I think you missed the entire point of the article > What we call “corruption” is a smaller scale of cooperation undermining a larger-scale. The vast majority

I think you missed the entire point of the article > What we call “corruption” is a smaller scale of cooperation undermining a larger-scale. The vast majority of people don't work for some abstract social good. They work for specific concrete goods: helping themselves, helping their loved ones, helping their friends first and foremost. People also believe in reciprocity and fairness. Sometimes that means that if someone 'helps you out', you do the same back... even if that interaction wasn't completely 100% sanctioned by the rest of society. Corruption is not people ignoring their moral instincts and choosing to be evil. It is them weighing one set of moral instincts more strongly than another set of moral instincts (egalitarianism, not breaking rules). The struggle is to align the incentives properly so that 'helping yourself' also means to help society. Unlike what many libertarians and pure free-marketeers seem to believe, this doesn't just happen magically, but requires careful thought and planning.