Worldbuilding 302: Corruption
Greetings and sonification! Well, you do sonification when you speak! ...and fart… and sneeze. Anyway, welcome to my blog of worldbuilding, I am your beloved and handsomely beautiful alien Limax, Vivian Sayan!
What is Corruption?
Corruption is not the easiest to define, yet most people can point at it and say it is corruption. Though even that fails, as some people are so surrounded by corruption that they become blind to it. So I will give my definition of it:
Corruption is when individuals or suborganisations perform actions as members of an organisation that benefit the individual or suborganisation while either not performing or outright violating the organisation's purpose in spirit.
I say “in spirit” in the definition because an organisation for a government or a company is always created with a specific purpose. The spirit of the organisation is the purpose it was meant to do. But spirit and practice can be quite different, which I will go into next.
Corruption and intent
As the definition says, the intent is important in judging whether or not an organisation is actually corrupt. Just because you can point at the Stasi, Gestapo, KGB, and more, and say that they are doing evil or bad things, that doesn’t mean they are corrupt organisations. It is far more nuanced than that.
Designed to be shit
The aforementioned organisations were organisations that caused a lot of suffering. An Eastern version was the Japanese Kempeitai. But they were never inherently corrupt because their entire purpose was to be awful organisations toward people.
So in worldbuilding, you can create awful organisations that are intended to be horrible, and they are not corrupt just because of that purpose. A book series I read had AI computers that had taken over a space empire but were mostly hiding behind humans, so most people didn’t know about them. They had created a military (called “The Fleet,” which is so uninteresting) to be their arm to do their biddings. They needed humans because they were huge machines without bodies to do small things. Anyway, The Fleet was intentionally made to be a hell hole for all involved where everyone is trying to backstab each other to win favours and climb. You could easily call it corrupt if it wasn’t intentional to the point where the AIs overlooked outright theft and violations in order to feed the hostile environment.
So it can even be made to be awful to those within the organisation without being corrupt.
Became shit
These organisations are created with nothing but the best intentions. To have a grand purpose and perform their duty to help whatever you call your nation. People would be better off thanks to this organisation!
But life is as it is, and stories are even more so (especially if Anne is the writer), and what was meant to be good starts rotting from the inside. All the rules were great at first, and the culture was awesome. But then some people find a way to abuse the rules, and the organisation has to change their rules to deal with this rule abuse.
Then it happens again, they correct once more, but it repeats, and the organisation culture might start becoming more hostile as frustrations at people keep rising. Each good attempt to keep the organisation doing its intended purpose is slowly withering away the tools, methods, knowledge, rules, and goal until it is nothing but a husk of what it once was.
It is an abomination of what it once was, and the rules have become such that they are there to enforce the organisation and maintain it and the people within. The rules are no longer intended to serve people but pay lip service to its original goal.
What was meant to be good in spirit has become awful in reality. Is this corrupt? I would say no. It is not corrupt because there is no intention by the people involved to benefit themselves directly, rather they follow the rules which have been mutated into an abomination. They violate the spirit every day, but they still don’t go for personal benefit.
An example of this in action is the U.S election system. The founding fathers had (mostly) good intentions and ideas on how to make it the best for the people. Don’t at me about all the stuff around it with women and slaves: the founding fathers were products of their time. But through the centuries of reinterpreting the constitution, it has become… quite bad with the influx of money through fundraising, dark money, super PACs, etc. which is essentially bribes, the gerrymandering that you might as well call rigging elections, and so on. It was not originally the intention, but these have become part of the rules and inner workings of the U.S. election system in time.
Is corrupt
Okay, so we can get garbage through intent and not-intent, but what about the corruption that we set out for in this blogpost for the world? How can we get corruption into an organisation? Anne kept asking about an entire corrupt organisation, which is fair and popular in fiction. However, I would say most of those we would feel are corrupt are in the “became shit” category. Some “designed to be shit,” but mostly became. Why I generally say whole organisations are rarely corrupt is because in my eyes, as I defined above, they have to be part of something else in order to be corrupt, which is why I said suborganisations.
