The future of corruption

We touched on the subject of pain for a reason. Namely, pain is one of the main (if not the only) attributes of power in contemporary societies. A monopoly on violence reflects the true attitude of the state to citizens. By the way, such a monopoly is quite a recent phenomenon from a historic perspective. It emerged together with the national state. Before, violence was never monopolized by the state structures. But violence is inherent in society as such since any hierarchy of power cannot be built without violence in one or another form. Today, the majority of people are subject to the state power due to their fear of possible pain in case of disobedience. It’s interesting, not pain itself but fear of pain is one of the major system-making social conventions. That’s why a state penitentiary system is a constant reminder of pain for all law-abiding people.

There are two different spectrums where pain occupies one of the opposite ends. One spectrum belongs to our human feelings. A polar end to the pain in it is comfort. This broad concept includes any instance when no pain is available. At the same time, it is sensitive once even the very mention of pain makes modern people feel discomfort. Why is religion becoming an undesirable topic in contemporary public discourse? It reminds of pain in one or another form. Who is the scariest bugaboo for Western society today? An Islamic terrorist is. He personifies pain squared: religious extremism multiplied by radical disobedience.

A positive aspect of such a spectrum reveals itself in various sorts of entertainment when we see someone’s pain while sitting on our safety sofas. The Game of Thrones impresses us badly just because of the rivers of blood and mountains of the dead. Even sports reflect the same: we are looking for lost teeth and broken limbs when watching MMA fights.

Another spectrum where pain occupies one of the polar ends belongs to both the spiritual realm and social relations. Both environments imply obedience. We obey religious leaders involuntarily due to the fear of future pain in the afterlife. We do the same voluntarily when our intellectual will allows us to comprehend and accept religious dogmas with no regard for possible painful consequences of our beliefs. We follow social conventions in the same manner: either fear of pain makes us obey state authorities or our conscious acceptance turns social restrictions into values.

Truth be told, the “painless” regime of obedience to state authorities is very questionable in the present liberal society. It requires a vivid interaction between people and power. Leaders should have an opportunity to hear people’s aspirations from the very source. Any palliative such as electoral democracy is no substitute for live communication with the lower strata. Count Leo Tolstoy hired servants from the neighboring villages. British aristocrats shared houses with their domestic maids. The last Russian emperor Nicholas the Second chose a simple Siberian peasant Grigory Rasputin as his advisor.

In fact, common people started losing touch with their state leaders long ago. Approximately at the beginning of the 20th century, the population of the Western world was deprived of the direct connection with the supreme power. Governmental institutions have insulated national leaders with a “belt of bureaucrats”. The latter was aimed at making communication between the broad masses of plebs and the top elite impossible. Why? Just to provide bureaucratic governments with all available power controls via moderation of public discourse.

Impersonal structures replaced personal leaders. We call this order of things the System. Now, only fear of pain makes people follow those idiotic and cannibal laws that the army of bureaucrats generates. But bureaucrats are also humans with all inherent biases and weaknesses. They occupy positions in governmental structures for various reasons. But the very nature of those structures implies corruption at a root level. No naïve idealists can be found among those who clearly understand all benefits of plum jobs. The present-day governing entities throughout the world all are infiltrated with the corrupted. Once corruption and bureaucracy are two sides of the same coin it is not too hard to foretell with what the present national states will end up.

If the present state is the same as the present bureaucracy, and bureaucracy means corruption by default, we can use the same logic to claim that the present state is corruption. Strong words, right? Let’s apply a negative proof to them: once a contemporary state cannot proceed without bureaucrats, corruption as an inherent feature of bureaucracy is a constituent attribute of any state. This definition is fundamentally important for understanding the inhuman nature of any society.

Nobody can argue that Society and State can be legitimately equated in the contemporary world order: we all are living in national states today. The main task for any present-day society is to preserve the current status quo forever. It means strengthening the national-state paradigm in all kinds of ways. Corruption can assist in it as few others can, how odd it may sound. The more corrupt state bureaucrats are, the stronger rationale they have to keep their States going as they go. At its limit, state corruption implies an illegal redistribution of wealth. It means inequality in consumption. A false paradox emerges in it: modern liberal society is seemingly fighting for the equality in consumption that is reflected by a well-worn doctrine of a society of opportunities. But the paradox is false because namely inequality is the basement of any hierarchy upon which all societies are built. Thus, both the “legal” state and “illegal” corruption play for the same team — the one that maintains hierarchies of inequality. Their methods are explicitly different, but implicitly they have the same essence.

So, one of the vicious circles of the modern world order can be described as follows: corruption leverages inequality, inequality creates hierarchies, hierarchy provides national states, states constitute the global society, and society as the System works thanks to bureaucrats. This is just another proof of the ugly nature of society as such.

