The World Bank Group recently issued its annual report on world corruption, and the evidence is staggering. In country after country – including many nations heralded as emerging democracies – corruption exists at all levels. It exerts a horrific tax on the poor and has a debilitating effect on everyone.
Such governments regularly hire police, teachers, judges and other so-called public servants but pay them so little that most feel compelled to augment their meager incomes by demanding bribes – students bribing their teachers for grades, patients bribing their public hospitals for care, policemen extracting bribes for everything. But recent revelations point out that corruption among the leaders themselves takes place on a much grander scale than we’ve imagined.
What is it that propels so many leaders of nations to line their pockets at the expense of the citizens they are entrusted to protect?
Look at the Panama Papers, the scandals that have hit Iceland, Ukraine, Brazil, Argentina and dozens of other countries – not to speak of the numerous national governments that may be grouped under the banner of the various “Kleptocracies.”
The dumping of billions of dollars into luxury New York and California real estate hoardings by oligarchs from around the globe and the abundant schemes that allow the richest Americans to sequester their money in shady (but apparently legal) off-shore or in-state dummy corporations are but a few of the many manifestations of unbridled – and unchecked – human greed. We never seem to ask where the money came from.
It might be useful to think of it as the political equivalent of obesity. We are genetically programmed to want to store fats against an expectation of future starvation, but we end up just putting on the pounds. We are genetically programmed to seek financial security, but we lack the gene that tells us when we’ve had enough.
But even if we acknowledge the human tendency to be greedy, that still does not explain our complacency in the face of graft by those we have chosen to lead us.
We are facing, I would argue, a global epidemic of corruption that is more pernicious, more widespread and more diabolical than the Zika virus, the Syrian refugee crisis or ISIS terrorism. It rivals global warming in its potential to undermine human civilization.
We are witness to the degradation of the very foundations of human society in the inability of governments to relate ethically and accountably to the citizens they have been elected to serve, and the abject refusal of most national leaders to censure or shun their blatantly corrupt counterparts. They meet, they shake hands, they smile – and then they continue robbing their people.
Politicians who run on a platform to combat corruption become themselves corrupt. Greed has become a universal “invasive species” that threatens to crowd out civil polity at all levels. It’s an epidemic with no apparent antidote – and there’s scarcely even a serious scientific search for one.
What’s going on here? We humans are primed to respond viscerally to outrages perpetrated on the innocent individuals by madmen and vicious ideologues. Think of our outpouring of empathy for Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, for the Tunisian vegetable vendor whose self-immolation ignited the Arab Spring, or the worldwide angst for a 3-year-old refugee washed up on the shore of a Greek Island.
An image of a coiled snake fires up much more of the human brain than evidence of an eventual global climactic catastrophe. The same lack of proportionality may well be evident in our muted response to corruption. We’re just not well programmed to view it as a serious threat.
If we were to witness one of these leaders torturing a puppy or whacking a cat against a tree, our outrage would be instantaneous. But drive their country into abject poverty, like a Mugabe, or build a billion-dollar palace, like an Erdogan, or squander billions on an Olympics, like a Putin, or rob the treasury like other Eastern European, Asian and Latin American oligarchs, and the world turns a blind eye.
The same leaders and functionaries who might hesitate to commit incest or to indulge in cannibalism for fear of public revulsion will nevertheless steal from their own people in the conceit that even if they are discovered, they will get away with it.
But as with climate change, we’d better get a whole lot quicker and more effective in our response to corruption if we want our civilization to survive.
What can we do? We can take some comfort in the recognition that we do possess an innate sense of “fairness” and “unfairness” (our young children certainly can testify to that). We know that bribery and corruption is morally wrong.
At the level of our charitable giving, we ought to be a lot more forceful in refusing aid to societies that cannot promise a graft-free transmission of goods and services. It may seem cruel, but those societies who ask for our help must be able to deliver it graft-free.
In the arena of international affairs, we need to be much bolder in condemning corruption wherever it exists, but also be much more generous in providing technical assistance to emerging or liberated nations.
Imagine if we had been able to organize, after the fall of the Soviet Union, after the overthrow of Gaddafi or Mubarak, well-funded cadres of technocrats, allied with World Bank financial assistance (that already comes with fiscal constraints), to offer financial assistance hand-in-hand with support for such institutions as an independent judiciary and the insertion of clear guidelines for civil administration.
Instead of putting all our moral and political energy to support so-called “free and fair elections” (which cost us nothing and too often lead to nasty factionalism, as in Egypt, Iraq and much of Eastern Europe), we ought to focus on the more technically complex tasks of creating responsible, graft-free governments, perhaps on the Singaporean model.
This may sound “undemocratic,” but it may be a necessary evolutionary stage.
We humans are just not yet evolved to the point where we can espouse noble ideas and assume that we have the DNA to carry them out in the face of those other primal propensities to take the money and run.
(Robert L. Fried of Concord is a retired educator who is now a writer, gardener and tinkerer. He can be reached by email at rob.fried@gmail.com.)