "brothers". That outlook is divisive in nature anyway, and a weapon for abusers: "I thought we were brothers. Now, put aside your hesitations, and help me hurt these 'other' people."

We can just be people. Don't hurt anyone, no one gets a pass to hurt you. Hurt someone, someone gets a pass to hurt you. Just you, not your "brothers". No matter the status of anyone involved.

Severity, intent, and priors must play a factor in the level of returned hurt, but should never end with none, and death should be a last resort, but never completely off the table.

That's the good-faith interpretation of the golden rule. Instead of the popular abuser and enabler (turn the other cheek) interpretations. They both call anyone who dares hold anyone accountable, a hypocrite for supposedly not following the golden rule.

I don't care what story book it's in, or who said it, or when. It's a good rule on it's own merits. Doesn't mean everything that comes form the same source is equally valid.

Yeah, that's why I'm not really resentful or disappointed, exactly. Life is still good without it. You have your actual family, maybe some other people you really share life with, and everyone else is just doing their own thing, and you're existing together without causing problems for each other. That's not a bad way for things to work.

The author cites Arendt a fair bit, whose claim to fame was that entirely ordinary people could become voluntary instruments of atrocity.

I think the belief of ordinary people most likely to dispose them to atrocity is that of prioritizing the ingroup. Once we believe that the members of one's own family, or company, or country, carry more moral value than others, we're doomed to a descent limited only by our ability to make these world-worsening trades.

When I was a child, my dad would sometimes engage in small acts of corruption to please me or my brother. Taking somebody else's spot, telling white lies to get more than his share of a rationed good, that sort of thing. It never sat right with me. "Family first" has a very ominous ring to me.

Yes, the slogan "America first" is a forerunner of the worst kind of imperialism.

also "Make America Great Again" states that America is not currently great, which given its geo-political and economic position is just dishonest. Combined with "America First" you get an entirely clean canvas to be incredibly radical while cosplaying conservative.

To me this is the best example of how language can be used to bypass rational thinking in the listener to manipulate and propagandize.

See also:

Politics and the English Language by George Orwell- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...

Newspeak by George Orwell - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

Verbal Behaviour by B.F.Skinner - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbal_Behavior

I would argue MAGA will be rather fitting campaign slogan for the democrat side come next election.

or maybe simply MAAA: Make America America again.

I have way too many family members and associates like that. "Family First" has the same ominous ring to me too. At least, in the given scenarios. Would you agree it's less ominous, maybe even noble, when shit hits the fan though?

I think they're easily convinced we're living in constant state of war, even on a slow Tuesday at Costco. The propaganda they often parrot would seem to suggest it.

Or maybe they see there are scenarios that is considered noble, and generalize it to be the case for all scenarios. The people I know like that also have a habit of over-generalizing every aspect of life. Cliches, aphorisms, etc. are a huge part of their vocabulary, but they are rarely applied in the original spirit of the sayings.

> Would you agree it's less ominous, maybe even noble, when shit hits the fan though?

The "family first, others second" interpretation is, I think, even more problematic when shit hits the fan. In disasters, it never benefits a community to turn on itself. And in fact, I believe the natural human reaction to disaster is to become more altruistic rather than less; see "A Paradise Built in Hell" by Rebecca Solnit for more on this.

The actually noble interpretation of "family first" is "family first, my own priorities second," at least so long as it doesn't lead to unhealthy self-sacrifice.

> I think the belief of ordinary people most likely to dispose them to atrocity is that of prioritizing the ingroup.

In my opinion, there is another tendency even more significant in that regard. Namely, the visceral desire to see "bad guys" deservedly suffer. Once people are in that frame of mind, they strongly resist any attempts to understand and maybe prevent whatever the "bad guys" did, let alone questions whether it was actually bad.

This is what fuelled lynch mobs, it's what makes MAGA types cheer when ICE murders immigrants, and it's what makes certain leftist circles chant "eat the rich" along with images of guillotines and wood chippers.

When you point out that poverty causes crime, rightists get mad at you for "excusing" or "justifying" crime, and when you point out that poverty causes support for far-right politicians, leftists get mad at you for "excusing" or "justifying" racism.