Nevertheless, corruption is a multifaceted phenomenon that only seems to be clear for understanding. It has some deeper layers that usually remain ungraspable for trivial minds. The general public tends to see corruption as something unnatural that erodes “natural” relationships within states. Many truth seekers and fighters for social justice follow such a misconception as well. They assume that a non-corrupt government can serve a population more efficiently than a heavily corrupt one does. It seems they merely know nothing about the relationships between different layers of the state bureaucracy. Their vision is obscured by many mental cliches that hinder the existing interrelations between bureaucrats on a global scale. Besides, romantic beliefs about the System deprive many people of assuming that corruption can imply some unexpected missions. How many of us can recognize a covert social protest in corruption?

We should make a substantial remark here: the following reasoning has almost nothing in common with a movement towards a post-social order of things. We are trying to explore unusual aspects of corruption in a paradigm of national states. For what? A revolutionary potential inside societies can take various forms. Nothing prevents us from using every particular sort of protest for building our post-social discourse. Once we all still live in the national states inherent in modernity, every anti-system impulse going against the present paradigm should be properly utilized. Corruption is not an anti-social protest in each and every case. But sometimes it happens so. It is worth figuring out why and when.

When we are trapped in an iron framework of the System, our protest can take two different forms: either a revolution or corruption. A revolution usually implies an overt type of protest against the System to break an existing political order. The traditional image of a revolution reflects direct violence against governmental bodies. Nobody knows to what consequences each particular revolution can lead. In many cases, it starts and ends with wishful thinking only. Revolution is the most radical approach to a currently existing order in a state. History suggests that it is impossible to make a slight correction of the System via revolutions that are always destructive. Revolutionists burn all bridges.

Despite all negative connotations towards corruption, its very essence was never comprehended completely. A desire for change in the system which implies no changes is a starting point where some special forms of corruption find their roots. Not retrograde selfishness but civic aspirations can rest at the basis of many corrupt deals, how odd it may sound. Greed with profits above all can hardly motivate those individuals who deliberately step on the dangerous path of corruption.

Profit by-all-means is inherent rather in corporative sharks than in the state bureaucrats whose wealth is too ephemeral in the light of the risk to be caught red-handed at any moment. There are hundreds of other less stressful ways to satisfy our personal greed and vanity than the continuous balancing on the edge of arrest on corruption charges.

Let’s imagine a progressively thinking individual who is rational enough to realize that the current system cannot be substantially modified lawfully. The system works for a relatively small group of people from an upper class. No effective upward mobility is available for common people in such a system. The local legislation is designed to sustain the system untouched as long as possible. The entire situation looks like a conspiracy of elites against the rest population.

Let’s assume that the given society has to tacitly accept such a system once no revolutionary situations seem to happen in the foreseeable future. Quite a typical social inertia discourages active protestants available among the present-day citizens in insufficient numbers. Nevertheless, the population suffers from the fundamental injustice inherent in the system. What would an active and generally law-abiding person do if s/he has to act beyond the legal framework of the system?

The only possible way in such a situation is to get integrated into the system to corrupt it from within. It is necessary to act as a secret agent behind enemy lines. It takes so much courage to steal money from a state budget. Both composure and creativity are needed to arrange effective corrupt deals in the era when whistleblowing and leakages are the norms. Fools and cowards cannot become the big-picture corrupted capable of resisting mighty machinery of the national penitentiary systems.

Moreover, national bureaucrats have to resist the transnational powers whose objectives contradict any national interest in most cases. The average people who are taught to condemn corruption do not oftentimes realize how grateful they should be to some national corrupt dealers. They do not understand the very evil which could be brought by foreign investments to their national economies unless that dirty money is stolen by the local bureaucrats.

Several nuclear power plants, dozens of chemical factories, hundreds of grounds for nuclear waste from foreign nuclear enterprises were not built both in Russia and Ukraine over the last three decades just due to the unprecedented corruption flourishing among local governmental functionaries. Hundreds of millions of dollars invested in those horrible projects by international funds were stolen by the local corrupt bureaucrats of all levels. They converted the stolen investments into cash to deposit it on their private offshore accounts. The more money was pumped into the local economies by the Western World, the more cash was sent back to the West by patriotic budget thieves from both Russia and Ukraine.

They were struggling against the covert international invasion to defend thousands and thousands of their compatriots from the foreign nuclear poison. They were risking both their personal freedom along with the wealth of their families. Some of them were caught by foreign secret services. The others were killed by criminals. But national corruption as a system of countering the existing supranational bureaucracy has survived. Moreover, it keeps evolving in accordance with the changing situation in both national and international legal systems.

Multiple layers of a hidden meaning are available in such undervalued phenomena as corruption. A primitive image of vulgar villains attributed to corrupt bureaucrats does not reflect the whole picture. When they transform a purely virtual value of foreign funds into solid cash (villas in Switzerland, luxury yachts, bars of gold) they actually commit a magical recovery of a public vision of a physical world.