But we want corruption, damn it! Well, an organisation’s culture could be extremely friendly to corruption. A perfect, infamous example of this these days is the Russian military. As an organisation, it is not corrupt (it is attempting to do its purpose), but virtually all levels and people within are either corrupt or part of the corruption one way or another. They take at every level some of the money and resources meant for the military and keep it for themselves, so by the time the money reaches the final level where people are meant to go to war or build war machines, a huge fraction of all the money and resources is simply gone.
If I recall correctly, my friend from former Yugoslavia–but if you are from here feel free to correct me below–said it was, at least back when she visited, expected that police would be corrupt to the point where you could bribe away minor offences, speeding tickets and such.
Perverse incentives
This is one thing that can make an organisation appear exceedingly corrupt to people, but perverse incentives are in fact not corruption. Perverse incentives are unintentional incentives that rules create that are within the rules, and thus allowed, but they go contrary to the intention behind the rules. It is also called the cobra effect because, well, let me tell you a story!
In India during British rule, the local British government was concerned by the high population of cobras. Quite the horrible snake! So they set up bounties for every dead cobra that was delivered to them. Sure enough, people started killing cobras left, right, and centre! However, some Indians figured out that they could breed cobras and make a decent amount of money. Once the British figured this out, they cancelled the entire program, and the breeders released their now worthless cobras, making the population of cobras even higher than it was initially.
So one way to get a… “corrupt,” or less functional, or outright harmful organisation is by giving them perverse incentives. Have rules and systems of rewards that will lead to people going for other ways to game the system. One example from the U.S.–why is it so easy to find examples there constantly? Anyway, the example is a lot of money from tickets by police go into the budget of the police department. The idea might have been to have them be dutiful and to give a slight help to the economy of the department, but of course you can pump out tickets left, right, and centre, and suddenly you have a slushy machine at the station.
Corruption for good
Corruption for good!? How can this madness be a thing!? Well, too much corruption is always bad and starts decreasing the efficiency of the system or organisation, so corruption has to be kept in check through various means of prevention. But zero corruption can cause issues, too. Not as much as corruption being rampant, but still issues.
The issue that can arise is that people want some favouritism and special treatment if they are part of something. If they don’t get that, it can create resentment and drop people’s quality and performance as they seek to do the minimum amount of effort they can get by with.
Say you got a fantastic printer, and you want to print something personal. If you have a real rule stickler for a boss, they will say “no, you can’t do that!” and you can get pissed off–all you wanted were just 30 coloured pages to give friends for your sick party next weekend! Some of you might think that is not a form of corruption, but by my definition, it is. You are doing something for personal gain (not having to spend on printing and paper) that harms the organisation. Now, the harm is so miniscule, it does not even register to most people.
That is a situation where you have corruption, and most people are ready to let it slide because it is insignificant, and for the price of some ink and papers, you get happier workers, and happy workers are more productive. So a little corruption acts like lubricant for the machinery of the organisation, but too much will drown everything and destroy it.
Power and corruption
Power and corruption have a dark relationship. But let us start with the big question, what is power? Speaking of, ANNE! Add it to the idea list! Anyway:
Power is the ability to influence people and have actions taken according to your will.
I will go into it in more detail another time, but keep this definition in mind.
Usually when you acquire power, there is some purpose behind it. See where I am going? Bah, I’ll keep on going then! Even old school monarchs and the likes had a purpose to their power: keeping the kingdom safe, which did require bad things to be done occasionally, but that is part of the whole power issue.
Now you have power, either because you are in the organisation, at the top, somewhere between, or are the country’s ruler, or are a key from my previous post on rules for rulers. You have power now, and you can have people do things for you! Oh, this is sweet, you can get coffee brought to you; that is something people like, right? I don’t understand why people like that wretched bitter brown fluid. But back to the topic!
You get all these sweet perks, and heck, if someone annoys you, you can make their life slightly more unpleasant so they learn to stay the fuck away from you. As time moves on, this becomes so normal that you forget that it is a privilege you have, and it starts feeling more like a right. You have gotten away so far, you can push more, and more, and more, and you keep pushing, and the more you push, the more normal what you do feels.
