How can corruption be defeated without destroying family?

Great Debates
1

I was reading a sample from Obama’s “Audacity of Hope” and I started thinking about why this world is the way it is.

It is the ever-changing painting of God (or ownerless if you’re an atheist). An art piece that is beyond life itself in meaning and value, just as we are more than the sum of our cells. Not everyone agrees on what it looks or looked like, nor what it should become or how fast the change can take place.

Some are happy to paint a little corner and do not care if it’s painted over later. Others want to leave a mark of their own or perhaps a bigger portion of canvas for their children. Some have a harder time letting go of their world as others paint over it. It is never possible to only paint over good or evil, thus the infinity of gray incertitude we wade through.

So How swift or careful must we be in altering the painting and towards what direction? Let’s take a look at corruption, a universal plague that is most virulent in the third world, and, rather the norm than the exception for most people living today.

From this website:

Here are a few examples of what I think of as “entry-level” corruption.

Governmental corruption:

A government clerk is given money with a form and asked to expedite it. The clerk only has to stay 20 minutes late to process it after hours after finishing up with his daily workload. Clerk gets 10 bucks to pay electricity bill which is late, briber gets his application to get processed at the end of the day (same day) instead of waiting in the queue for weeks/months.

Business corruption light (anti-competitive practices):

Company Rep: Hey, cousin, look, I’m getting a $20,000 bonus if I get this $250,000 contract from your company. Help me get the deal (as opposed to company X and we’ll split it.

Cronyism: A friend of a friend can hire my recently graduated engineer son and asks me to help him get his own daughter admitted as an intern at my law firm.

I do not deny that greed is enough to corrupt, verily it is. But it is true that loyalty to a large family or an even larger clan has both advantages and drawbacks. First, people feel the love more. Second, they don’t commit suicide as much. Third, well, Family parties are fun. However, loyalty to family must inevitably clash with civic duty and blind justice and I just don’t see a way out of this conondrum short of making corruption *unnecessary *(if that is even possible).

So, in waging war against corruption, are we ultimately waging war against strong family bonds?

As the global village gets smaller and the villagers differ on what they consider non-negotiable in the the path for universal harmony, how much can we preserve and how much must we lose?

2

You are talking about one specific type of corruption called nepotism. Which I don’t think is in all cases corrupt.

The thing about nepotism is that there will come a time in your life where you absolutely can’t move forward without relying on someone else, and the only ones that will be willing put up with your burden are your friends and family.

That is if you treat them right.

3

Possibly, but you phrase this as though it were a bad thing. Monkeysphere thinking is something we need to overcome if we are to be better than we were in the past, both as individuals and as societies. Modern man is now no longer a tribal animal, it’s time he stopped living as one.

We’ll have to lose a lot. There’s little that’s really worth preserving in terms of selfish behaviour like your examples. Of course, I’m taking an idealistic view here, but I think it should be possible to overcome millennia of programming and become truly social creatures. If that means extended family networks have to go, well, I won’t shed any tears. As long as the nuclear family or some version exists, it ought to be possible to shift emphasis from Clan to Society as a whole.

4

America in its essence is an experiment against nepotism. People come to America and abandon their relationship to their family in the old country. Even here, family is eroded by the way of life. Think of how many people you know who live far away from their families. What you are describing is one of the more subtle aspects of the American way.

As a counterpoint, most heavily tribal nations are today the poorest nations on the planet.

5

I should have stated that the man who hired the engineer works for the state and is supposed to hire solely on merit. Thus, the network of influence grows between those in power. They inevitably have good reason to cooperate to maintain and pass their comforts and privileges to the next generation. A perfectly understandable behavior that does not necessarily involve malice or sinister meetings but organically “happens”.

MrDibble : Your claim sounds dubious to me. Will your children stop speaking or caring about each other when they become parents and focus on their nuclear family all of a sudden?

It takes a village to raise a child. How will the village be replaced?

6

I’m not sure what you mean by “even here” but I assume you are referring to the (unsettling) low birthrates in the developed world. The U.S are only stagnating (thanks to all those immigrants so many fear) but they are faring better than most European countries as well as Japan and ,I believe, South Korea.

Indeed, corruption causes poverty and poverty encourages corruption. It’s tricky business.

7

I know I did - if I see or even communicate with my 6 siblings once a year, that’s a lot. Same-same for my parents, and they live <10 miles from me.
And there’s a difference between caring for someone (as I do for my parents and siblings, still) and placing their needs above the common good.

Platitude.

By the whole of society - if everyone sees every child as something to be cherished and nurtured, the “village” covers the globe.

8

What about the needs of your wife or children? Would you place them below the common good? It’s easy to to talk but hard to walk.

As far the village thing goes, that is how we lived and how children were raised. That is what out psyche evolved for. My reasoning is as follows:

On a very fundamental level, all true wealth is biological. Child-bearing harems and preoccupation with preserving “dynasties” are common themes for rulers throughout history. Among those less wealthy and powerful, most parents routinely value their children more than their own lives, sometimes more than anything in the world. Even fictitious bastards like Tony Soprano.