Being occupied by the contemporary ephemeral “bubblenomics” we all are losing a feeling of true valuables — the precious things that are really worth risk and money. The down-to-earth corrupted show us that tangible treasures outweigh speculative prospects propagated by the so-called international investment agencies. The thing is that all national bureaucrats perfectly mastered the transnational vocabulary of populism to recognize both empty rhetoric and fake values staying behind such instruments of bubblenomics as, for example, loans from the IMF and World Bank.

Local bureaucrats know exactly that any foreign aid is fiction at best. And at worst, it can bring only troubles to a national economy trapped in numerous debt obligations. The corrupted clearly realize that they cannot fight against the global System. They cannot help the local population even if they want. That’s why they make a pragmatic decision to decrease harm via budget thievery. In doing so, they support a small fraction of the local population at least — their close relatives, friends, and partners.

What do they build in doing so? Paradoxically, but they build what is a polar antithesis to society: they build a community. A community consisting of those with whom we can deal within arm’s reach is a historic enemy of any society. Once the main task of modernity was to involve as many people as possible into societies, the independent communities of plowmen, fishermen, hunters, and the other self-sufficient individuals were to be absorbed by society. Any community is naturally asocial because a community is about survival, not about power.

The corrupt bureaucrats build communities of their dear ones to separate them from deeply socialized masses of plebs, not to be absorbed by the System, to remain special, to stay conditionally independent. Of course, this is not their own invention. Intuitively they look up to the closed groups of traditionalist elites — the old aristocratic families who never mix themselves with any society. Anyhow, an echo of postmodernity can be recognized in such efforts of the corrupted. How weird: the most reactionary stratum — bureaucrats — surprisingly happen to have one foot in the post-social future.

Nothing but philosophical myopia prevents many of us from recognizing a contemporary Robin Hoods in brave actors of corruption. No, they do not distribute stolen money between the poor. But they show the poor an alternative way how to get rich in the system that does not imply any upward mobility.

And the largest benefit brought by corruption to a general socio-political discourse comes to a clear vision that the state, society, and criminality are the same. Corruption is impossible without society in the form of national states as we know them today. Namely, the State triggers corruption at all possible levels. Only narrow-minded people cannot see a direct correlation between the solidity of a state and a scale of corruption available in it: the stronger, the larger.

Corruption draws its shadowy strengths from the System‘s attributes — hierarchy, constitution, legislation, social stratification, etc. That’s why the only decent solution for anti-corruption fighters is as simple as obvious: destroy the System and corruption will disappear on its own. Otherwise, any struggle against corruption will always remain a fruitless illusion as it happens today.

The given grotesque vision of corruption reflects more than just a weird intellectual game. It shows the absurdity underlying public anti-corruption discourse. The so-called fighters with state corruption cannot comprehend the very futility of their efforts when they support strengthening the State. Indeed, the right hand does not know what the left is up to. The most primitive perception of corruption implies some certain personal features of the corrupt bureaucrats. It does not touch the System as a whole. Officials talk about corruption as about some sort of curable disease temporarily available inside a healthy organism of the System. Nothing can be further from the truth.

Corruption is not a random phenomenon that appears when dirty persons happen to occupy some governmental positions. Corruption is a systematically progressing erosion of society induced by the very society itself. It is thoroughly preplanned and meticulously controlled. It grows like cancer metastases without radiotherapy. Moreover, corruption is a natural process that inevitably present in any modern state. Corruption is determined by the very existence of the bureaucratic “insulating belt” which reliably separates masses of common citizens from the top elite.

Any personal inclination to crime inherent in any particular corrupt bureaucrat cannot add too much evil to the generally vicious system of state power. Personal greed is not a deep reason for corruption, it is just one of many epiphenomena along with a thirst for power and morbid hedonism. In addition to some basic systemic prerequisites, one of the deepest roots of corruption is hidden in a trivial lack of fear of punishment. Namely, impunity drives bureaucrats to a specific sort of perverted overconfidence from which only one step towards crime usually remains.

Corruption is a sort of crime that is becoming more and more casual among state elites. Bribery is a soft-core version of violent coercion. When our under-table money moves something inside cumbersome state machinery towards our personal interests an almost irresistible feeling of permissiveness descends on us. No need to be a typical villain with strong muscles and a scary face — corruption easily accepts innocuous appearance and aristocratic manners. No need to get our own hands dirty in blood violence, gang wars, and risky confrontation with police. Bribery is cleaner and much more efficient.

To grasp the evolution of crime from brutal violence into corruption we need to zoom in certain socio-historical transformations.

The development of sciences over the centuries of modernity gradually turned societies into strongly secular states. Materialistic capitalist relationships sidelined religious moral imperatives. The so-called humanism that made “man the measure of all things” played a dirty trick on humans who had to evaluate everything through the prism of their physical bodies. Unsurprisingly, the present hyper-capitalist ethics urges state authorities to live life for a day. The unstoppable overpopulation is adding fuel to fire: there are too many in our boat, but the resources are limited.

