Despite that refreshing clarity, when corruption is overt and blatant, it becomes even more entrenched and damaging. It's hard to muster even local, contingent

Despite that refreshing clarity, when corruption is overt and blatant, it becomes even more entrenched and damaging. It's hard to muster even local, contingent alliances against it. A society that aspirationally pretends it has less corruption than it really does can often better contain corruption. The magnitude and practices of corruption can be confined to certain sectors & ritualized, obscured mechanisms – and its expansion checked with a surviving norm that "here, we don't do that".