Of course, this interacts with your point: when someone from the ingroup does something bad, people are willing to look at their reasons and if found lacking it is only the individual that should be punished, whereas the outgroup is never afforded the luxury of complexity, and the entire group is held responsible for each individual's sins.

What you describe is deepest human nature. We are tribal, period. No amount of morales will change that, no matter how it sits with you personally.

Some groups of people are much less tribal than others.

Wouldn’t that be horrible? If great masses of humans did act morally, and you didn’t have this justification that everyone does it?

I feel like this is a false binary. Acting more morally some of the time is surely possible (both as individuals and as a society); we have at least some level of ability to choose our actions independent of our nature.

Yes, I was about to say this. A human is basically testicles with a brain attached, and the natural goal of life is to make sure that the genetically closest material survives and reproduces. That's why it's common to have stronger relationships with your family than with randoms on the internet. The more different the genetic material is, the less you care - individuals of different culture, of different race, of different species, of different kingdom of life, and finally viruses that are just strings of RNA floating around and nobody advocates about their rights because fuck that.

> A human is basically testicles with a brain attached

> The more different the genetic material is, the less you care - individuals of different culture, of different race, of different species, of different kingdom of life, and finally viruses that are just strings of RNA floating around and nobody advocates about their rights because fuck that

The type of mental model that ignores 50% of the world's population due to having that same proportions of chromosomes not matching one's mental heuristic of what constitutes a human is what I'd say "fuck that" to, personally

Okay but you have to admit that this is not how things functioned through majority of human history.

No, I think it's pretty much a biological fact there have been plenty of people without testicles for pretty much all of human history.

The excessive focus on the nuclear family is itself a very recent trend that would otherwise be viewed as very odd by many if not most historical social organizing systems.

Given the diversity of social models which have emerged globally, I have no idea how you could possibly make that claim.

I have no idea how to argue with you because it feels like we can't agree whether the Earth is obviously round or obviously flat.

From a cursory google search, there does not seem to be anything close to a consensus that the nuclear family is the dominant way that humans have organized historically: https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/the-persistent-my...

>The more different the genetic material is, the less you care

This is sort of true but it misses that we don't actually have DNA sensors built into our eyes. Instead we rely on heuristics like the Westermarck effect where we will (normally) tend to not find someone we lived with as a child attractive regardless whether they're a blood relation or not.

We influence who (or what) is in our group through our behaviour, thoughts and associations. Look at the vast number of people who value their dog or cat over other human beings. It's unlikely their dog is closer to them, genetically speaking than any single human on Earth but they spend time and invest emotionally in their pet so they form a bond despite the genetic distance.

If you see a child being hurt it likely invokes a slightly stronger emotional response if the child reminds you of someone in your own life. Often this will be someone who looks like you/your family (i.e. is genetically similar to you) but it might be some other kid you've grown attached to who is not related at all.

So yes, we are driven by a calculating selfish gene mechanism but we're also burdened/gifted with a whole bunch of emotional and social instincts and rely on imperfect sensors not tricorders. It's why people can form group identities over all sorts of non-genetic characteristics (e.g. religion, nation, neighbourhood, sports team affiliation, political ideology, vi vs emacs, etc).

That's completely true because there are many aspects to what is "my group" and what isn't, but the key point is, people naturally care about their group more than they care about strangers. Thinking in terms of genetics provides a simple model that's good enough to explain a lot of phenomena. But yes, if you want to go deeper, you need to consider other factors - at first glance it seems like "culture" is the most important one.

An even worse sign is when we believe that the members of one's own family, or company, or country carry less moral value than others.

Uh oh, is this a reference to the radar meme/study?

The one that conservatives keep claiming shows that liberals care more about out-groups than in-groups, but actually shows that either 1) many conservatives are illiterate and can't read a survey question, or 2) many conservatives literally don't care if right or wrong happens to acquaintances, strangers, their countrymen, humans in other countries, non-human animals, living things, etc?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/moral-circles-heatmap

That's pretty insulting, mate.

You should look into what Conservatives have actually done.

It wasn't Liberals that took children out of factories, mines and chimneys.

Clearly you've never read Hayek.

Sure, post memes as proof.

Well it's not really a meme, it's a study. And it was an earnest question as to whether GP was referencing the study. They claim they weren't ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also it sounds like you're referring to the British political parties Liberals and Conservatives, not the lowercase-l and lowercase-c political philosophies by the same names, which the study is actually about.

