You've never lived in a place with endemic corruption. I grew up in India where corruption was a way of life.
Every interaction with a government official of any sort came with the expectation of some sort of bribe being paid. We're not just talking about paying inspectors off to ignore violations, we're talking routine matters. For example, a passport application requires a police verification where the local police visit you to verify your home address and other details. You can get that without paying a bribe but it might take months. Or you can pay a few hundred rupees to "expedite" it. Get pulled over by the cops or caught on the train without a ticket? You can pay the official fine or pay a fraction of that as a bribe. There's a whole coded language around this. They ask if you "want a receipt". Want to get admitted to a good college? You need to make a "donation".
The corruption goes up the chain. Civil servants want to be posted in positions with more bribes to be had. Of course the people making those decisions expect a substantial payoff for the most lucrative postings. Officials who've paid that don't want to disrupt the system they've paid into. You can't prosecute someone because you probably won't find an honest official. Every so often someone does manage to gain some notoriety trying to clean things up only to get torn down by people with a vested interest in things staying the way they are.
To me, that's the scariest part of the brazen corruption at the supreme court, and members of congress who won't do a thing about it because they happen to play for the right team. I don't think we're far from the tipping point where the system can no longer root out corrupt officials the way the city did after this report exposed it.
I'm curious when things get that pervasive how a system wound up in that state. Did it start out that way, did it slowly creep, did it cross over from other societal interactions that predated it.
yah that's an interesting angle, the default is corruption. This mirrors that line of thinking with poverty, which is the default in the state of nature is poverty. Just humans standing about trees and rivers and all the natural resources they start with and choose how to direct and shape from their own free will. The analogy there is the default is corruption in the state of society and people tame their selfish desires and other impulses to erect order and justice and other higher level objectives that unlock even higher level objectives. That's an interesting angle to take I'm going to have to think about that a bit.
For example Egypt is like GP's explanation, that's why when the Arab Spring happened, cops were beating up protestors; the cops were part of the corrupt system and were eager to defend it/themselves.
Every interaction with a government official of any sort came with the expectation of some sort of bribe being paid. We're not just talking about paying inspectors off to ignore violations, we're talking routine matters. For example, a passport application requires a police verification where the local police visit you to verify your home address and other details. You can get that without paying a bribe but it might take months. Or you can pay a few hundred rupees to "expedite" it. Get pulled over by the cops or caught on the train without a ticket? You can pay the official fine or pay a fraction of that as a bribe. There's a whole coded language around this. They ask if you "want a receipt". Want to get admitted to a good college? You need to make a "donation".
The corruption goes up the chain. Civil servants want to be posted in positions with more bribes to be had. Of course the people making those decisions expect a substantial payoff for the most lucrative postings. Officials who've paid that don't want to disrupt the system they've paid into. You can't prosecute someone because you probably won't find an honest official. Every so often someone does manage to gain some notoriety trying to clean things up only to get torn down by people with a vested interest in things staying the way they are.
To me, that's the scariest part of the brazen corruption at the supreme court, and members of congress who won't do a thing about it because they happen to play for the right team. I don't think we're far from the tipping point where the system can no longer root out corrupt officials the way the city did after this report exposed it.