Question

'Relation of Corruption and country's failure'

Answer 1

This is a great question. From my perspective, the quick answer is no. I think an equally large, and maybe larger reason at least in an advanced country, is the disengagement of the people. I’ll use the “United” States as an example.

In our country, we have relatively low voter turnout. That is an engagement issue. Not changing the voting process, or contributing to gerrymandering is a corruption issue.

We also have a fairly large group of people who have no intention of being self reliant. Included in this group is a subgroup of “victims”. They believe they can never succeed in the system, so they stop trying. That is an engagement problem, and the identity politics that was born from that is corruption.

And an offshoot of identity politics is the tendency of people to disengage from each other, tending to stay more with people who think the same instead of trying to understand other viewpoints. Corruption has made its way into this area as well, as there have been more and more people working to repress the speech of others.

In my opinion, some of corporate America has tended to look more at shareholder return, than total return to society. Part of that comes from much larger corporations as population has grown. But part of that is just conscious decisions. That is a form of corruption; not illegal maybe, but not ethical either. A disengagement with the overall health of society.

Then there is the media. People have disengaged from critical thinking, and the media has corruptly decided, in many cases, to give the people what they want, which is confirmation bias of their own opinions. There is way more conjecture, opinion and speculation on the news channels now than there is fact. And the people are eating it up, from their respective dinner bowls.

So to summarize, in an advanced society, the people get lazy. Lazy of thought and action. Compare the lives of people you know from previous generations. My father finished high school at 16, and as soon as he could, after his 17th birthday, enlisted in the Army to go fight in WWII. He had worked all through school on the family farm, trapped fur in the early morning and late at night for spending money during the depression. Not to imply that only younger generations are lazier, but the world has changed to allow more freedom. And it has had the side effect of causing people to disengage with the importance of keeping society on track. The corruption just takes advantage of that, and encourages it.