Second, what you propose is something that could have been achieved long ago, when mankind first colonized the entire world. Why did it not happen then and why would it happen in the future?

I think the problem is that what you propose may be statistically impossible as long as are playing by rules such as those described in game theory. For those not familiar with the topic, click for an overview of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

9

The conflict between family and society isn’t just about corruption. Consider the man who is killed by another. Does his brother avenge his death personally, or let society do it?

Civilization is about primitive family bonds being replaced by societal bonds, for the greater good of all. For every son who gets the advantage of being hired in your example, another son or daughter does not get hired. Since that person is better than the son, the company and society both lose due to nepotism. Plus, is it true familial love if the son is miserable in a job he is not up to?

10

Anecdote alert:

I applied for a job at a company…and they were interested in me. In the process, the owner (it was a smaller company) came under nepotism pressure. He succumbed and didn’t hire me.

I took a job at another company, a direct competitor with the first. I am an analytics person but since I can actually speak English when I need to :slight_smile: (I was once a teacher) they would bring along to sales meetings. The one time I was in direct head-to-head (both in the same room) I made my counterpart look like a fool.

Usually the competition is not ‘direct’ in that you do not see your competitor - you either win the bid or you do not.

I met the owner 3 years later and we had a beer at a local pub and he said that he would NEVER succumb to nepotism again.

:slight_smile:

11

No, that’s not what I mean. I don’t find the low birthrate unsettling. The US is at replacement rate, which is ideal. What I mean is that families are split from their old world families when they move here, but also that ‘Even when your family is here in America’, there is some innate property of our culture that erodes the family in favor of the State.

Right, people don’t have the incentive to go outside the kinship group. Some are wondering how this will affect China with it’s Confucian family oriented culture. It shall be quite interesting.

12

I suppose it’s the fact that there are more than 50 states (Guam, Puerto Rico and Hawaii are states, right?) to choose from. Everybody finds a clique, it may seem.

13

Umm, they’d be that “nuclear family” I mentioned?

That’s empty rhetoric.

If you go that route, I psyches evolved for small family groups on the savannahs. Villages are only 10000 years old. A blip.

I don’t agree

I think you’ll find it’s mostly bastards who care about that kind of “legacy” - not too many women in it.

Someday, we’ll have a post-scarcity, post-religion, post-capitalist, post-oppressive society. We’ll be ready then, we’re not ready now.

People don’t always act like ideal prisoners. Read the book “Critical Mass” by Philip Ball for an overview of how game theory has advanced beyond something as simplistic as the PD. More realistic models show that altruism can be a winning strategy even in the face of cheaters; or else what’s known as the Tit-For-Tat strategy.

14

I think the problem is not so much the tight family structure, as extreme obedience to authority. After all, we have plenty of nepotism in the United States and our corruption level is under control.

In Cameroon, the person with the higher social status (determined by a complex mix of age, traditional status, gender, ethnicity, job, and wealth) is god. For example, any adult can pick any random child off the street and tell him to do any kind of labor- from go to the market to washing his floors- and it will be done. Everything has a social order- from who sits where in the bus to who gets to the buffet first at a party. And people pretty much respect this, even when they know the guy on top is a thief and they are getting the short end of the stick. They figure that is the price to pay for having an orderly society.

A big part of this is instilled in schools. The school system was set up by a colonial government for the purpose of training low-level government officials to help them rule. It’s role is not to teach critical thinking and decision making. It is to teach people how to fit into an established social role and how to follow orders.

In school, the teacher stands in front of the board and dictates. The kids memorize. If they move or speak or otherwise do anything, they are forced to kneel in front of the class. If it escalates, they are beaten. There are numerous rules from what kind of shoes they can wear to the exact length of permitted hairstyles. These rules do not serve any real purpose besides getting the kids used to doing what they are told. If a child tries something and makes an error, they are often yelled at or publicly shamed. If they ask a question, they make also be made fun of by the teacher. Students are rarely asked for their opinions or to critically evaluate what they are presented with.

The absence of critical thinking is profound. I’d have trouble getting kids to make even the slightest leaps of logic. When I’d find errors in textbooks (the US does not have 52 states) I’d have the hardest time convincing anyone that I really did I what I was talking about. Even things like essay tests came back with what you said, word for word, proudly presented. Thats what all the other teachers expect.

Of course, all of this is also enforced on the street. Children are treated as small, loved slaves. Women hide their face and fall to their knees before men.

And this leads to a number of problem. The lack of critical thinking means people often don’t really fully see how much they are getting screwed. Even if they do, they have no way to begin questioning the system. And if they get that far, they still have to buck a lifetime of obedience and start agitating against authority.

15

Fascinating stuff about Cameroon.

I must disagree on the seemingly arbitrary separation you and others have put forward.

Family enganders nepotism. There is a deep and strong desire from the part of wealthy and powerful parents to arrange things so that their progeny retains and passes along their property and social status. They are usually not deterred from bribery and corruption. Whether people are paid in cash, leniency or letters of recommendation is irrelevant.