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I guess I'm confused as to who is allegedly providing the counterargument that they should love out-groups more than in-groups?

It's rare to see anybody literally arguing it, but it's more common than not in the real world.

Oppression would be quite impossible throughout history if people weren't willing to oppress their own kind to the benefit of others.

Even those arguing for loyalty to the in-group are rarely those who would themselves make any sacrifices for that group.

> Oppression would be quite impossible throughout history if people weren't willing to oppress their own kind to the benefit of others.

No what's far more common is that people change their perception (or have different perceptions) of who is "their own kind."

You can actually see this happening in real time in the US with the emerging concept of "Heritage Americans." It's a way for losers and crybabies to narrow the scope of who is "their own kind" without having to openly declare that they simply don't love their countrymen.

I - and thankfully, it appears, the current administration - don't accept your definition of who is "my countrymen".

> losers and crybabies

Luckily, for now, at least, it appears to be your side that is losing and crying.

QED

> Oppression would be quite impossible throughout history if people weren't willing to oppress their own kind to the benefit of others.

Isn't the opposite far more common? When oppression happens, it is typically people oppressing the out-group for the benefit of the in-group.

My impression is that the foreign/out group delegate the actual oppressing to local representatives, who are more than eager to do it towards their own kind.

It's complex. My wife's father-in-law immigrated from Italy to escape the destruction wrought by fascism in WWII and seek economic opportunity. He was part of a diaspora of a small village in Abbruzze that settled around Binghamton, NY. I would say that they all love Italy and they all love the U.S.

Those are people I know very well because I have been to so many parties, dinners, and other events with them. I've seen the same thing with people from India, China, Sri Lanka, etc. I'd assume that it's the normal condition of immigrants.

This is a good explanation of the Irish Machine in Chicago, corrupt white governments in the south, and Somalian welfare scams in Minnesota. It also explains the endemic corruption in tribal or clan-oriented societies like Afghanistan.

Conversely, radical universalist regimes—even bad ones like the Taliban—can cut down on corruption. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tackling-corruption.... It’s possible that the low levels of corruption in New England, compared to the rest of the country, is the legacy of the radically universalist Puritans.

The situation in which people exchange favors within their mutually beneficial personal networks seems to be the basic and typical way things function. It’s actually remarkable that we are able to resist this tendency and normalize fair and impartial institutions.

The brain actually has specific neurological system that compartmentalise reasoning contexts in different social contexts, so we operate according to different sets of assumptions and rules of behaviour and reasoning in different kinds of situations.

Can you share some resources on the above?

The the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) both play roles in this. Not a neuroscientist, just going on my own reading.

Unless you’re autistic

True. I really don't know enough about it, but it may well be these functions are still there, after all I expect the relevant neurological systems are still there, but the impact on social cognition from autism render their effects basically irrelevant.

Can you elaborate on your hypothesis? Would them being "still there" imply the possibility of treatment to enable their effectiveness?

I enjoyed this paper, and there's innumerable things that could be said about ingroup-outgroup dynamics and corruption.

In my personal experiences with corruption with organizations, ingroup membership often becomes increasingly narrowly defined, and defined in such a way as to benefit a certain group of individuals at the expense of others. The underlying rationale is a narcissistic entitlement or rationalization for why one person or small group of people is deserving of disproportiate benefits or flexibility at the expense of others. It starts with some kind of distorted egocentric schema about others in a more distal way, and then becomes increasingly strict and more proximal. Narcissistic egocentrism is at the core; it only manifests more weakly at first, and then becomes stronger. The ingroup boundaries never stop shrinking, because there always has to be some justification for why that particular group — which was never really defined by the initial ingroup boundaries, the ingroup was only a proxy for themselves — is more deserving than others.

It’s like they worked at my last workplace

The rationalization aspect of their model can't be overstated enough in my opinion. It never starts with something clearly unethical; it starts with something more complicated. Something that is uncomfortable and morally suboptimal, but has some justification being appealed to — it benefits the group, it's otherwise unfair for some members to have to bear some small temporary cost for the benefits of others, or something of that sort. The level of the corrupt behavior becomes more and more extreme though, such that justification becomes more and more questionable, until you're left with something more seriously problematic. In the meantime, the people who questioned the slippery slope might have left, and you're left with people who aren't in a position of power for whatever reason (they're junior, or in small numbers) to question what has become clearly unethical cultural norms.

