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> there is no avoiding "corruption," only moving it around. American culture, and to a lesser extent Western culture in general, encourages this kind of corrup

> there is no avoiding "corruption," only moving it around. American culture, and to a lesser extent Western culture in general, encourages this kind of corruption. If your culture elevates individualism and freedom above social responsibility and harmony, then your institutions will be systemically corrupted by selfish individuals. So yes, given a culture that prioritizes individualism above all, corruption is unavoidable. In other news, a former CCP top government minister was just sentenced to death for corruption. Incentives at work.

spywaregorilla 4y ago
Is that why all the local governments are collapsing under their off the books debts?
woodruffw 4y ago
Well, I don't think the intended message of The Wire is "adopt the CCP's anti-corruption measures." That's editorialization on our part as viewers. I also don't think the show has a particularly anti-individual message: individual police officers and drug dealers are repeatedly shown as struggling within a collectively dysfunctional system, and individual members of each group are shown as themselves corrupt while being protected by the collective. The show is more nihilistic than proscriptive, other than the small handful of "successes" that occur (like Hamsterdam).
- pphysch 4y ago
  The Wire is radical, but not quite radical to the point of openly questioning the foundations of modern American culture. That would be crazy in ~2002.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    Right. The show is even conservative, by some measures: the police are generally shown deference by the show's writers (even when individual cops are openly characterized negatively).
gtirloni 4y ago
> In other news, a former CCP top government minister was just sentenced to death for corruption Maybe it's a cynical view, but I wouldn't be surprised if anticorruption laws were used to get rid of someone for other reasons, especially by corrupt people.
- pphysch 4y ago
  That's certainly possible -- lawfare definitely happens in the West (Russiagate, anti-Corbynism and Lava Jato come to mind). But if it was simply about political maneuvering, death penalties are wasteful and severe. So that suggests that there is more to it.
upsidesinclude 4y ago
And because it was the CCP, we'll never know if that news is state propaganda or truth... . He might have just been the honest fall guy who promoted too much social harmony to the detriment of his superiors lifestyles
- behaveEc0n00 4y ago
  The US relies on private propaganda to normalize attitudes to its goals. Given how chummy politicians and “journalists” and corporate owners are off camera it’s laughable to think there is a real separation of power. Our biology evolved for thousands of years before language was invented. To suggest our language influences our biology is nonsensical. Our biology influences language. Propaganda is all about setting a biological mood not embedding a specific chant. Media had been stoking the right moods until the internet enabled an unfiltered emotional meta-mind. They intentionally wrap news in titillating music and graphics. It’s all research based effort in the fields of behavioral economics, public relations, etc. An educated minority are leveraging that education against the majority to optimize for themselves. “Because that’s the history of our society!”
  - upsidesinclude 4y ago
    For a time, propagandizing US citizens became illegal. We lost that in the Obama administration. Not that it would have mattered.... Language does certainly influence biology and vice versa. I agree we are living in precarious times and there's no benefit to promoting an equally opaque system built for an elite class
    - behaveEc0n00 4y ago
      Cable news has government officials on spewing government talking points all night. That’s government propaganda. Suuure it’s not “official” but wtf does that matter when it embeds itself in our inner monologues? Corporations that own cable news and are given all the money with no strings by the government; hardly an Obama era shift. Making it illegal is meaningless.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
> American culture, and to a lesser extent Western culture in general, encourages this kind of corruption. If your culture elevates individualism and freedom above social responsibility and harmony, then your institutions will be systemically corrupted by selfish individuals. Which culture are you suggesting does not get systematically corrupted by selfish individuals?
- JacobThreeThree 4y ago
  American culture is much less corrupt when compared to the rest of the real world, instead of being compared to a hypothetical corruption-free world.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    You gonna back that up? The "rest of the world" contains various European, Asian and even a neighboring North American country with plenty of readers who would be delighted to see your evidence
    - fragmede 4y ago
      https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021/index/usa https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021/index/usa 27th isn't too bad!
    - JacobThreeThree 4y ago
      It's my opinion based on my personal experience in various countries around the world. There's plenty of corruption in Europe, Asia and Mexico/Canada.
  - avgcorrection 4y ago
    > American culture is much less corrupt when compared to the rest of the real world, Does this mean that it’s the least corrupt place in the world?
JacobThreeThree 4y ago
CCP China is your example of an uncorrupt culture? From my personal experience in China I can tell you that it's standard practice to hand paper bags full of cash to government officials (and CCP members) in order to get government contracts. Xi targeting his political rivals with "corruption" charges hasn't changed this culture.
- AyyWS 4y ago
  My family member who runs a company in China avoids bribes by pretending to be a dumb American.
canes123456 4y ago
I doubt there less corruption in the CCP than in the US. Corruption is an easy justification to arrest or kill anyone in China. Also, corruption is absurdly high in Venezuela since they moved away from individualism and toward collectivism.
DoughnutHole 4y ago
Except that those individualistic countries in the west have some of the lowest rates of corruption and lowest perceptions of corruption in the world. The supposedly less individualistic countries of the east lag behind, including China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index The Asian countries that do match the west for low levels of corruption (Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore) largely have a very obvious trait in common - wealth. The least corrupt countries are all among the world's wealthiest, and the most corrupt all among its poorest - regardless of how "individualistic" the country is. The poorer a country is the more necessary are the advantages to be gained by gaming the system. The weaker a country's institutions the easier it is to get away with corruption - hence the worst offenders being failed states like Syria and Lybia. It's honestly fairly simple even without considering culture. If anything a more collective society is more susceptible to corruption (and I say this as proponent of big government). The reason China hands out death sentences for corruption is that an individual at the top of the governmental organisations in China can do an enormous amount of damage since the government directly controls the apparatus of the economy and has a huge stake in every major company. No governmental official in the west has as much control over the societal purse as a high ranking official of the CCP.