The well-known motto of criminals “you die today to give me one more day” becomes a norm for those who are in charge of wealth distribution within the States. Unfolding thought emancipation in the present liberal democracy allows questioning anything from the traditional codes of behavior. Basic principles of social Darwinism encourage people to see all the others as competitors. Thievery from a state budget is losing its criminal coloring. For many bureaucrats, it is merely a redistribution of wealth in favor of the fittest: nothing personal, just evolution.

An exclusive opportunity to take control of the distribution of societal wealth is taken by the majority of citizens for granted. Anything depends on neither our acceptance of such an order of things nor our unacceptance. Society makes all of us face an indisputable fact: a small group of citizens is authorized to manage a public good. In such a situation, any liberal declaration about “a society with equal opportunities” sounds ridiculous, to put it mildly.

Unequal access to resources is protected by the entire state machinery. Even the most liberal legislation is designed in a manner that implies the supremacy of the state over individuals. Supremacy implies hierarchy. This is about the position of government bureaucrats who are always above all the others. The State is represented by a group of bureaucrats whose ideal image is faceless and corporate. Governmental authorities must have no individual features, no human factor should affect the functionality of the System. An ideal bureaucrat is just a “walking function”. And this is what we never meet in real life: humans always remain humans. But humans empowered by the System are always at risk to fall into the temptation of using their “functional” capabilities for their own benefit.

Esprit de corps inevitably appears among those groups of people who oppose themselves to the rest population. Bureaucrats are not common citizens, they are a special stratum having a higher mission, as they believe. Mutual responsibility is an effective ancient method of keeping a group of people a group. Various orders of knighthood, Masonic lodges, mafia clans, and other secret organizations always use special initiation rituals to make their members remember about esprit de corps. Different sorts of crime beginning from human sacrifice and up to perverted orgies usually constitute the very core of such rituals.

A softer version of esprit de corps is typical for many contemporary professions (doctors, policemen, judges, army officers, etc) who do not need to commit any crime to follow collective solidarity. Some special common experience is enough for them to keep a strong fellowship. The corrupt bureaucrats often combine both soft and hard versions of the initiation practices making them heavily interdependent. However, their esprit de corps goes far beyond any narrow profession-specific activity. A corrupt functionary from the Ministry of Health won’t face any problem in cooperation with a similar bureaucrat from the Ministry of Justice if their Cosa nostra (shared endeavor) implies deals on budget thievery. They both, after all, belong to a minority in power, not to a powerless majority.

The corrupt believe that any regulation is optional for the minority in power because the majority is always wrong. A wolf does not need to report to sheep. That’s why the sheep need to invent something more persuasive than just physical punishment or economic sanctions to restrain the wolves. Something having an above-human nature with the irresistible appeal should come from somewhere that mighty powers-that-be could get over. There is a pressing need for new supernatural ethics, for something like a techno-spirituality. But more on that later.

Corruption allows various persons in power to ignore many legislative deterrents. One hand washes the other. Once corrupt elites have lost the fear of legal punishment, criminals from an upper class became unstoppable in their permissiveness. They created quasi-democracies in various territories. Such regimes as a deviation of the Western liberalism seem to have two basic forms of social management.

1. Neo-oligarchy. This type of quasi-legal society is inherent in both well-developed and developing countries. It is rooted in the corporate sector from which many rich and influential individuals went to occupy different state positions. They administer various hybrid initiatives aimed at serving the interests of a limited circle of persons. The latter belong to super-rich families whose power spreads over national borders. Their history is long and ample with events. The families having multi-billion fortunes control many political and economical processes from behind the scenes. Namely, the neo-oligarchy stratum is a favorite target for numerous conspiracy theorists.

2. Neo-feudalism. This is a more blatant version of neo-oligarchy inherent mostly in developing countries, especially from the former socialist bloc. While neo-oligarchs are parasites on host organisms of quite strong national states, the neo-feudal lords keep total control over their “native” territories making the corresponding national states just formally existing zombies. Private paramilitary troops, pocket bureaucrats from all branches of power, wholly-owned media, and threatened local population makes neo-feudal princelings highly independent from any central government. They keep their eyes open towards neighbors not to miss a chance to grab a piece of flesh from those who show any weakness. Continuous redistribution of assets between competing oligarchs is a sure sign of predatory relationships they thoroughly cultivate inside their latifundia.

The position of a head of some regional administration provides oftentimes much stronger power than a ministerial post or a chair in a parliament. The most benighted neo-feudalism paradoxically meets what many “progressive” post-capitalist movements are seeking to — a vast decentralization. No matter that in most cases it has a cannibal’s face.

