Principles of Corruption

I've been doing some nationalistic introspection. I've been reading some troubling articles and watching some disturbing documentaries detailing the flaws of the US American prison system. In response to that, misgivings I have about exploitation, and speculations on responsibilities of leadership, I have this philosophical view to offer.

Under the growing conscientiousness of world cultures, harmless behavioral deviants in society can become part of the norm: a set of lifestyle choices that promote the freedom of human pleasure that are tolerated, if not outright accepted as legitimate and benign expressions.

However, for every harmless divergence from tradition, there are many others that detrimentally affect the culture they stem from. These deviations can be anything as old as bigotry, thievery, and sexual exploitation, or as new as insider trading and cheating vehicle emissions tests. Any number of factors can tempt individuals members of society to act selfishly. Living in an imperfect world, this cannot be avoided. People will stray from the course of communal greatness to pursue exclusively personal rewards.

In essence, these individuals have cast away their stake in a structure that supports them and forfeited stability in lieu of lucrative prospects. They become anomalous elements in their society and are handled according to societal laws. This justice usually dictates that they undertake a punishment proportionate to the crimes committed against the group, before they are re-accepted to society.

A healthy system of justice will also find ways to turn this atonement into a refinement of the individual. Through such a system, an individual that has diverged from the broader group can learn the cost of their past behavior, understand misconceptions of that behavior, and develop alternative means of expressing that behavior.

If a society is to successfully manage its population, it will need to support a tailored rehabilitation for each of these individuals. Like all processes, the utilization of this rehabilitation by its keepers for secondary benefits (like cleaning up freeway overpasses, or making license plates) is acceptable. But only to an extent. Neither the method nor product of these benefits should hinder the realization of rehabilitation's goal: healthy reintegration of an individual into society.

When the leadership components of such a system of justice are given permission to utilize these deviant components to produce and expand the structure for everyone else, this process must be scrutinized. They should by examined by the rest of, or by trusted members of society. The danger lies in the fact that in the past, those in power, when left un-monitored, are tempted to extort a system for personal benefits, without regard to the original objective.

And once a subsystem with conflicting goals is fitted into the broader system without oversight, the upkeep of such a deception begins to take toll on resources. These profit-focused mores will lean the system away from rehabilitation and the effectiveness of the system as a whole will deteriorate.

When the reintegration of individuals into society is put aside for personal profit, such as the exploitation of prison workers as a cheap labor for avaricious economic industries, it begs the question: where is this Church of Money, and how can I get in on the action?

If there are food machine service people taking loose cogs from the machines, using them to open soda bottles they stole, then shoving them in backwards while yelling how “these parts are all wrong, anyway!" it is only a matter of time before the machines are properly restored or eventually go out of business.

Someone tell these guys that historical revisionism is played out.