- pphysch 4y ago
  Those Western "Corruption" ratings are deeply unserious. Washington is totally, systemically corrupt. Lobbying, insider trading, and the revolving door are all corrupt practices that practically define the Beltway. Try winning even a local government seat without being buddy-buddy with local "employers", media, and other unofficial power brokers. That's not democracy.
  - DoughnutHole 4y ago
    The fact that your prime examples of corruption in the west is Washington corruption and corruption in local government indicates you don't have a grasp of what truly endemic corruption is like in developing countries. - Do you have to personally slip a DMV official several times the actual required fee whenever you get your license renewed to get them to even look at the application? - Do you have to directly bribe police officers to get them to respond to your complaint? If you were pulled over for a traffic offence would your assumed way out of it be to personally slip something to the police officer? - Do truckers have to routinely bribe state officials when crossing state lines? - Do local officials routinely illegally procure land via the government purse for their own personal use? - Are government officials ever bribed to declare someone dead to allow someone to erroneously claim the totally-not-dead person's property? These are all pretty much regular occurrences in India - a country that is basically middling in terms of corruption on a global scale. And don't worry, they have all of the high level local and national legislative corruption that the US has as well, with the bonus of a civil service and judiciary that are corrupt from the top down to their roots. Outside the west corruption isn't just government officials making bad choices to satisfy their doners and special interests (as bad and dysfunctional as that is). In most developing countries it's a fact of day-to-day life - if you are on the lower rungs of the social ladder you have to personally engage in corruption in order to survive. Getting a home, a business licence, governmental documentation etc etc pretty much always come down to either who you know or who you bribe. And if you're higher up you might be lucky enough to benefit from it.
SoftTalker 4y ago
Western culture is not built only on individualism and freedom, it's also built on Judeo-Christian morality. The Golden Rule, the Ten Commandments. We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other. -- John Adams Our culture is predicated on not elevating individualism and freedom above responsibility. They go hand-in-hand. When morality becomes relative, and "whatever feels good" is the standard of acceptable behavior, you see the sort of social decay that is happening all around us.
- pphysch 4y ago
  American culture has transformed over the centuries, but the most recent dominant form is hyperindividualist. Ayn Rand over Jesus Christ. Just look at our most recent leaders -- a couple of highly corrupt guys with no serious religious conviction.
- vore 4y ago
  In practice, you see a lot of these self-professed Judeo-Christian moralizers engage in irresponsible individualist behavior so I don't think paying lip service to religious morality is really effective here either. The overriding factor is still the structure of incentives rather than adherence to a specific moral code.
pdonis 4y ago
> If your culture elevates individualism and freedom above social responsibility and harmony, then your institutions will be systemically corrupted by selfish individuals. While I don't disagree with your general comment, I would point out that the words you are using can be interpreted multiple ways. For example: "Individualism and freedom" does not have to mean shortsighted individualism and freedom. Any thinking person should realize that social cooperation and wealth creation through specialization and trade is in their individual, "selfish" interest. And that being the case, any thinking person should realize that "individualism and freedom" must include supporting and preserving social institutions that facilitate social cooperation and wealth creation through specialization and trade. That is what "Western culture" is supposed to be about, and the fact that many Western cultures don't do a good job at this doesn't mean "individualism and freedom" are bad; it means that many Western cultures have forgotten what "individualism and freedom" is actually supposed to mean. Conversely, "social responsibility and harmony" does not have to mean preserving social institutions that facilitate social cooperation and wealth creation through specialization and trade. The Soviet Union's leaders and official media outlets like Pravda were constantly talking about "social responsibility and harmony", but what they meant by that was absolute obedience to the Party and its leaders, even as those leaders killed millions of their own people and sent millions more to gulags. Similar remarks could be made about the present government of China; yes, they claimed that they executed a former top minister for "corruption", but given their history, what that actually means is that this former top minister was purged for reasons which most likely had nothing at all to do with actual corruption in the sense we use the term.
themitigating 4y ago
That death sentence shows me that China cares about stopping corruption. When was the last time an elected official in the US was severely punished.
projectazorian 4y ago
> In other news, a former CCP top government minister was just sentenced to death for corruption. Incentives at work. This doesn’t mean much. Selective enforcement of anti-corruption rules is a common method for national elites to eliminate potential rivals. It’s especially common in regimes with pliable judicial systems.
ep103 4y ago
You've gotten a lot of responses here. I think there's a chance you were trying to say something similar to what I said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32953111#32954329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32953111#32954329, but given the brevity of your reply, were unable to articulate fully. Might be worth taking a look : )
nemothekid 4y ago
>If your culture elevates individualism and freedom above social responsibility and harmony, then your institutions will be systemically corrupted by selfish individuals. In other words, if you just allow the powerful to do what they want in the name of "harmony", you will have no corruption. That the CCP experiences no corruption is laughable.