The two subdivisions above demonstrate the most apparent modifications of a global trend when pervasive corruption makes legal forms of social governance almost indistinguishable from illegal ones. In many intermediate cases, we can recognize hybrid regimes having similar features from both Western corrupt democracy (Europe) and Oriental corrupt totalitarianism (China). Their differences are conditional while a common feature implies making control over taxes pretty murky.

A legitimate monopoly on violence is one of the holy pillars of the state power. Many people mistakenly consider such traditional instruments of oppression as police and army as the main attributes of a national state. But they aren’t. What makes a state a state is taxation. To whom you pay taxes is the one who dominates over you. That’s why double taxation is quite an unnerving moment in international commerce. This is not because you pay more than necessary, but because it’s unclear to whom you belong.

A conditionally healthy state is hardly characterized by heavy taxes. Quite the contrary: the larger taxes citizens have to bear, the weaker their state is. This is about governmental effectiveness after all. If the government can regularly collect and distribute even small taxes following the actual needs of all state-supported institutions, the state runs well. Many libertarians believe that taxes should lose the status of an obligation. An ideal government should collect taxes in the form of voluntary donations, as they suppose. It can reduce the oppressing function of a state and make citizens freer to decide how to earn for a living.

There is a direct correlation between the number of taxes and the extent of corruption: the bigger the stronger. But the thing is that any budget thievery implies a compensation not to make the budget empty. And namely, the population is the ones who have to provide such compensation. That’s why neither the number of taxes nor the amount of them matter much if some pro-rata part of taxes is stolen.

Thus, the mass of common citizens cannot benefit from a libertarian program on tax cuts as long as an effective anti-corruption remedy is unavailable. Once any modern state cannot work without bureaucracy which is unimaginable without corruption, the desirable remedy should imply a complete elimination of the very basis of corruption — the doctrine of a national state as such along with its inherent bureaucracy. But this is a radical postmodernist approach to which we should come back a little bit later. Now let’s continue our reasoning within a framework of still existing state structures.

Any contemporary state legislation is over-complicated with various legal technicalities. Only professional lawyers can cope up with them. That’s why no simple legislative innovations can be implemented to observe how state entities follow the interests of civil society. Common people are removed from any sort of arbitration over the ways in which bureaucrats execute their duties. Typical state machinery is murky waters where corrupt authorities are catching a big fish without any fear. Infrequent fat scandals when some reckless functionary gets caught with budget thievery constitute the exceptions that prove the rule: corruption is a low-risk high-yield business.

The very technology of state looting is evolving over time to become as invisible as possible for the general public. Many talented and expensive professionals are hired to develop business schemes through which budget funds are channeled towards seemingly important social programs. Numerous proxy stages and fake subcontractors provide safety money laundering under the programs. It is extremely hard to prove that the nobody-wanted glass bridge in the center of Kyiv is built by Kyiv mayor Klitschko just to steal money from a municipal budget. In fact, nobody can make a clear cut between legal and illegal deals when they are camouflaged with cumbersome bureaucratic procedures wrapped in pretentious quasi-state demagoguery.

The problem of state corruption seems to be solved with some human-free technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain. The technocrats who bet on technological breakthroughs in combating corruption would prefer to remove humans from state management. Such initiatives as, for example, “State in your smartphone” (propagated by Ukrainian President Zelensky) should make the bureaucratic human factor get minimized when citizens interact with the government. For all its progressive character, the program is destined to fail, nevertheless. The reason for it is trivial: those officials who are assigned to develop the program belong to a heavily corrupt stratum of the illustrative Ukrainian neo-feudalism.

Any other AI-based (or blockchain-based) solution dedicated to a human-free state government will face the same problem: both creation and implementation of such systems rely on a vast variety of state officials whose mentality is eroded by an idea of the “humane healthy state”. They, at best, can create some palliative acting as a poorly functional hybrid of a social network and a state ledger where users will have to select between options rooted in the existing over-bureaucratized legal norms.

Needless to say that such a solution is akin to Baron Von Münchhausen who was trying to pull himself up by his bootstraps. Besides, any viable initiative capable of removing bureaucrats from their chairs will inevitably face fierce resistance from those very bureaucrats who are always capable of banning such a project at the earliest stage.

Any constitutional reform cannot change the situation with state corruption unless reformers possess an utterly different vision of the State as such. Besides, they should origin from a different social sandbox having nothing in common with the traditional corrupt elites. And even if so, all other citizens who will “consume” the reformed legislation should be somehow incentivized not to violate it. Such unrealistic conditions forward us to the idea that either different ethics should emerge from some new way of thinking or punishment for crime must adopt some innovative forms.

Please note that we are still trying to stay conceptually within a framework of the state. The doctrine of the state as an indispensable condition for corruption should be thrown away only after all hypothetical measures against corruption are invalidated within the doctrine. At the same time, we hope that such quasi-democratic forms of decentralization as the given neo-feudalism cannot be seriously considered by anyone as a viable solution even though they actually exist today.

