I was talking with my coworkers one day about our work lives before joining our current company. One of them mentioned how the union at the grocery store they worked at was very corrupt. There were rampant cases of sexual assault and harassment amongst employees, but no one would ever get fired, or even talked to about it, because the union would just sweep it under the rug. I was absolutely flabbergasted! Why would a union protect those kinds of people? Unions are there to protect the workers, not to facilitate crimes against them. I then remembered that, of course, this is the problem with humans; en masse, we’re corrupt.

I no longer consider myself a Calvinist, which is to say I don’t believe that humans are innately evil. Though I was raised to believe this, I’ve come to the conclusion that, on the contrary, most people want to do what’s right⁺ most of the time. I also do not consider myself an anti-natalist. Personally, I think anti-natalism to be ignorant and a defeatist’s mindset. With all this hope for people to be good, though, why does it seem that, at large, people are corrupt?

The Self

You are just one person. You do what you can to take care of yourself. You need things in order to take care of yourself, and you need to do things to get the things you need. I would say that, all things equal, this process of meeting your own needs doesn’t introduce a whole lot of room for wrong-doing. Outside of your own survival, you don’t have that much incentive to harm others. Even in the face of your own survival, though, I think many people would sacrifice some amount of their own well being to help someone else if it meant that other person’s survival. Here is where I hope in the idea that people are generally good. This is a nature versus nurture problem, and I think nature tends towards good.

The Family

Once we reach the family unit, my belief in the ability for people to weed out corruption already begins to drop off. Once blood ties get involved, so too does loyalty to a fault. You have a duty now to not only protect yourself, but also those close to you, and sometimes those close to you do wrong. Regardless of any wrong doing they may have done, you need to defend them. They are family after all, right? And if you had “messed up”, you’d want someone to defend you, right? Humans are social creatures, and as such we look to other to help us, and in exchange, we help them. Things only get worse from here.

The Tribe

It’s all down hill from here, I’d say. Here, a tribe can be considered to be a collection of people united by any sort of identity outside of the family unit. This could include unions, churches, board members, or even whole countries. A key definer to the tribe, though, is the Other. For there to be a tribe, there must be an Other, and the tribe needs protecting from the Other. While not inevitable per se, I do believe tribes will generally tend towards corruption in order to protect its members from the corruption of other tribes.

To make matters worse, tribes need not be exclusive. Using the previous examples, board members are a part of a tribe, but they’re also citizens of their country. That’s two tribes right there, and that board may engage in behavior that is harmful to their greater tribe, their contrymen, if it so serves the board. Deeper in the chain, one board member may convinces the others to oust another member so that there’s room on the board for their sister/father/aunt/second-cousin. Now you have the family unit leading to corruption within the same tribe using its corruption to harm their countrymen.

Where Does It Start

I genuinely think all it takes is two people. As soon as you call someone a friend, you’re already more likely to write off any wrong-doing done by them. You’re not a bad person, right? And you don’t like bad people, yeah? So how could your friend, someone you like, be a bad person? Maybe there was just a misunderstanding, or the “wronged” person is just too sensitive. As soon as you have someone to protect, corruption is waiting with bated breath.

And here is where I accept my defeatist fate. I don’t think there is anyway around the corruption of man once any considerable group of people are gathered. There will always be an Other, and the group will always do whatever it takes to protect itself from that Other.

Humans are an aggregate problem.

---

⁺: Of course, “right” and “wrong” can be entirely subjective. Here, “right” means “to cause the least amount of harm⁺⁺ to others as possible”

⁺⁺: Okay, now define “harm”