Eventually, you reach a point where people start pushing back. If you are a country’s dictator, it is revolution time from the people! Or a coup from the elite. They react one way or another, unless they are benefiting from it or are goodie two shoes, because you are now corrupt. You have had such luxury of not being challenged that you’ve forgotten what you were meant to do and have come to focus everything on yourself.
You have the power, you have it easy, you have money and the brown bitter liquid, you can get people to do what you want, and no one will take this from you under any circumstances! It is your damn right to have power!
Incorruptibility
Virtually all people can and will succumb to corruption if placed in the right environment. You might think to yourself that you wouldn’t do it, but with the right pressures, you will succumb as well. The benefits afforded are simply too great of an attractor under those circumstances. This is also why easily corrupted people are drawn to positions of power.
But there are some people who are truly incorruptible. They are exceedingly rare, but they do exist. So you can make people in stories and history that are truly incorruptible. A bit of the great man thing. They are figures who moved others because they became something others would look up to. While most people could and would falter in their morals and succumb to the temptation of corruption, these incorruptibles do not and can pull people back to the path they see.
One thing to keep in mind when one worldbuilds, though, is that these people, due to their “perfection” in one area, make them very hard to manage if they are still alive. This is doubly so if they have amassed power. So either they’re confined to history, or whatever ones are still active are often left too busy or in some way made so that they cannot interfere in the conflict you want.
Stories thrive on conflicts (see Anne’s thorough discussion of conflict), and these have one aspect where it is diminished. But of course there are stories to be told about people who are incorruptible, as that is not an entirely conflict-free personality, so if you have good ways to do it–feel free to! I personally have one incorruptible person in my universe, but they are worn down from age and too busy maintaining the star nation they rule over to affect individuals' lives.
Corruption and characters
Indulge in greed, and darkness consumes until nothing is left.
Corruption and purple goes together like Anne and Revolutions. I am not too much of a fan of that image’s colour association, as purple is my definite favourite colour, especially the more blue shaded purple, but c’est la vie. Second place is pink! 😀 Anyway, I will be discussing characters for writing and worldbuilding, so let’s split them up a bit.
Morality characters
This is a group name I just made up that we might actually use in the future if Anne approves (Anne: Approved! Look for it in the future!). With Morality Characters–I am not shortening it to MC, since that’s taken (Main Characters); maybe Morchars? Or not. Well, with this, I mean characters who are defined and characterised by their morality. Heroes, villains, morally grey characters, and so on. The lens we look through when considering them is the morality they exhibit.
For what I hope are obvious reasons, heroes will score very low on corruptibility, but very rarely entirely zero–see previous section. For heroes, corruption is often a way to have them make a huge mistake that often leads to the darkest hour trope. It can come at any point in the story where temptation makes them do something, then later friends or more discover or unveil it.
For villains, corruption is often part of the game. They are villains; not doing as intended is often just a normal part of the role. But if you ask me, that is selling them far too short often. Unless you do one that is intentionally short-sighted, impulsive, or the likes, corruption done in the way many villains portray will draw attention to them far too quickly for them to do their evil schemes.
Morally grey characters can go any direction really. That is what makes them morally grey. An exception are morally grey characters with a specific code of conduct that they adhere to, but even that can be complicated to the point where readers and people do not understand what they will do in a situation.
Narrative characters
The name says it all! Narrative characters are defined by their narrative role: protagonist (protag), antagonist (antag), side character (side). Anne will make a post about it before 2030, she swears.
Protags are the main characters that the story follows; there is more to them, but I am lazy. How could corruption be used here? Well, if hero, see previous. If they are more grey and not pure of heart, they might have engaged in corruption in their ordinary life before the call to action (which Anne describes in her post on dramatic structure). Maybe as the adventure goes on, they use their corruption to gain what is needed toward the climax or are able to move the story forward. If you want a protag to be likeable, however, corruption can still work, but it has to not be too bad where it actively harms others. People get quite pissed then. But a corrupt character, if they have turned or are following along because it is beneficial to them, can offer a lot of abilities and tricks that help the team where they least expect it.