I think the article is overlooking an important category of corruption where social norms treat certain acts as theoretically immoral but in practice impose little to no social sanction for such acts. In places like India, for example, taking bribes is just standard practice. It carries so little social sanction that it’s like jaywalking here in the US. People acknowledge it’s technically illegal, but it carries so little social sanction that people don’t consciously need to rationalize it. The same thing with cheating in schools, which is normalized in India and has become almost as normalized in the U.S.

I like this definition of corruption, though there are many...

"The abuse of entrusted power for private gain"

Jaywalking is breaking the law, but it is not corruption.

Civil disobedience is also typically breaking the law, but is not corruption.

It is important to recognize that just because a system is codified in law does not mean that it is not corrupt.

The “power” focus for corruption is not useful. Corruption by people without power is more harmful to society than high level corruption. People skimming off the top is undesirable, but survivable. But ordinary people taking bribes and cheating grinds society to a halt and makes it impossible to develop societal wealth.

This is well evidenced in the development of asian countries in the 20th century. South Korea has plenty of corruption at a high level. But it’s clean at the lower level, and as a result it’s been able to become a rich society. By contrast, India has crippling corruption at lowest levels of society that imposes a huge drag on routine transactions and daily life.

That's a good point, although I think it depends on how you define "power". I think in a lot of ethical discourse, power is defined more broadly in terms of who has more leverage in a situation. It doesn't have to correspond to a political position or position of physical authority necessarily.

In the US at least I think the power distinction is dangerously becoming lost. Traditionally, there was a trade that was made for power: you have more power, you give up privacy to maintain transparency, and you are held to a higher standard. Frequently it seems arguments are made that people in power should enjoy the same standards as others with less power, which was not part of the trade.

I agree with you that there is an importance of cultural norms at every level, but I do think power matters, as it is key to understanding conflicts of interest and permeates every level of society.

I feel like seeing people disregard traffic laws fits this topic in some related way. They could be patient, they might arrive at their destination 1-3 minutes slower (or not), but in the moment they choose to break the law and put others at risk.

1. You see others do it and feel compelled not to be taken advantage of

2. You start with small things as escalate

3. You normalize the behavior in one context and then it expands to other context.

This feels like it's following similar patterns of normalization

Even if it's not direct death, which, with at 4000lb car is certainly a possibility, it can indirectly cause severe repercussions. If you ruin someone's car they might not be able to get to work. They lose value in their car even if repaired. Repairs are never 100%. They also have to deal with all the time dealing with the time dealing with accident itself and time dealing with repairs etc. Time they could have spent earning a living or taking care of loved ones.

Yesterday I was at a 1 lane road where there's enough room on the right to squeeze in for a right turn. A driver squeezed to that right turn area on the red. Then on the green they went through the light and illegally passed all other cars. I see this kind of stuff daily.

Another one I see regularly. There's left turn lane with a left turn arrow. The lane to the right of the left turn lane is NOT a left turn lane, yet random drivers turn left from it. It's more common to see them turn left when there's the green turn signal but I've seen them turn left when the left turn signal is red.

Another that escalated over the years is cutting across multiple lanes of traffic and the painted barrier to take a freeway exit at the last second.

i agree 100% and it occurs more often the closer you drive near a big city where the traffic is already aggravating. that one driver doing something maneuver to save themselves 1-2 minutes while delaying everyone behind them 10 seconds..which adds up across the 10-20 people that just got cut off.

curious what your solution/remedy to this problem is? more police on the streets with pre-filled tickets they can quickly hand out? self policing via dash cams and if you send in a video to the police they can ticket them and get a 30% cut of the ticket the law breaker paid? mass traffic surveillance and get sent a ticket instantly to your address/email when traffic laws are broken? when i travel outside of the US i usually take the country’s public transport instead of driving so don’t really know if this has been solved for successfully

The US supreme court allowed thank you gifts for politicians to not be considered bribes somehow in a 2024 ruling, I think that alone might break the US.