We are not going to state that the new supernatural ethics will be a silver bullet in a struggle for healthier social management. This is just another hypothesis. But a techno-spiritual approach to the problem of corruption seems to have not fewer chances to win than, for instance, the “State in your smartphone” has. From which sources should the new ethics arrive?

A well-proven technology of keeping large masses of people in obedience is religion. It has been working for millennia. It is still effective in the Islamic Ummah. It contains the very attribute that all other methods of social management lack — a mandate descending from a supernatural level. Besides, due to a millennia-long history, a religious archetype is reliably inbuilt in a human subconsciousness where modern secular modus operandi has a much weaker position. In fact, any contemporary society keeps its code of ethics not too far from one or another version of religious standards. The conceptual basis of any Western constitution is rooted in Christianity: two thousand years under a specific social experience cannot simply disappear.

However, any effort to get an old religion back into force won’t work: our public discourse is overloaded with numerous negative connotations towards basic behavioral patterns of traditional cults. This is because of a new quasi-religion that covers the Western World — human rights. Anyone who dares to violate them today is harassed by civil institutions as severely as heretics were persecuted by the Holy Inquisition in the middle ages. This is a spiritual heritage of modernity where “man is the measure of all things”.

An old formula with some Supreme Being dictating humans what to do is not acceptable any longer. We always demand rational arguments, we ask for sufficient proof. Of course, new sects and cults appear from time to time (the Marvel Universe is an illustrative case of a contemporary American supernaturalism) but their effects are far from the capabilities required from a new global code of ethics.

An injection of the above-human inspiration would not hurt for a conceptual model of techno-spirituality. The injection can be made by what everyone respects but nobody completely understands — by technology. An interdisciplinary synergistic approach to the process should be applied as well.

The synergy implies a combination of postulates of the philosophy of new-age and some post-human cyber technology. The former are propagated by such famous thinkers as Kenneth Earl Wilber II who is thoroughly developing an integrated approach to the spirituality of contemporary civilization. Transhumanistic cyber technologies are developed by some tech giants such as a consortium of companies headed by Elon Musk whose latest project offers a special digital implant for human brains capable of connecting people directly to the internet.

If we combine the new-age moral imperatives with the digitization of human organisms, a possible final solution can achieve the level of efficiency needed to fight the existing corrupt mentality from within. It implies introducing programmable algorithms of new ethics directly into the sectors of our neocortex responsible for behavioral patterns. Once the cyborg technology can provide desirable effects in human perception on the round-the-clock basis, a mass behavior correction can happen almost instantly at a societal scale.

Elon Musk can hardly give up his efforts to digitize our brains. Transhumanism remains a powerful global trend. Rather sooner than later we will reach the next stage of the 4th industrial revolution when all people become totally interconnected. We all will turn into bio-cyber terminals capable of communicating with each other with no need to use any device exogenous to our bodies. After that, a red pill from the Matrix in the form of brain implants will deliver us directly to a post-human cultural ethos. All pre-digital social phenomena such as corruption won’t get too many options to choose: they will have to either disappear or be transformed into something different.

May we assume some possible outcomes of the new “implanted” techno-spirituality? Why not, especially in the light of the available well-developed new-age philosophy. In order not to dive deeply into numerous postulates and nuances of the integral approach of Ken Wilber in the present text, we strongly advise you to read the latest report of the Club of Rome. It is easily accessible on the internet. One of the sections of the report represents both the context and content of what should be accepted by a global population as a new pathos of existential philosophy.

In a few words, a neo-spiritual integration of the future humanity will be based on a strong appreciation of equity between humans and all the other forms of life on this planet. This can be achieved through the unconditional acceptance of both universal human values and a hyper-ecological uniformity of all species capable of perceiving the external world. Not intellect but perception is proposed to be the main and only mark of the above-human intelligence.

Respect for life as such reinforced by a cybernetic stimulation of corresponding parts of human brains will depress individual ego to a level where thoughts about personal gain and, therefore, about corruption are unlikely to remain in our heads in the forms they have at the present moment. Thus, a techno-philosophical approach to super-humane ethics (techno-spirituality) seems to be a viable instrument for rebuilding people’s attitudes towards any sort of crime including corruption.

Of course, the given approach might induce many questions. Who will pay for the global implementation of the neo-spiritual techniques? The corresponding institutions that can work on a pro bono basis with no commercial rationale seem to be far from what the successful entrepreneur Elon Musk is looking for. Will the existing corrupt elites voluntarily accept the proposed post-human ethics? The question is rhetorical. Wouldn’t the technology make the sheep just more “sheeper” and the wolves more “wolfer”? This suspicion is appropriate once even a perfect technology is never immune to failure. And who will decide which new behavioral patterns should be implanted to whom? This question alone can make an end to the very idea since it calls out to the specter of Dr. Mengele.