spywaregorilla 4y ago

Is that why all the local governments are collapsing under their off the books debts?

woodruffw 4y ago

Well, I don't think the intended message of The Wire is "adopt the CCP's anti-corruption measures." That's editorialization on our part as viewers. I also don't think the show has a particularly anti-individual message: individual police officers and drug dealers are repeatedly shown as struggling within a collectively dysfunctional system, and individual members of each group are shown as themselves corrupt while being protected by the collective. The show is more nihilistic than proscriptive, other than the small handful of "successes" that occur (like Hamsterdam).

pphysch 4y ago
The Wire is radical, but not quite radical to the point of openly questioning the foundations of modern American culture. That would be crazy in ~2002.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Right. The show is even conservative, by some measures: the police are generally shown deference by the show's writers (even when individual cops are openly characterized negatively).

gtirloni 4y ago

> In other news, a former CCP top government minister was just sentenced to death for corruption Maybe it's a cynical view, but I wouldn't be surprised if anticorruption laws were used to get rid of someone for other reasons, especially by corrupt people.

pphysch 4y ago
That's certainly possible -- lawfare definitely happens in the West (Russiagate, anti-Corbynism and Lava Jato come to mind). But if it was simply about political maneuvering, death penalties are wasteful and severe. So that suggests that there is more to it.