The US Supreme Court is the very worst a supreme court could be. They've been thoroughly co-opted and will only start to see the light when it is their asses that are on the line.

The whole way the Judicial system in the US is beholden to politicians, and is thoroughly politicised looks completely horrific to me in the UK. Even the election officials responsible for overseeing voting are politicians.

Combined with this elected King George III presidential nonsense (not just king in general either, specifically the powers George III had in the 1780s) and I despair sometimes. Get yourselves a decent parliamentary system. If you avoid proportional representation it works fine. Unfortunately the US population is somehow convinced the current US system is modern and up to date. They'll probably still think that in another 200 years.

What do you have against proportional representation?

We can't "proportionally" represent a constituency which returns a single individual

So, if you want PR you have to either: Have two distinct classes of MP: Some were directly elected and represent an area, others are just to make the up proportions - but obviously these are just worse right? Second class MPs.

OR Abolish the constituencies entirely, now nobody represents your area and its particular concerns, or everybody does, which as we know amounts to the same thing because of how dilution works.

Unlike other electoral reforms a PR system has deeper implications far beyond the elections themselves. Historically the UK actually didn't have a single electoral system for every constituency, and that was fine†, indeed it works fine in the US today, the thing which needs to be coherent is what happens after the election and PR meddles with that.

† Well, not "fine", this is the era of the famous "Rotten Boroughs" but the fact that the system varies from one place to another wasn't key there.

It also means that people are voting for party lists, not individuals, and the lists are controlled by the parties. In a proper parliamentary system the parliamentarians directly represent their voters, and have a mandate from them. Parties do not have that, only MPs have that. By passing the mandate from the representative to the party, and the party having list control, that puts far too much power over parliamentarians in the hands of unelected party functionaries that draw up the lists and have no mandate themselves.

That's way less bad than it appears, because in a proportional system you will have more than 2 parties. In practice, every election is an election of those invisible bureaucratic hands, instead of some heads on display.

Party affiliation is already a problem, List systems make that worse.

Years ago two of my friends lived in Vauxhall in London. That spy building in central London where James Bond works? That's in Vauxhall (and it is really for spies, though real intelligence agents do not look like James Bond), they lived like 10 minutes walk from there.

Vauxhall is pretty far left even for a city borough, but they ended up with Kate Hoey as their Labour MP. Kate - despite being a representative of a left party was nevertheless pro gun rights, pro fox hunting, and pretty luke warm on LGBT issues, she was also, which led to her finally be thrown out by her local party, pro-Brexit.

But the people of Vauxhall weren't really voting for Kate Hoey the woman who likes fox hunting and isn't too bothered if they make abortion illegal again, and who is supporting Brexit even though they don't want it - they were voting for Labour, a centre left party and Kate had Labour's endorsement.

Maybe under PR Kate ends up finding a home in some party that more closely tracks her personal beliefs, but, equally maybe not. And so people end up voting for something they don't really want.

I think that given simply counting is apparently too untrustworthy in our post-truth world, we might as well do something more sophisticated like Instant Run-off or Approval, but I don't approve of Proportional as a goal.

Or, larger districts of ~5 or so representatives. In the US, Representatives are already barely "local" -- 700k+ people to a single district.

lest we forget luxury fishing trips, RVs, real-estate debt payoffs, or payoffs of relatives' tuition

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It was SCOTUS, literally. They literally weakened the legislation. And by SCOTUS we mean conservative majority specifically.

From dissent of disagreeing SCOTUS justice: "absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s Court could love."

> They literally weakened the legislation.

IMO that's not the case, because if a legislation looses its intended focus, it gains a lot of arbitrariness in return. The more interpretations you consider valid, the more options you can choose from when applying it.

So, obviously, the legislation had to be returned to a single interpretation, the one Congress intended (or the one the court thinks is the best if you believe courts should hold legislative power).

Which leads directly to the second issue: Which was the interpretation Congress intended?

> From dissent of disagreeing SCOTUS justice: "absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s Court could love."

The majority opinion analyses this issue with 6 different approaches, including a textual one, arriving at similar conclusions from each.

The dissenting opinion on the other hand argues, that all other approaches but the textual one should be rejected.

