There is No Hope: Why There is No Chance of Making U.S. Democracy Less Corrupt.

A society can be made less corrupt, a democracy cannot. The U.S. democracy, as any democracy, is corrupt because corruption lies at the basis of any democratic process as such. It is very difficult to provide a theoretical account of the concept of corruption and give its analytical-style definition. The fact that modern human society has even raised the issue of corruption is remarkable, as the concept of corruption has never received much attention. Not surprisingly, existing conceptual work on corruption consists in little more than the presentation of brief definitions of corruption as a preliminary to extended accounts of the causes and effects of corruption and the ways to combat it.

Since most of the definitions of corruption are unsatisfactory, let us look once more at the etymology of the word corruption. The base word “corrupt” comes from Middle English (Anglo-French), which in turn is based on Latin word “corruptus” (broken in pieces), past participle of “corrumpere” (to abuse or destroy). Here the “co-“ part is intensive prefix and “rumpere” means “to break”. Therefore, corrupt literally means "utterly broken" and corruption, as a state of being corrupt, means the relationship between two or more entities, which have been corrupted, i.e. completely broken.

When we are talking about something broken into pieces, we imply that the integrity of that object has been destroyed. In corruption’s case, the object, which integrity has been destroyed, happens to be the personality as the sum total of the physical, mental, emotional, and social characteristics of an individual as well as the organized pattern of behavioral characteristics of that individual. We are talking about personal identity and the essential character of a particular person.

The broken part in corruption issue happens to be the most intimate and vulnerable part of human society, it is the integrity of one’s mental, emotional characteristics, and the very quality of being a person, and his or her existence as a human being.

The concept of corruption has not been dealt with diligently enough in the modern society because tackling this problem entails dealing with much more profound and fundamental issues of integrity of human personality in today’s world. That is a tricky issue, in a world that is engulfed in incessant political and social reforms of epic proportions. The world that we live in has been in constant turmoil of political, social, and cultural upheavals for the past four hundred years. The defining agenda of this ongoing trepidation is unremitting struggle for power on the part of a certain faction of human society occupying the highest ladders of the social order.

That relentless struggle for power involves redesigning the behavioral characteristics of individuals and various social groups. The fundamental principle of power politics is “divide and rule”. The same principle is applied in sociology and social psychology as a way to gain and maintain power over individuals or groups of people. By breaking up larger concentrations of power – social, political, mental, emotional, or psychological - into pieces that individually have less power than the one implementing the strategy, the usurpers use their advantageous position to gain more power and create conditions necessary to forever keep that power.

By breaking up the integrity of personal identity and the essential character of a particular person or large groups of people, the one applying such concept intentionally breaks up existing structures of individual characteristics as an entity thus perpetrating a crime against a particular personality or social group. In essence, such activity constitutes a crime as severe as murder. Undermining or destroying the integrity of human character, as well as that of a society in general, is tantamount to crime against humanity and usually that is how it ends up.

Democracy, despite the current normative democratic theory, which deals with the moral foundations of democracy and democratic institutions, presupposes corruption. That is why the most popular of the definitions of corruption is: “Corruption is the abuse of power by a public official for private gain.” The abuse of public offices for private gain is paradigmatic of corruption in all forms of government, but the so-called Western parliamentary democracy has only highlighted the dubiousness of the idea of equal participation in politics.

Moreover, political process in the Western-style democracies has become possible thanks to the processes, which had been present in Europe before they became carried across to North America, that have nothing to do with integrity of character or intactness of personal identity. The U.S. political system has been predicated by corruption. It is mistaken to think that the U.S. democracy has become corrupt in eventuality. Given the analytical definition of corruption, the formation of the political system in the United States of America has become the result of relatively recent disintegration of physical, mental, emotional, and social characteristics of those individuals, who happened to be at the forefront of the political struggle there about two hundred years ago. The changes that took place in behavioral characteristics of people, who were most actively involved in that nation building process turned out to be characteristic of the future society in general.

There were notable exceptions, of course, the giants, which, like all exceptions, stand out the more obtrusively the more mediocre the dominant landscape is.

This is not the case of moral decadence per se, for there are deeper and more profound underlying factors that have contributed to the economic, social, and political problems of the U.S. and Western Europe of today. It is a systemic problem of the capitalist society in general. The issue of corruption cannot be solved from inside such a society. The patient cannot make himself whole! Because he has never been one. That is why the ideas of incentivizing non-corruption - you corrupt people with non-corruption – arise in the first place. Set up a fund that, if you serve for five years or ten years with distinction for the people, there is money waiting for you that you do not have to take from lobbyists, etc. That would not work that way!

Since corruption is the foundation of the building, which is the U.S., and not recently added upper floors that make the whole building look ugly, the only way to resolve this issue is to move forward according to the laws of nature and social development that have demonstrated their unescapable efficacy for centuries and millennia of human history before. After a corrupt society have evolved into the developed democracy, which allowed some of its most active citizens to accumulate enough wealth and power to forgo any democratic processes to retain that power, it is time for that society to grow into a valid dictatorship!



A valid political system does not have to be a democracy only. Besides, capitalist democracy has more alternatives than just pure socialism, let alone Communism. God forbid! There are options that are more genuine in their approach to solving social problems. One of them is Enlightened Dictatorship, which has been practiced already but not explicitly. Efficiency-wise, the Western democratic capitalism has already come to that stage, when more unambiguous social policy would not undermine, but significantly strengthen, the position of the omnipotent elite.