When I was a boy I spent a great deal of time trying to deduce the one great evil that plagued mankind. I may have mentioned this before, I don't recall.
Anyway, by the time I was a teenager, full of the vim and vigor the young are known for, I was certain it was apathy. People not caring about the world around them, not bothering to learn this or that, to care about the details of life.
Don't get me wrong, I still think Apathy is a pretty big problem... if people want a participatory government they better damn well learn something about politics! If people want to worry about causes they need to actually learn the facts. Slacktivism creates more problems than it solves.
But Apathy no longer rises to the level of a great evil, in my mind.
In a way I think I have solved the mystery of my youth. Ten years ago I created an entire world, an experimental government, for the purposes of telling a story. This isn't terribly relevant, what is relevant was that in the course of determining how a government could last a thousand years (something I find too many authors gloss over), and doing the research into historical governments and their inevitable collapses, I determined that corruption was a Great Evil. In the decade since that time I've come to see the hand of corruption first hand, and I've learned, largely, that I am right.
Look: When a man becomes evil, he does evil to those around him. A serial killer like Jeffery Dahmer or a mass murderer like Adam Lanza is a bad man, but the scope of their crimes rarely rises above that of a sudden, shocking tragedy. Even the most prolific killer has a hard time rising to triple digit death counts.
When a government turns bad, and let us not permit the illusion that there are not people doing the turning here, the counts rise quickly to thousands, then millions, and it is quite possible to count billions of potential victims.
Worse: Many of the worst evils of men are committed to extirpate great personal pain, the instinctive lashing out of a wounded animal against the world. We can almost forgive them, if not tolerate, their crimes. Others, far less forgivable, may commit their crimes out of a perverse sense of pleasure, for their enjoyment.
When a corrupt politician or bureaucrat commits great crimes, it is not the act of a wounded animal lashing out, nor do they generally derive personal pleasure from it, it is merely for a bit of coin or to grow their petty domain a minute amount. To invoke Godwin, the Nazi's perpetrated great and terrible evils in the pursuit of far more mundane and trivial evils, the concentration camps and the murders of vast swaths of their society simply to perpetrate a class war to ensure their own power went unchecked.
If mankind never makes it to the stars, and dies alone and unmourned upon our tiny orb, it will be because corrupt politicians saw no personal and short term gain in reaching for the stars. If we are reduced to the level of beasts it will be because some politicians saw that primitive and superstitious men were easier to lead. The Environmental Lobby wants to destroy our very way of life, content that they will personally benefit from the very things the wish to ban, that their personal power or aesthetic enjoyment of life will be improved if only YOU sacrifice... the tally is endless.
There is an interesting debate within the scholarship of rhetoric around the concept of the Slippery Slope. It is frequently cited as a 'Fallacy', meaning that invoking it is a dodge to avoid addressing the real arguments in a debate. Yet, as even the quick read of the Slippery Slope wiki page show, it has long been acknowledged that it is NOT a Fallacy... once it has happened.
Corruption is a Slippery Slope. One corrupt politician, one corrupt bureaucrat, spreads his evil and venal ways. He promotes those who flatter him, who pay him, and they in turn profit from following his example. Unchecked he spreads his domain until other, previously virtuous men, adopt his behavior to compete.
And so we come at last to us.
We come to a world where teachers care more about their political influence than the education of their charges, where brainwashing is more important than learning. Bill de Blasio shuts down charter schools that help the underprivileged at the behest of the Teacher's Unions.
We come to a world where our leaders insist they know what's best for us, despite the fact that they have spent their entire adult lives deep in politics, to the point where they disdain the common man, and the common experience... common sense. Where destroying the free market of medical insurance for eleven or twelve million Americans, and raising the rates of the rest, is the solution to ten million uninsured. Where supporting the wealthy and increasingly elderly Boomer population is done on the backs of the poor and young Millennials. We come to a world where Hillary Clinton is the democratic frontrunner for 2016 despite forty years of accomplishing nothing except being in the room, where her tenure as Secretary of State saw the first ever, and only, ambassador for the US killed by hostile forces, for which she suffered no censure because no one in our government is accountable to anyone except public sentiment.... and who cares about some nobody ambassador in far away Libya?
We come to a world where Germany is the villain for not paying Greeks to dodge work and taxes while reaping vast governmental largesse, where Italy can arrest people for murder simply to look good and can ignore the real criminals, even release them from jail, because it makes them look bad.
Corruption is not inevitable. It requires a watchful eye and a stern refusal to tolerate it. I personal advocate governmental corruption as a capital crime, simply for the scope and repercussions it creates.
As I write this I have open on another tab an article by Dennis Prager, talking about what is truly wrong in Africa. His charge? Corruption.
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