The dissenting opinion's textual interpretation strongly asserts, that Congress intended with "accepts or agrees to accept, anything of value from any person, intending to be influenced or rewarded" to address both bribes (intending to be influenced) and gratitudes (intending to be rewarded).

The majority opinion argues that if you were to divorce the concept of a reward from the prior intent during the influenced/rewarded actions in a statute that criminalizes accepting something of value rather than the intent itself (because how would that even be possible?), you end up with a situation in which being promised something of value, but only receiving it after the influenced actions have been completed, would no longer fulfill the requirements to be considered a bribe.

Basically the majority argues that if they are correct (666 being a bribery rather than a combined bribery + gratitudes statute), Congress still would have had to use language at least equivalent to the one at hand and therefore additional tests to deduce the intent of the 99th Congress can not be disregarded.

> It is reasonable to assume some gratitude should be allowed, otherwise you'd have to ask how long a teacher should be tossed into jail for receiving a "Best teacher ever" mug from his students.

This is unfathomably ridiculous and you know it. Profoundly bad faith argument.

The difference is that a teacher is on government payroll, while politicians, at least those in the Congress are not.

And when I was a teacher that was strict guidelines on what gifts you can receive. Usually under a certain limit it’s fine. If it is too expensive you have to report it.

> The difference is that a teacher is on government payroll, while politicians, at least those in the Congress are not.

Congresspeople are paid by the government... What are you saying here?

Not really, because that's the core issue had hand, but I might not have made my intention with the argument sufficiently clear.

The question the court looked at: Did Congress intend "receiving gifts as a bribe" and "receiving gifts as gratitude" to be two separate crimes for non-federal employees as it is the case for federal ones (In which case handling the issue would have been left up to the states)?

The majority opinion refused to consider the moral argument (although they snuck it in in their argument on a lack of fair notice), but IMO that's by far the most intuitive one, when you allow yourself to look at the problem from the legislative perspective. By looking at the extremes it becomes very clear that there are two very different problems:

Imagine a group of students doing much better than their peers on their final exam thanks to the efforts of their teacher and they gift him a "Best teacher ever" mug.

But now reverse the causality:

Imagine a teacher demanding to be gifted a "Best teacher ever" mug before putting extra effort into preparing his students for their final exam. The group that gifted him the mug does much better than their peers as a result.

IMO these should be two very different crimes, but there is also a valid argument that they are about equivalent, as pursued by the dissenting opinion.

But that's not something a court should legislate.

No, it's already in the law that it only applies if it is intended to and corruptly accepted as an influence on official decision-making.

A gift as a thank-you, post-hoc, where the prosecution cannot prove the gift was part of an effort to "corruptly" influence a prior decision, was always fine under any interpretation.

If students said "if you give us a good grade, then we'll give you a Best Teacher Ever mug," that is functionally identical to a bribe but is now legal.

> it only applies if it is intended to and corruptly accepted as an influence on official decision-making.

The majority opinion argues that this is one of the primary differences between a bribe and a gift of gratitude.

> A gift as a thank-you, post-hoc, where the prosecution cannot prove the gift was part of an effort to "corruptly" influence a prior decision, was always fine under any interpretation.

No, which is a large part of this whole argument. The interpretation the government used and was (indirectly) backed by the minority opinion, was, that the statute would not cover "innocuous or obviously benign" gratuities. But what counts as "innocuous or obviously benign" was never established. And this "innocuous or obviously benign" line is EXACTLY what distinguished between whether a gratitude was accepted with a corrupt state of mind.

And that's where we arrive back at the core of the problem.

For a bribe, the question of whether or not a corrupt state of mind existed can be judged at minimum by if the official act was corrupted. Usually this standard doesn't exist for gratitudes. These do not require a corrupt state of mind to be criminal, but their criminality derives solely from the heightened standard of responsibility of an official when performing official duties. Just like a heightened standard of responsibility when operating a motor vehicle or carrying.

> If students said "if you give us a good grade, then we'll give you a Best Teacher Ever mug," that is functionally identical to a bribe but is now legal.

Not really a good example, because unless that's something like a theater performance there is basically no way forward from this, which could end with the teacher handing out good grades and receiving a mug from these students without this scenario becoming bribery.

And gratitudes do not become legal in general. It's just that the involvement of the federal government ends and states are now free to handle such cases however they think is appropriate.

