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There are several possibilities. It could be that when you don't catch all defectors in such a system the remaining defectors reduce your ability to catch futur

There are several possibilities. It could be that when you don't catch all defectors in such a system the remaining defectors reduce your ability to catch future defectors. It could be that the power structure, and associated politics, of the group mean that defecting is a move that increases your relative fitness - in terms of the power that you will wield within the group and over its moral character - dramatically (imagine if the person investigating a complaint is a defector, or someone performing public interest tests when deciding whether to prosecute has some incentive to prosecute regardless....) It could just be that most people within the group are in fact good, but that the systems that allow them to publicise and correct malign actors within the system are not present, or are very ineffective. It seems to me that you only require that the majority of the group be in need of corrective action, and be completely unwilling to do so themselves, if you think that the group is ruled by a majority... If you believe that power between the members of the group, is roughly evenly distributed, and can be as easily turned to any end. I don't believe that's the case. I believe that the moral character of the group taken as a whole is uncertain, but that a few very powerful people establishing the character of the system are operating under fairly perverse incentive structures... and that there's no readily apparent way to get rid of them. That is to say, that there is no candidate you can vote for where your vote translates into meaningful action in removing them. That, if you were an individual policeman, there is no action you could take there to remove them either. That even if the majority of the group were good, there are problems of detection and power disparities that they would have to act in concert to overcome (perhaps even on a national level)... That as such the chance of anything significant to being done to curtail abuses of the system, before they can grow and become the nature of the system, (if they are not already,) are very low. You don't need everyone in the police to be corrupt to silence a potentially problematic civilian. A few people in the right place, that you can get to do what you want them to, will do perfectly well. It doesn't even need to be the case that they're evil if you can feed them the wrong intelligence. The people who turn up to arrest the person might honestly believe that they're a criminal. They may even be right. Everyone's guilty of something these days and selective enforcement would be a fantastic weapon if you were a hypothetical evil master-mind type. You arrange for someone to be looked more closely at, and they'll be effectively eliminated even by people who are trying to impartially uphold the law. You get to eliminate your problems while thumping your chest about how impure the world is and how you need more power to protect it.... Not everyone needs to be evil for the system as a whole to become abominable, even incorrectably so (at least just going by number of good vs bad participants.)

kbenson 11y ago
I don't believe the conditions you outlined make it impossible to change the system, but they do outline a situation that makes it very hard. At a minimum, voting to aggressively replace incumbents in all offices for a few terms would definitely shake up any existing internal power relationships (as I said, hard). But if we can outline way out of the scenario you outlined above that possible, we can work backwards from there to see what is a necessary condition for the desired outcome and how we can achieve it by iterating on a known possible solution (even if initially unlikely). > You don't need everyone in the police to be corrupt to silence a potentially problematic civilian. No, but you need a fair percentage of people, or people in power to be, to do it continuously without getting caught. Additionally, as long as general consensus is against specific group actions, they will eventually come to light. Just as there is a chance that a normally lawful person may occasionally, due to some aspect of their personality or environment,break the law, there is a chance that a person that normally breaks a specific law will decide that this instance of it occurring within the group is inexcusable in the way it previously was, and make it public. That is, groups that exhibit aberrant behavior with regard to the social norm will eventually be exposed, and society in general will take steps to correct that behavior if it is aberrant enough. I.e. The group defined by getting just a little too close when greeting people will face little or no social correction, while the group that spits in your face instead of saying hello will face some heavy corrective actions. > Not everyone needs to be evil for the system as a whole to become abominable, even incorrectably so (at least just going by number of good vs bad participants.) I'm not sure any system is incorrectably abominable. Nature seems to abhor steady state systems (if it seems to be steady, perhaps the scale is too small), cyclical seems more common. and cyclical implies change (and return, to be fair).

kbenson 11y ago

I don't believe the conditions you outlined make it impossible to change the system, but they do outline a situation that makes it very hard. At a minimum, voting to aggressively replace incumbents in all offices for a few terms would definitely shake up any existing internal power relationships (as I said, hard). But if we can outline way out of the scenario you outlined above that possible, we can work backwards from there to see what is a necessary condition for the desired outcome and how we can achieve it by iterating on a known possible solution (even if initially unlikely). > You don't need everyone in the police to be corrupt to silence a potentially problematic civilian. No, but you need a fair percentage of people, or people in power to be, to do it continuously without getting caught. Additionally, as long as general consensus is against specific group actions, they will eventually come to light. Just as there is a chance that a normally lawful person may occasionally, due to some aspect of their personality or environment,break the law, there is a chance that a person that normally breaks a specific law will decide that this instance of it occurring within the group is inexcusable in the way it previously was, and make it public. That is, groups that exhibit aberrant behavior with regard to the social norm will eventually be exposed, and society in general will take steps to correct that behavior if it is aberrant enough. I.e. The group defined by getting just a little too close when greeting people will face little or no social correction, while the group that spits in your face instead of saying hello will face some heavy corrective actions. > Not everyone needs to be evil for the system as a whole to become abominable, even incorrectably so (at least just going by number of good vs bad participants.) I'm not sure any system is incorrectably abominable. Nature seems to abhor steady state systems (if it seems to be steady, perhaps the scale is too small), cyclical seems more common. and cyclical implies change (and return, to be fair).