Corruption
In this episode, we take note of the damage that corruption can cause, to systems and to people’s lives…
Last weekend, I at last had a chance to meet up with one my former colleagues whom I respect the most. I hadn’t seen her since we’d last worked together, almost twenty years ago, on a full-scale business-transformation project for large national organisation. I was just a contractor there, so I moved on after the main part of the project came to an end; but she stayed on, of course, because she was a full-time staffer there, at a very senior level, often working directly with the organisation’s executive. The last I’d heard about her, some years later, was that she’d been headhunted to work at one of the big banks, at a very senior level, and was doing well there.
Or so I’d thought.
When we met, I found out that she’d just resigned from there. Leaving the company, the industry, everything. Starting again. Moving back to her original home-town with her family, more than a thousand miles away.
She’d loved working there, she said. She’d built up an encyclopaedic knowledge of the place - she’d worked in almost every department there, after all. She’d loved working with the people - or most of them, anyway. Yet there was one issue there that, yes, she knew had always been there in the background, though mostly kept at bay - but in the past few years it had been kind of let off its leash, and was now visibly getting worse, almost by the day. And then one day, a month or two ago, she suddenly realised that she couldn’t ignore it any more.
The issue? Corruption.
It was another colleague who’d told me the truth about what was happening for her there, and how much it was hurting her soul.
It was now running rampant in that place, he’d said; almost everywhere, but especially at the more senior levels. And starting to infect the next levels down as well.
Seemingly everyone ‘on the take’, each doing anything at all, anything, however unethical, however illegal, however much it might hurt others, the clients, the shareholders, the company as a whole - all just to get that little bit of a bigger bonus than anyone else. Sometimes more than just ‘a bigger bonus’, though. Sometimes a lot more…
A whole culture of corruption; a culture of theft and worse. Out of control, like a necrotic cancer, spreading everywhere, destroying everything.
And nothing she could do to stop it. Nothing that would work, anyway. Nothing that would not destroy her own career, at the least, whilst still having no useful impact on that issue at all.
Debilitating. Soul-destroying.
She was putting on a brave face about it when we met, and actually said nothing about it while we were there. But we knew, all of us; and she probably knew that we knew, too.
Hard; very hard. Hard to bear - especially for someone like her, who always put people first in everything that she did.
So yeah, definitely the right decision, to resign. Time for her to go; time for her to leave that place.
That kind of corruption just hurts too much - especially for someone who truly does care…
Well, it’s just a bank, you might say. Maybe we kind of expect it with banks, handling so much of other people’s money in such an anything-but-transparent way. And there’s that old joke, isn’t there? - that if you want to steal some money, you rob a bank; but if you want to steal a lot of money, you have to own a bank…
Seems like it’s been that way for a long time now, though. Down in the nearby town, there are quite a few old buildings that once were banks, back in the old gold-rush days. For example, there’s this one, with the huge bolts still pushing through its impressive old doors, half-hidden behind the more modern-ish glassy façade:
Off to the left, you’ll see that nice informative plaque, provided by the local Heritage Society, telling us the history of the building:
And right in the middle of that text, you might notice this sad little story:
It operated as the Oriental Bank. This branch of the bank ceased trading in 1884, with considerable losses suffered by many.
Though losses not suffered, we might suspect, by the officers of said bank.
Almost certain cause of collapse? Corruption…
It should be no surprise, really: it’s what we would expect as a natural outcome - if ‘natural’ is the right word? - of a money-based possession-economy. Plenty of perverse-incentives and all that, particularly so wherever paediarchy is allowed to run rampant within a society and its economics. Not just banks, either: everywhere.
Tho’ mayhap ‘twas ever thus? The 17th English diarist Samuel Pepys recorded his travails, as Secretary of the Admiralty, in trying to keep corruption there down to a level where the Royal Navy could still function at all: everyone was ‘on the take’. He’d soon made enough enemies in high places that several times he ended up imprisoned in the Tower, always on trumped-up charges. Yes, he too was, uh, not exactly averse to playing the same skim-a-bit-off-the top games as everyone else: but at least he was less extreme than most of those of his time…
And despite all his faults and his own often-questionable ethics, Pepys was also aware of the real danger of corruption: that it’s not merely that it’s immoral and all that, but that corruption stops systems from working well, or even from working at all.
In the Navy of Pepys’ time, for example, they’d suddenly find that a ship couldn’t sail because the ship’s crew hadn’t been paid, because someone at some higher level had stolen all of their pay. Then they’d discover that the ship’s provisions had also somehow vanished from the quartermaster’s stores. They’d find that all of the ship’s cannon had also somehow been sold, without any signature or seal on the order, with no trace of the buyer, nor any record about who had been paid for them. And they couldn’t find the captain at all, because he’d disappeared off to, well, no-one knew where, presumably to spend all his ill-gotten gains on wild escapades with his latest mistress. What a mess…
When things like that happen to a country’s military on a regular basis, that country starts to lose its wars.
Which, given the state of the Royal Navy in Pepys time, it duly did.
And, these days, likewise so for the Russian Armed Forces, whose ‘three day Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine is now already past its seven-hundredth day. More than one hundred percent of the number of its initial personnel now dead; maybe another million more now so maimed that they will never be able to live well again. More than one hundred percent of its initial tanks now lost, that can barely be replaced; more than half its ground-attack aircraft now lost, that cannot be replaced at all; more than one-third of its vaunted Black Sea Fleet now sunk by a nation that doesn’t even have a navy of its own. And no sign that any of that it’s going to get any better for them any time soon.
Yeah, corruption in a nation’s armed forces: definitely Not A Good Idea…
In Russia, though, it’s not just in the armed forces: as in so many other countries now, the corruption is everywhere, embedded deeply into every aspect of the country, its culture, its economics, always spreading, always getting worse. For Russia, it seems that almost nothing can happen there now without first passing through layer after layer of ‘blat’, or bribes; throughout its commercial world, for example, there’s the role of the ‘tolkachi’, those whose job it is to negotiate the bribes to be paid by a business. If it’s not bribes, then it’ll be some form of ‘protektsiya’, literally a mafia-style ‘protection’-racket, all ultimately controlled by the ‘siloviki’, ‘those persons authorised by the state to use force against citizens or others’.
It’s been going on for so long there in Russia - and, again, in so many other countries too - for so many centuries there by now, that it might seem that there’s no way to ever bring all of that corruption to an end. And yet somehow they, and we, must find a way to do that: there is no choice about that, because, remember, if corruption is left to run unchecked, it will cripple the systems so much that they stop working at all.
In Russia’s case, allowing the corruption to run rampant was a direct cause of the ending of the Tsarist empire. It was a direct cause of the ending of the Soviet empire. And, by the look of it, it’s already close to causing the end of its post-Soviet empire too. Not A Good Idea…
Even in a money-based possession-economy, it is possible to rein in the corruption enough to get the system to at least sort-of work in a sort-of-viable-ish way. Samuel Pepys did manage to do that for the Royal Navy, way back in the latter half of the seventeenth-century; with the systems we have today for exposing all those hidden back-door deals and the like, we should be able to do a lot better than Pepys did by now.
The only real way to really kill off all of that corruption and crime, of course, is by ripping out its roots in the possession-economy itself, and then replacing that by a responsibility-based economics in which, by definition, such notions of ‘control’, corruption and money would no longer make any sense. But that, perhaps, is another story for another time; in the meantime, do whatever we can to keep the corruption at bay, and keep our systems better able to face all the other challenges that are already coming our way.