"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.”"
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
gniv|2 days ago
"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."
praptak|2 days ago
"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/
getnormality|2 days ago
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?"
Paracompact|2 days ago
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.
rayiner|2 days ago
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.
LudwigNagasena|2 days ago
simonh|2 days ago
derbOac|2 days ago
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.
unknown|2 days ago
[deleted]
dundercoder|2 days ago
derbOac|2 days ago
rayiner|2 days ago
socalgal2|2 days ago
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.
toteroni|1 day ago
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
daedrdev|2 days ago
jacquesm|2 days ago
treetalker|2 days ago
DeepSeaTortoise|2 days ago
[deleted]
rramadass|2 days ago
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.
luke5441|2 days ago
stared|2 days ago
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nZv_UkMh0FA
_factor|2 days ago
ArchieScrivener|2 days ago
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.
codechicago277|2 days ago
FrustratedMonky|2 days ago
Paracompact|2 days ago
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.
csfNight167|2 days ago
jacquesm|2 days ago
chaostheory|2 days ago
unknown|2 days ago
[deleted]
NoToP|2 days ago
cpa|2 days ago
marcus_lam|2 days ago
[deleted]
AxiomLab|2 days ago
[deleted]
duskdozer|2 days ago
rramadass|2 days ago
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.
scotty79|2 days ago
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.
quacked|2 days ago
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.
Ensorceled|2 days ago
You can list these connected problems all day.
cassepipe|2 days ago
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.
casey2|2 days ago
justonceokay|2 days ago