> But what counts as "innocuous or obviously benign" was never established. And this "innocuous or obviously benign" line is EXACTLY what distinguished between whether a gratitude was accepted with a corrupt state of mind.

Easy: someone would complain and a court would decide based on the specifics of the situation. Most laws work this way and cannot actually resolve based on a programmatic list of facts.

> Not really a good example, because unless that's something like a theater performance there is basically no way forward from this, which could end with the teacher handing out good grades and receiving a mug from these students without this scenario becoming bribery.

Are you arguing that grading (outside of "something like a theater performance") is fully objective? Because... it's not.

As a counterexample, here is an example of a Singaporean officer refusing to accept a bribe, as reported by Lee Kuan Yew:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nZv_UkMh0FA

The people who crave that money and influence tend to be control freak psycho/sociopaths. They need to feel superior to others because deep down they don’t/can’t value themselves. They don’t even know what they’re competing/fighting for anymore. They just can’t stop because they know no other way.

There are some great movies that deal with this: Wall Street, The Firm, The Big Short, Suicide Kings, Michael Clayton, among others.

One can even consider the never ending Ethics classes in college an ironic form of corruption that never teaches anything we don't already know by secondary school, but used to pad credit numbers and tuition revenue.

My business ethics professor just showed clips from Yes, Minister! and House of Cards in class and showed the tactics. Seemed odd at the time, but I got more out of it than a normal ethics class.

> Fear is induced by coercion, the threat of negative consequences such as ostracism and demotion. To be sure, blatant coercion facilitates the denial of responsibility and thereby compliance with corrupt directives. Such coercion, however, leaves less room for (perceived) volition, a key precondition for the dissonance reduction process discussed earlier. Newcomers subject to blatant coercion have a sufficient justification for their obedience – to avoid the threat – and thus do not need to realign their attitudes to accommodate the otherwise dissonant behavior. Indeed, blatant coercion may provoke resentment and reactance against the source of coercion and the targeted behavior (e.g. Nail, Van Leeuwen & Powell, 1996). The upshot is a greater likelihood of grudging compliance, whistle-blowing and voluntary turnover (and thus, risk of exposure). Further, coercion may affect behavior only as long as the pressure is applied. For these reasons, blatant coercion tends to be an ineffective means of sustaining corruption.

Astute. When the average person is asked to imagine how corrupt leaders operate, I think they tend to overemphasize the effectiveness of simple violence. To foster a corruption that will last, you have to mold the circumstances so that corruption is the only option that makes sense.

Such an insightful article. Had to cover in 3 sittings though - the reading is a bit dense.

It's Gwern! He's like a combine harvester for data in all forms, digesting it and putting stuff out there that is usually bullet proof and extremely enlightening. I've yet to see him put out something that didn't meet that standard. Well worth your time, also on other subjects.

The actual linked PDF is not from Gwern, it's a 2003 paper from two sociologists Blake E. Ashforth and Vikas Anand.

The 1972 Knapp Commission report is essential reading on the topic

This is how the US falls. The entire US as organization, with corruption at the very top.

Absolutely on point!

You need only look at the bureaucracies in countries which rank high on the corruption index. Most join to just earn a livelihood but are soon "socialized into corruption".

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption#Causes

Per R. Klitgaard corruption will occur if the corrupt gain is greater than the punitive damages multiplied by the likelihood of being caught and prosecuted.

Since a high degree of monopoly and discretion accompanied by a low degree of transparency does not automatically lead to corruption, a fourth variable of "morality" or "integrity" has been introduced by others. The moral dimension has an intrinsic component and refers to a "mentality problem", and an extrinsic component referring to circumstances like poverty, inadequate remuneration, inappropriate work conditions and inoperable or over-complicated procedures which demoralize people and let them search for "alternative" solutions.

The references section has lots of links for further study of which Robert Klitgaard's Controlling Corruption is a classic with case studies.

One thing i would like to know more of is how Technology either reduces or exacerbates corruption.

Well, I know of one technology whos primary use-case is corruption: Crypto.

With corruption, one needs to look at the overall system i.e. involving Society/Individual/Economics/Politics/Organizations/Processes/Technologies/etc. rather than narrow silos.