upsidesinclude 4y ago

And because it was the CCP, we'll never know if that news is state propaganda or truth... . He might have just been the honest fall guy who promoted too much social harmony to the detriment of his superiors lifestyles

behaveEc0n00 4y ago
The US relies on private propaganda to normalize attitudes to its goals. Given how chummy politicians and “journalists” and corporate owners are off camera it’s laughable to think there is a real separation of power. Our biology evolved for thousands of years before language was invented. To suggest our language influences our biology is nonsensical. Our biology influences language. Propaganda is all about setting a biological mood not embedding a specific chant. Media had been stoking the right moods until the internet enabled an unfiltered emotional meta-mind. They intentionally wrap news in titillating music and graphics. It’s all research based effort in the fields of behavioral economics, public relations, etc. An educated minority are leveraging that education against the majority to optimize for themselves. “Because that’s the history of our society!”
- upsidesinclude 4y ago
  For a time, propagandizing US citizens became illegal. We lost that in the Obama administration. Not that it would have mattered.... Language does certainly influence biology and vice versa. I agree we are living in precarious times and there's no benefit to promoting an equally opaque system built for an elite class
  - behaveEc0n00 4y ago
    Cable news has government officials on spewing government talking points all night. That’s government propaganda. Suuure it’s not “official” but wtf does that matter when it embeds itself in our inner monologues? Corporations that own cable news and are given all the money with no strings by the government; hardly an Obama era shift. Making it illegal is meaningless.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

> American culture, and to a lesser extent Western culture in general, encourages this kind of corruption. If your culture elevates individualism and freedom above social responsibility and harmony, then your institutions will be systemically corrupted by selfish individuals. Which culture are you suggesting does not get systematically corrupted by selfish individuals?

JacobThreeThree 4y ago
American culture is much less corrupt when compared to the rest of the real world, instead of being compared to a hypothetical corruption-free world.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  You gonna back that up? The "rest of the world" contains various European, Asian and even a neighboring North American country with plenty of readers who would be delighted to see your evidence
  - fragmede 4y ago
    https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021/index/usa https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021/index/usa 27th isn't too bad!
  - JacobThreeThree 4y ago
    It's my opinion based on my personal experience in various countries around the world. There's plenty of corruption in Europe, Asia and Mexico/Canada.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  > American culture is much less corrupt when compared to the rest of the real world, Does this mean that it’s the least corrupt place in the world?

JacobThreeThree 4y ago

CCP China is your example of an uncorrupt culture? From my personal experience in China I can tell you that it's standard practice to hand paper bags full of cash to government officials (and CCP members) in order to get government contracts. Xi targeting his political rivals with "corruption" charges hasn't changed this culture.

AyyWS 4y ago
My family member who runs a company in China avoids bribes by pretending to be a dumb American.

canes123456 4y ago

I doubt there less corruption in the CCP than in the US. Corruption is an easy justification to arrest or kill anyone in China. Also, corruption is absurdly high in Venezuela since they moved away from individualism and toward collectivism.

DoughnutHole 4y ago

Except that those individualistic countries in the west have some of the lowest rates of corruption and lowest perceptions of corruption in the world. The supposedly less individualistic countries of the east lag behind, including China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index The Asian countries that do match the west for low levels of corruption (Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore) largely have a very obvious trait in common - wealth. The least corrupt countries are all among the world's wealthiest, and the most corrupt all among its poorest - regardless of how "individualistic" the country is. The poorer a country is the more necessary are the advantages to be gained by gaming the system. The weaker a country's institutions the easier it is to get away with corruption - hence the worst offenders being failed states like Syria and Lybia. It's honestly fairly simple even without considering culture. If anything a more collective society is more susceptible to corruption (and I say this as proponent of big government). The reason China hands out death sentences for corruption is that an individual at the top of the governmental organisations in China can do an enormous amount of damage since the government directly controls the apparatus of the economy and has a huge stake in every major company. No governmental official in the west has as much control over the societal purse as a high ranking official of the CCP.

