Friday, February 22, 2008

Corruption

"The word corruption means something spoiled: something sound that has been made defective, debased, and tainted; something that has been pushed off course into a worse or inferior form. Whoever corrupts sets out to make something impure and less capable, an adverse departure from an expected course.
When applied to human relations, corruption is a bad influence, an injection of rottenness or decay, a decline in moral conduct and personal integrity attributable to venality or dishonesty. When applied to public office, rather than referring to departures from ideal or even generally expected standards of incumbent behavior, the practice has been to spell out specific acts of misconduct that disgrace public office and make the offenders unfit to remain there."

"Corruption leads to a breakdown in shared concerns and results in factional pursuit of special interests and a reliance on coercion over consensus.
Indeed, reliance on coercion indicates a corrupt or corrupted state, perverted and rotten, where every person is on guard against everyone else in a society of amoral familism." (Where Corruption Lives, 2001, Corruption and Governance, Gerald E. Caiden)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It is not only the secrets we keep that keeps us sick, but the company we keep.