And then there is the matter of talking about political corruption or a "personal corruption scandal" or some such. We have this idea that money circulating into the wrong places is bad, or that it is bad that individuals are using public powers and resources for personal gain, but then all of that starts to get tangled up with a more problematic reality. We see money power infiltrating every corner of society, and we see political power correspond pretty faithfully with personal power, and then the laws sanctioning the extremes of those thing begin to look more and more arbitrary and selective, with the customary powerful playing by a different set of rules and enjoying immunity for their crimes, and then the smaller fries getting taken out for similar infractions.
On a larger scale, we see an entity like the US wagging its finger at "corrupt small third world dictatorships," while at the same time becoming so suffused with the interests of money power that it can no longer be understood as corruption, but simply how the system operates. So then again what really is corruption; how and why does it happen? How much is too much and does it even matter when corruption is ubiquitous?
It does seem that "corruption" does matter. Historically, levels of corruption go up and down, especially correlating with the weakness and coherence of a given regime. Regimes that are not long for this world typically display all of the classic signs of corruption: bad finances, organizational chaos and apathy, communication and accounting breakdowns, and so on. You see the diversion of resources towards personal ends contradictory to a public purpose, resulting in a dissipation that not only fails to leverage resources towards a given purpose, but which also can be leveraged in turn by outside powers to the detriment of the ailing agent.
A healthy regime may direct all sorts of atrocities outward, but at the very least there is a public coherence and order to the flow of collective resources towards common ends. The rule of law has some coherence; occasionally powerful people come into real danger and so power is tempered. There is a dynamism to social structures. Macroeconomically you see the same trends in young productive empires and maturing, financializing ones.
Today with the ubiquity of mercenary concerns, the intense financialization of everything, and the suffusion of the market into every corner of daily life, it is tempting enough to project backwards. But there is a clear trend in which the market expanded over time to further and further corners of daily living over the past century. Even more interesting, the market itself seems to be not only corrosive to isolated cultures - it radically transforms them in line with its own logic - but also to itself. Within market society there is a constant struggle to roll it back out of the domains it colonizes, what with its intense transformative and exploitative tendencies, which rapidly emaciate them. The emergence of a self-destructive process out of the late stages of a more localized civilization has gone global and total.
Lots to think about and chew on. But before I end I wanted get back to the basic questions posed of corruption at the beginning. If you start looking at basic definitions of the thing, you start to get a little closer to its meaning. Past the conventional definitions of improper and illegal behavior at the top of the social pyramid, you get something like a "departure from original form or what is pure and correct." Getting warmer. Another interesting avenue: obsessions on purity and correctness often accelerate dissolution as well, but beside the point.
Going even further back, getting to the etymology of the thing, one gets even warmer: it is traced back to notions of decay, especially of dead bodies. So corruption is likened to the processes of something coming to an end, or indeed, something which has already come to an end breaking down ever further to free up the recirculation of energy, or simply something distinct changing into something else or into other things.
And here is the dilemma: living things, living systems have to contend with a troubling contradiction: to expand and contract and change enough in response to a perpetually transforming universe, while at the same time halting change enough to exist as a distinct, bounded, and continuous entity.
The end of what? For whom? The corrupting body may be bad for the bounded body, but we can be sure that the participating bacteria and fungi are having the finest of times. What again is corruption? Alas, we seemed to have succeeded at corrupting the question!