Antags are those that oppose the protags, and again, it depends entirely on their alignment. Villains or morally grey characters will easily and often do corruption. Though I will add as an interesting food for thought, it would be interesting if the protags are the ones who are more corrupt while the antags are the less corrupt, and I mean where protags are more heroes and antags are more villains (but not necessarily all the way). It is for a reason I won’t explicitly state right now, but enjoy this meme and try to think on it.
Side characters can be all over the spectrum. They can be useful in corruption by having contacts or favours to call in, they can be nuisances who need a bribe or else they’ll cause issues, they can be outright obstacles who require much more than the protags can do to be dealt with. I recommend being careful so it doesn’t become an obstacle for the sake of having an obstacle but rather a natural thing. Like the series I spoke about before with the AIs, bribery is rampant because it is incentivised to be so as the AI’s really don’t care if you drug yourself to death or not. They only care about keeping humans down, so infighting serves them well.
Preventing corruption
Okay, so corruption is mostly bad and a problem that many nations to this day have. I’m going to show a picture and brag a bit.
The scale is the usual dark green = best, dark red = worst, and all between. This is a map on corruption in the world and little is unexpected if you are familiar with the world, except a few. Also the super dark green on Denmark is 100% fake, they are potatoes 😛 (Nordic love for each other). Anyway the point is that the Nordics are very low on corruption, and the question is, then, how?
Well, I won’t go into all the details, but I’ll give some reasons for it. You have the usual sense of communal duty and honour in one's job, but those alone cannot maintain a system as no matter how good you are, when you move on, someone else who is bad can take your place. The main reason Nordic countries have so little corruption is that essentially everything is transparent and made into public information. Your tax records? Public information. Economies of departments in government? Public information. Everything that is not related to national security, very private things such as medical histories, and certain criminal histories that are not obscene is public information. Every average citizen has the right to go to any agency and demand all the information, for a small fee of the paper and ink (or whatever is needed) to get it. The agencies and organisations are not allowed to make money on providing this, only cover costs.
Every year, every newspaper, at least in 🇸🇪, has some unlucky sod who has not been there long sift through loads of politician’s tax records to find any discrepancy in their taxes to report on. So organisations, parties, people, companies, etc, have a huge incentive to be honest and not be corrupt because every person can out them.
So transparency is a way to maintain low corruption, as it will then quickly be found out by people and spread like wildfire. Another much less prominent and much more fragile method is instead of having it be from below, corruption is kept in check from above. As discussed in my Rules for Rulers post, this can be troublesome but not impossible depending on how things are structured.
But if you wish to keep corruption low, generally the most efficient way to keep even the most dishonest people honest is to have it so everyone in any position knows that everyone else, no matter who or where, can become a snitch that tells on them. To change an old phrase into something that fits here:
Si vis probitatem, para corruptionem
If you want honesty, prepare for corruption
Google translate was used.
Summa summarum
I’ll give you 5 bucks if I don’t have to write this! ...No, I am not trying to bribe you ._.
Jokes aside, corruption has been around since the time cities got too big for everyone to know everyone else. Anne loves having things be a catastrophe to be fixed, I am more optimistic, but even I don’t have perfect things. Corruption will always exist.
So when you do include corruption, think on where the cracks in the system can be if you want them to go beyond lubricating the system, or, if you just want the lubrication, look at what people would be taking and doing that is generally harmless. It depends on the agency they work at. If you want to minimise corruption, transparency is the way to go. How well it can be done depends on the technology, but even if you go back 200 years or the likes, you can have a low level of corruption with clever usage of papers.
Now I’m going to use this wad of cash I randomly got and buy myself some cider. Have a good one!
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Copyright ©️ 2024 Vivian Sayan. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as various aspects of corruption are copyrighted under Creative Commons with attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. However, specific ideas such as The Fleet from the Empire of Bones Saga and all language or exact phrasing are individually copyrighted by the respective authors. Contact them for information on usage and questions if uncertain what falls under Creative Commons. We’re almost always happy to give permission. Please contact the authors through this website’s contact page.
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