My friend asked me to do her homework for her. It's an essay on the progression of corruption throughout history. As it's not a very important homework and she's only paying me $2 for it I knocked it out in about 15 minutes without giving it much thought. Therefore I am asking for forgiveness in advance for it's blasé tone and lack of depth and acuity. If you want to read something of mine which I would consider more profound and interesting I would recommend this: https://steemit.com/politics/@joeviajo/our-inescapable-nature-why-politics-cannot-save-us-from-ourselves
Anyway here it is, might be mildly interesting for a few of you.
Although it seems like today the world is more corrupt than ever, corruption has been rife throughout history. The difference is that today the general pubic are more aware of the corruption than before. Corruption is out in the open for everyone to see because we are at a point in history where we are helpless to do anything about it. It used to be possible to lead a revolt or start a revolution, but these days the surveillance of most communication methods prevents that from happening. Another important factor to realise is that the working class are less valuable than ever. If the working class were to start a strike 100 years ago, society would collapse because they are so important to it’s functioning. Nowadays the only thing would happen is the traffic would get a little worse and their jobs would be outsourced to a different country. So it could be said that globalisation has facilitated the recent increase in corruption.
Corruption on a large scale has grown with the size of global systems. What I mean by this is that up until a few thousand years ago we did not have much global trade or religion for corruption to exist in. Corruption requires a system to infect. The first notable instances of corruption arose within religion. Before the existence of popular religions we lived in a world involving a strict hierarchy that did not pretend to be fair or democratised. The system was unfair by nature and greedy people did not need corruption to get what they wanted.
When popular religions came about, they spoke of fairness and loving and respecting each other. They condemn acts of greed and gluttony and promote tolerance and equality. The problem with this is that greed is an innate characteristic of mankind. The clever and selfish people within these religious systems soon discovered ways to exploit people using the religion. Church tax is an obvious example of this. Meanwhile politics did not really exist and we did not live in democracies therefore political corruption had not come about yet.
After several revolutions in places like France and Britain which overthrew monarchs and emplaced parliaments instead, the idea of democracy started to spread. This too was a pretence of fairness and a handover of power to the people. The same thing that happened within religion, now happened within politics. This corruption was still on a relatively local scale up until the end of World War II and the formation of the European Union, NATO, the World Bank and the IMF. These bigger organisation that spanned the globe created the possibility of global corruption, which has been growing ever since their creation. The reason why we haven’t had any wars in developed countries is because these organisations make it more profitable to subjugate the populations of the richer member states than to make them fight against each other.
The human has become a sort of money generating machine for the systems they belong to, for the organisations that govern them. The use of media and propaganda has allowed for this extraction of value by keeping people uneducated about what’s truly going on, and by making them think there are no alternatives to the current system. In this respect corruption has grown massively, infecting the many systems that govern our society. It has become entrenched in everything we do and like a large malignant tumour, is quite possibly inoperable.