All hesitations above are supplemented by the operational degradation that has been revealed by such international institutions as the UN over the last couple of decades. From an organizational perspective, the proposed techno-spiritual arrangements should come down from a supranational level to occupy a global scale. Otherwise, the approach is meaningless. But the problem is that supranational bureaucracy is not less corrupt than any national one. The objectives and practices of the supranational corrupted differ quite significantly from what and how national bureaucracies do. But that doesn’t change the very principle of corruption.

The logic in it is very clear: once an international bureaucracy is created from former national bureaucrats, they inevitably bring their corrupt approaches with them. Moreover, the international bureaucrats are less vulnerable to legal prosecutions from a procedural standpoint. Once they get away with a lot of stuff they often feel overconfident. They operate with absolute impunity in those risky deals which make their national-level accomplices think twice. Besides, one hand washes the other at the international level as well. Just look at who was appointed the new president of the European Central Bank for the next eight years. It is easy to evaluate the level of corruption in the main European financial institution through the prism of the criminal history of its head.

The official international entities won’t be of any help in fighting against corruption. We face a situation similar to what would happen with the above-mentioned “State in your smartphone”: any bureaucracy-dependent anti-corruption initiative will fail due to the very corruption.

Theoretically, we would have an opportunity to implement the techno-spiritual program through some private organization that could stand aside from any bureaucracy. We can assume a powerful techno giant such as Google that can cope up with the task in terms of both technology and global coverage. But again we will face two problems in such a case. 1. What would be a commercial rationale for our program? Feasibility matters most for any private project. 2. Both national and international bureaucrats can ban the project at the earliest stage if they smell even the slightest danger for their status quo. The exemplary case of it includes such projects as “Libra” by Facebook and “Gram” by Telegram that are banned by namely bureaucrats.

It seems we have to go in circles whenever we intend to solve the problem of corruption through bureaucracy-dependent approaches.

That’s why let’s try to do what nobody has been doing before in this regard. Let’s do an intellectual backflip and address the problem of corruption from an opposite angle.

Has anybody ever addressed corruption from a positive perspective? What if corruption as a socio-economic phenomenon can contribute to society more than it can compromise? Isn’t the very fact of a growing global corruption a clear sign of an organically developing process running within the evolution of human societies?

Let’s train our thinking with a quite speculative but possible “third way” where new ethics along with a more advanced punishment for corruption should step back for a while. It is worth starting our training with the assumption of the number of people involved in various corrupt schemes. Obviously, no certain statistic on this is available. Nevertheless, an indirect calculation can be made for the countries where the above-mentioned neo-feudalism thrives.

In Ukraine, for example, all institutions and organizations that one way or another are linked to budget funds (ministries, state industrial enterprises, infrastructural objects, nuclear power plants, defense facilities, schools, hospitals, universities, etc) run under the control of corrupt individuals whose main task comes to budget thievery. Once the very process of such state looting implies quite complicated methods of money laundering, the corrupt top management of those organizations cannot do without the help of literally all other staff. Hence, the entire hierarchy of every state-funded organization in Ukraine has to be engaged in corrupt schemes to some extent.

Of course, the lion share of “profit” ends up in the pockets of top managers, but the compulsory esprit de corps over the schemes allows even the lowest-level participants to get some crumbs from the bosses’ table. Such organizations reside not in a vacuum. They inevitably have to cooperate with various partners and subcontractors from the private sector. Namely private associates assist in the construction of complicated proxy solutions for secure and reliable money laundering. Numerous dummy companies win public tenders in favor of their corrupt state-based patrons. Banks and lawyers are involved in the process as well. To sum up, very few people in Ukraine have absolutely nothing to do with one or another form of corruption. By the way, the population of Ukraine is about 40 million people.

If we take into account such large countries as Russia and, for example, Kazakhstan where a very similar situation with corruption takes place, the mass supranational nature of corruption as a social phenomenon becomes apparent. Dozens if not hundreds of millions of people all over the post-soviet area make their living on corrupt business. Once the history of the corruption development on those terrains counts in decades, a strong psychological addiction to make deals in such a manner happens to be an integral part of the entire post-soviet mentality. Having a generally negative effect on social relations corruption, nevertheless, became an inherent feature of a particular social organism. And as we know, any surgical intervention in a living organism may entail unpredictable and, sometimes, lethal consequences.

Chaotization of an entire national economic complex is what the ill-considered fight against corruption can bring to many countries, in fact. A well-established paradigm of semi-legal relationships between people in a corrupt society might work in a very inefficient manner. But it works. It allows keeping control over huge masses of the population the majority of which might be merely unaware of any different way of doing things. To quote Goethe’s Mephistopheles, corruption is a “part of that Power which still produces the good, whilst ever scheming ill”.