pphysch 4y ago
Those Western "Corruption" ratings are deeply unserious. Washington is totally, systemically corrupt. Lobbying, insider trading, and the revolving door are all corrupt practices that practically define the Beltway. Try winning even a local government seat without being buddy-buddy with local "employers", media, and other unofficial power brokers. That's not democracy.
- DoughnutHole 4y ago
  The fact that your prime examples of corruption in the west is Washington corruption and corruption in local government indicates you don't have a grasp of what truly endemic corruption is like in developing countries. - Do you have to personally slip a DMV official several times the actual required fee whenever you get your license renewed to get them to even look at the application? - Do you have to directly bribe police officers to get them to respond to your complaint? If you were pulled over for a traffic offence would your assumed way out of it be to personally slip something to the police officer? - Do truckers have to routinely bribe state officials when crossing state lines? - Do local officials routinely illegally procure land via the government purse for their own personal use? - Are government officials ever bribed to declare someone dead to allow someone to erroneously claim the totally-not-dead person's property? These are all pretty much regular occurrences in India - a country that is basically middling in terms of corruption on a global scale. And don't worry, they have all of the high level local and national legislative corruption that the US has as well, with the bonus of a civil service and judiciary that are corrupt from the top down to their roots. Outside the west corruption isn't just government officials making bad choices to satisfy their doners and special interests (as bad and dysfunctional as that is). In most developing countries it's a fact of day-to-day life - if you are on the lower rungs of the social ladder you have to personally engage in corruption in order to survive. Getting a home, a business licence, governmental documentation etc etc pretty much always come down to either who you know or who you bribe. And if you're higher up you might be lucky enough to benefit from it.

SoftTalker 4y ago

Western culture is not built only on individualism and freedom, it's also built on Judeo-Christian morality. The Golden Rule, the Ten Commandments. We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other. -- John Adams Our culture is predicated on not elevating individualism and freedom above responsibility. They go hand-in-hand. When morality becomes relative, and "whatever feels good" is the standard of acceptable behavior, you see the sort of social decay that is happening all around us.

pphysch 4y ago
American culture has transformed over the centuries, but the most recent dominant form is hyperindividualist. Ayn Rand over Jesus Christ. Just look at our most recent leaders -- a couple of highly corrupt guys with no serious religious conviction.
vore 4y ago
In practice, you see a lot of these self-professed Judeo-Christian moralizers engage in irresponsible individualist behavior so I don't think paying lip service to religious morality is really effective here either. The overriding factor is still the structure of incentives rather than adherence to a specific moral code.

pdonis 4y ago

> If your culture elevates individualism and freedom above social responsibility and harmony, then your institutions will be systemically corrupted by selfish individuals. While I don't disagree with your general comment, I would point out that the words you are using can be interpreted multiple ways. For example: "Individualism and freedom" does not have to mean shortsighted individualism and freedom. Any thinking person should realize that social cooperation and wealth creation through specialization and trade is in their individual, "selfish" interest. And that being the case, any thinking person should realize that "individualism and freedom" must include supporting and preserving social institutions that facilitate social cooperation and wealth creation through specialization and trade. That is what "Western culture" is supposed to be about, and the fact that many Western cultures don't do a good job at this doesn't mean "individualism and freedom" are bad; it means that many Western cultures have forgotten what "individualism and freedom" is actually supposed to mean. Conversely, "social responsibility and harmony" does not have to mean preserving social institutions that facilitate social cooperation and wealth creation through specialization and trade. The Soviet Union's leaders and official media outlets like Pravda were constantly talking about "social responsibility and harmony", but what they meant by that was absolute obedience to the Party and its leaders, even as those leaders killed millions of their own people and sent millions more to gulags. Similar remarks could be made about the present government of China; yes, they claimed that they executed a former top minister for "corruption", but given their history, what that actually means is that this former top minister was purged for reasons which most likely had nothing at all to do with actual corruption in the sense we use the term.

themitigating 4y ago

That death sentence shows me that China cares about stopping corruption. When was the last time an elected official in the US was severely punished.

projectazorian 4y ago

> In other news, a former CCP top government minister was just sentenced to death for corruption. Incentives at work. This doesn’t mean much. Selective enforcement of anti-corruption rules is a common method for national elites to eliminate potential rivals. It’s especially common in regimes with pliable judicial systems.

ep103 4y ago

You've gotten a lot of responses here. I think there's a chance you were trying to say something similar to what I said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32953111#32954329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32953111#32954329, but given the brevity of your reply, were unable to articulate fully. Might be worth taking a look : )

nemothekid 4y ago

>If your culture elevates individualism and freedom above social responsibility and harmony, then your institutions will be systemically corrupted by selfish individuals. In other words, if you just allow the powerful to do what they want in the name of "harmony", you will have no corruption. That the CCP experiences no corruption is laughable.