All Institutions Are Corrupt

I've heard a lot of predictable statements these last few days about how people are exasperated with the political system. “Oh, those politicians are just in it for their own careers”, ‘They don't care about anything except their stupid games”, and many variations. Here's the thing: The political system in Canada is working better now than it has in my living memory.

What did Martin have to do to get his budget passed? He had to work his ass off. He had to listen to other parties about what they wanted in the budget instead of just declaring it unilaterally.

The people accusing Belinda stronger of unethical behavior are confusing loyalty to a political party with ethics. Party loyalty is the opposite of real ethics. She realized that Harper is a wingnut who doesn't listen to Canadians nor to people in his own party, including Conservative premiers who have won multiple elections and might have useful advice on how to crack through to the rest of us. What does she owe a party that doesn't listen to her and isn't articulating what she wants to see for her country?

Now, the Liberal party is owed no loyalty, either, but they are now in the position of having to employ discretion in their actions. What more could someone ask for in a balance of power?

Politics is corrupt because people are corruptible. The same goes for the business world, only they can do their dealings in the dark. Mussolini equated corporatism with fascism for a reason, and American corporate leaders were the most vocal supporters of the Nazi government and its method of operating.

If you are losing faith in government you should rightfully have lost faith in the corporate world long ago.

Any institutions out there that are actually functional? The church? I won't even waste the effort on them.

What these three institutions, and any other similar-sized collections of people, have in common is that at some point they change their focus to self-preservation. Members of a government seek re-election even if to do it they have to make promises or take positions that damage an entire society. Employees in a business seek to protect their own positions and will step on their fellow workers to do it. Shareholders will shield themselves from enough real involvement in the filthy actions they demand in order to make quarterly profit estimates to still allow them to sleep at night. Churches attack innocent, marginalized groups of people to hide and distract from their rotting corpse of an institution.

The animal kingdom functions much more effectively than humans because instincts are far harder to corrupt. A wolf pack is just about the perfect-functioning unit. If a member of the pack performs poorly at tracking prey, the rest of the pack will just stop following him. In the human world the poor tracker will have a title called 'boss', and he'll be more concerned with keeping that title than for the pack eating. And the pack of poor, stupid humans defer to this title out of sheer selfishness. They imagine themselves wearing that title proudly one day, and they want to preserve all the arbitrary power they covet.

But humans don't have the luxury of instinct. When a wolf loses a fight for dominance he skulks off. A human in the same situation will very well wait till nightfall and cut the winner's throat. That's human nature. So we erect rules and systems and institutions to protect us from our own nature.. and the result is that these institutions become the agents of harm themselves.

The difference is that being the leader of a wolf pack is a hard job. A submissive dog lives a much happier and less stressful life than a dominant one who feels he has to protect his pack and put himself at risk when needed. In the human world we associate leadership with luxury and comfort. And so we get as our leaders people who seek those things, rather than those who feel a drive to take on the hard work of protecting his pack.

(My use of the masculine gender is unfortunate, if there was a neutral article I'd have used it when referring to humans.)