The total character of corruption in such societies requires quite radical and even severe reforms. Who can be confident in the people’s readiness for them? Nothing but a civil war can erupt when overdoing reformers get down to business.

Many may perceive neo-feudalism as a disgusting and unnatural way of social governing. But it works to give millions of people a chance to make ends meet in peace. Many of them suffer from injustice and crime, the others have to live their native places in search of a better life. At the same time, the most active and passionate individuals make the grade even in the very tough conditions of total corruption. They have to swell the ranks of criminals, fraudsters, bribers, and semi-legal dealers of all stripes. Their business runs as a continuous maintaining of a balance between jail and freedom, between life and death. Maybe they behave oftentimes like wolves, but who says that everyone must chew grass in herds?

The problem of corruption has no straightforward solutions for today. The phenomenon keeps going in parallel with publicly acceptable methods of governing. They both constitute what we call the System the major principle of which is a vertical hierarchy of power. The second compulsory feature of the System is the “bureaucratic barrier” that reliably keeps common people far away from the top elites. Life experience along with a common logic suggests that it is impossible to cut a part of an organic system without severe effects. That’s why all efforts of social activists to separate corrupt bureaucrats from non-corrupt ones are futile.

As soon as corruption keeps developing it can be accepted as an element of the natural human biocoenosis in the paradigm of modern society at least. It is hardly possible to rip out the shoots of corruption without damaging the mycelia of society. Besides, from an operational perspective, it is unclear who could and should do this. The corrupt strata are continuously working over upgrading their schemes making them closer and closer to the so-called letter of the law. In the long term, corruption is to integrate into the field of national legislations and to vanish into the bureaucratic sophistry.

The “belt of bureaucrats” has already turned into an autonomous power independent from both civil society and top officials from governing hierarchies. It absorbs impulses from both parties to interpret them with its own logic. The logic is simple being known for ages: divide and rule. With the help of their intermediary function bureaucrats made both masses and elites believe in the vital importance of bureaucracy. They literally hooked the society on their seemingly critical functionality. Today, nobody can doubt the existing structure of society in which the “belt of bureaucrats” is an indispensable component. Moreover, namely, bureaucrats constitute the force that imposes its will on both masses and nominal governors. The real power is entrenched in the hands of bureaucrats as a result.

In the paradigm of national states of the late modernity, no remedy against corruption can be found since its main carrier — bureaucracy cannot be deleted from the structure of society in principle. Thus, our reasoning implies two mutually exclusive outcomes:

1. We should leave alone bureaucrats and forget about fighting against corruption as soon as we agree to keep playing by the System’s rules. Of course, we can pretend that the fight against corruption is going on to let the voiceless majority take naps in their existential lethargy feeling that society cares about them.
2. We should escape from the hypnosis of the System to brake the basement of both corruption and bureaucracy — the very doctrine of a vertically integrated state. But since in the current paradigm such an approach can lead to havoc only as soon as an alternative model of human coexistence is unavailable even as a concept we have to get back to outcome 1.

Sometimes, it seems that the best approach to corruption is to give this kernel time to ripen into fruit. All types of society including the most neo-feudal ones are moving towards one or another final destination. Natural cycles of evolution continuously unfold. Let’s see how far the corrupt societies can go. What if they appear the most resilient forms of coexistence in the paradigm of national state?

The final verdict on corruption cannot be made without understanding the fundamental operating principle of modern society: it runs only through hierarchical relationships between the masses and a ruling bureaucracy. The latter personifies power on both national and supranational levels. The ruling class of bureaucrats dominates over the silent majority of the world population. Both strata are striving to survive in the universe of cruel food chains where all eat all. But bureaucrats parasitize the masses of plebs in favor of the Supreme Being who charges fees to humans for their very existence via the interface of society. Corruption in such a situation is an intrinsic function of any bureaucrat who is “fairly” appropriating a part of the public good as a service fee for herding human flocks.

To say the truth, such a pessimistic way of looking at things is not the only available. An alternative model exists. Moreover, it came from the same ancient times as society did. But the model has never fitted expectations of the silent majority and only small groups of individuals have dared to accept it as a modus of coexistence over the entire human history. We are talking about a horizontally integrated fraternal community. No prerequisites for corruption are available in a community since power is spread over all members equally. There is no need in bureaucracy as in a moderator of relationships between various levels of society since only one horizontal level is available in a community. But as soon as a compulsory feature of every member of a community is the full self-awareness via the “existence-towards-death” no community can be created within a consumer society by definition.

Thus, the only conclusion we can come to is that the longer society remains the main paradigm of people’s coexistence the stronger character its inherent corruption is to have. The next postmodern paradigm can come only after a drastic change in people’s minds happens when they start appreciating a different form of coexistence — a community. And the only viable way of providing such a change seems to be brought by communication technologies capable of rearranging people’s interactions via decentralized internet protocols.