On the whole, i feel technology has been a corruption mitigater since it reduces the human factor (i.e. the motivation/cause) from the process chain. This has been validated in my own personal experience.

On the flip side, when used by people-in-control it concentrates power in the hands of the few and its non-linear disproportionate effects can exacerbate the problem tremendously eg. various Internet based scams.

PS: Are emerging technologies helping win the fight against corruption? A review of the state of evidence - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016762452...

Another good read: https://www.scu.edu/ethics/focus-areas/business-ethics/resou...

Corruption is as normal as cancer in organizations. Sometimes it gets excised, and new cells form eventually starting the process again. Other times, it ends up killing the organization.

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This sounds like an LLM-generated response. Care to confirm/deny?

You sound like a bot. Prove you aren't.

I'm not particularly fond of large corporations.

Anyway, you and I both know I don't and the parent comment does.

See the diagram; A Systems Thinking model of Corruption from the article Evaluating the Impact of Institutional Improvement on Control of Corruption—A System Dynamics Approach - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-Systems-Thinking-model...

Systems Thinking provides a holistic view of the interactions contributing to an outcome expressed as a Causal Loop Diagram (CLD). The CLD developed using Systems Thinking shows the full complexity of the problem at hand, and then simplifications are necessary to create a working quantitative System Dynamics simulation. Figure 1 was developed based on 43 in-depth interviews and 155 survey interviews with government officials, aid agencies, civil society organizations, business people, lawyers, and the general public in Pakistan. It shows the complete set of relationships considered to represent the problem of corruption in a nation.

In the CLD, connections with directed arrows imply that a change in the tail variable leads to a change in the variable at the head of the arrow. An arrow labelled with polarity ‘+’ means changes in the same direction. Increasing the tail variable increases the head variable, and decreasing the tail variable decreases the head variable.

On the other hand, ‘-’ implies changes in the opposite direction. For example, increasing the tail variable decreases the head variable, and decreasing the tail variable increases the head variable.

These connections create highly non-linear behaviour because feedback loops develop where a change in one variable in the model will ripple through the cause-and-effect structure to return to its source and either reinforce or inhibit the change.

The reinforcing feedback loop is labelled with an ‘R’ and inhibiting or balancing feedback loops with a ‘B’.

Connecting these loops often leads to emergent and unexpected behaviours in the system.

There should be a checklist of simple rules of thumb that any created or reorganized entity should undergo.

For example if the organization is self-financing it breeds corruption.

If an entity mediates between buyers and sellers it can't be financed by sellers.

It should be fairly easy to compose that list by observing corrupt and underperforming setups that are already entrenched.

Corruption is defined as deviation from universalism. Shouldn't orgs at least pretend to care about productivity or is that the ultimate sin for a universalist? Or is the ultimate sin not pretending that universalism is productive?

Young people hate it when friends work together because it means they are at a disadvantage as they are not making friends

I take some issue with these kinds of articles that minimize the impacts of "street crime" in favor of the admittedly much broader and insidious effects of corporate crime.

Corporate crime generally can coexist with a functioning system, even while it drains the prosperity of society, but street crime will just dissolve the society overnight. People physically abandon locations with high street crime.

A corrupt system is still a system, meaning that in theory it operates to produce something of value for society (e.g. in addition to lying about climate change, causing cancer, and blocking renewable energy via lawfare and propaganda, BP provides a colossal amount of fuel for society) but street crime produces nothing and destroys community outright at the local level.

But street crime is often a symptom of the "much broader and insidious effects of corporate crime": social systems stripped of resources by politicians to provide grants to baseball stadiums, police patrols in quiet wealthy streets but abandoning poorer quarters, tax incentives to companies that then pay their employees so little they are a burden on the food security systems, mental health care priced out of reach for the poor so they end up homeless and violent.

You can list these connected problems all day.

> People physically abandon locations with high street crime.

Exactly. Which is why

> ... street crime will just dissolve the society overnight

is false. Street crime is also generally limited to poor areas and people who can't move out will be the first victims. Street crime does not dissolve trust at the societal level, it just dissolve trust of everyone into a few segments of the population (whose members are also now the first victims of that loss of trust)

Whereas corruption is a cancer that takes hold of all institutions as anyone and you might need to leave your country altogether when it becomes a third world hellhole.