A Tale of Two Countries
Corruption is what other people do until it's not.
Corruption in Black and White
Right after I graduated college, I moved with two friends to an apartment in Quito, Ecuador. We lived there for about 7 months. At the time, Ecuador was one of the most stable countries in South America and we traveled around both Ecuador and Peru with limited concerns about safety or much else.
Despite its stability at the time, one couldn’t miss the growing pains of Ecuador’s democracy. Apart from areas of deep poverty, corruption was also part of everyday life. It was common knowledge among the ex-pat community that a drunken brawl outside a nightclub could be overlooked if you slipped the responding police officer a $10. If that failed, you could pay off the police chief or even the judge, each rung of the ladder increasing the cost exponentially.
I used to use this example in my American Politics classes, asking the students what they think would happen if, after getting pulled over by a police officer on an American highway, they wrapped a $20 around their license as they handed it out the window.
My students were clear: 90% of the time, in the U.S., you’d be arrested for bribing a public official and end up with consequences far worse than a speeding ticket.
We all knew, of course, that there are exceptions. But in the United States the exceptions proved the rule. When police are caught taking bribes the sense of the community is one of outrage. When the sense of the community is a collective shrug, as was the case in Ecuador, we know we’ve fallen over a cliff of sorts.
Despite its helpfulness for undergraduates, I probably wouldn’t use this example anymore. At least not without a lot more nuance. And not only because of recent political developments in the U.S.
My concern now is that the example encourages us to think in black-and-white terms about corruption, both individual and political. The more I think about the future of liberal democracy, the more I think that’s a deeply dangerous thing to do.
Human Behavior and Complexity
Americans (and probably other people) make two primary mistakes about morality, both linked to inaccurate black-and-white thinking about human beings.
In general, we tend to put both people and political communities into binary boxes.
People are either good or bad, corrupt or law-abiding.
Nations are either corrupt or respect rule of law.
As you might guess if you’ve read this Substack for more than a week, I’m going to argue that both of these are false binaries.
Human beings, their behaviors, and the societies they build are endlessly complex. Too often, we reach for simple metaphors—two sides of a coin, good and evil. But human nature doesn’t exist between two extremes. Human nature contains both beauty and cruelty, generosity and selfishness, and a whole host of things that are in between or all of these things at the same time.
Social psychologists, political theorists and scientists, and many others have known for a long time that moral corruption isn’t an either/or state. It exists on a spectrum and it’s highly dependent on context, incentives, and the overall shape of our four dimensional moral, political, and social landscapes.
One of the most important insights from social science is the idea of emergent order: the way institutions, norms, and patterns arise from human interaction, often without deliberate design. But these emergent structures are not always good. They are shaped, for better or worse, by the choices individuals and communities make—especially how they respond to incentives, and how they relate to one another.
Corruption itself is an emergent order, a kind of cooperation (oddly enough) shaped by a complex combination of the incentives in a given social environment and the decisions that networks of unconnected individuals make each day. This includes, of course, the things people are willing to overlook when it’s their side in power.
Every developed nation has its share of corruption, whether formalized pay-to-play corruption or the local official who gets freebies from local businesses to turn a blind eye to some kind of malfeasance.
What sets countries apart is not the existence of corruption itself, which is unavoidable in any complex society, but the moral sentiment of the people themselves and whether people are held accountable when caught. But that moral sentiment itself has to be trained to think about corruption in the right way to be effective.
Two Mistakes About Moral Corruption
People often respond to stories about personal or political corruption in one of two ways.
The first is a kind of shocked naïveté: “this kind of thing doesn’t happen in my community/country!”
The second is an exhausted resignation along the lines of “we’d be idiots to expect anything better.”
Right now elites are reacting in the first way and many in the exhausted middle react in the second (and of course another group doesn’t see anything concerning at all), but both are distortions of how humans actually work.
For too long, those of us who love liberal democracy have fallen for the early-Fukuyama claim that once we have a complex liberal democracy like the U.S. we’re in good shape and things will sort of roll onward. “There’s no going back,” we blithely exclaimed, “because we’ve reached a point where our politics is impervious to the human desires that came before.”
This kind of utopian determinism characterized much of our thinking about how robust institutions would be or could be.
We now know that’s a dangerous and flawed assumption. Fukuyama has admitted that his famous 1989 essay was both premature and overstated the stability of liberal democracy.
On the flip side, there are those - including many of my students - who are deep and determined cynics. Government is always about power, they shrug. Why would we expect any better?
This other brand of cynical determinism is deeply rooted, going all the way back to Machiavelli and Hobbes (or Thracymacus if you want to be pedantic). I spend a lot of time in my classes attempting to undermine my students’ simplistic real politick interpretations of government and governance. Not because politics isn’t about power a lot of the time, but because our expectations of our governments and institutions play a crucial role in the outcomes we get.
It’s not a case of wishful thinking or of manifesting the kind of government we want. Instead, our expectations have to be followed by holding people accountable for the kind of government we want to see and the kind of government we think we deserve.
Cautionary Tales for Individuals
But it’s much more complicated than just holding people accountable for corrupt behavior.
And this is where both the utopian determinists and the cynical determinists get it fundamentally wrong when it’s oh-so-important that we get it right.
While living in Quito, my roommates and I made a number of visits to the women’s prison in the city. We brought the inmates cigarettes and tampons and in return they hung out with us in prison hallways and courtyards. We talked, mostly to the foreign women incarcerated there because our Spanish wasn’t that great, about their lives and how they got there. We developed something akin to friendship with a group of women who were all in prison for drug trafficking, each serving 10 year terms.
The group was unexpectedly diverse. There was a young Polish girl (a deeply tragic figure for reasons I’ll discuss below), a self-centered American, a pragmatic South African mother, and a few others whose names and faces have been obscured by two decades and the lack of cell phone cameras at the time.
Most of the women, with the exception of the South African, were lured into trafficking by men they were in relationships with.
Everyone though shared in common that they were offered the opportunity to bribe their way to freedom for around $10,000. Most could not afford it, though the American’s father, who also happened to be a judge in the states, had simply refused to pay.
After our visits, my friends and I speculated on our own families: Would our parents have paid the bribe? Would we have expected them to?
My friends were adamant. Their mothers would fly down at a moment’s notice with a suitcase full of cash to bribe whoever needed to be bribed to get them out of jail.
My own calculation was a bit more complex. My parents, I concluded, would probably fly down with cash to free me—but they then would have refused to talk to me ever again.
When we all asked our parents’ what they would have done when we got back to the states, they all agreed with our assessments.
My dad agreed (uncomfortably) that he would have violated his deeply held moral principles about governance and rule of law, but he would have struggled to forgive the daughter whose idiocy had required that kind of sacrifice.
My friends’ parents varied a bit in their responses, but all agreed they would do it if they had to.
Our parents’ reactions point out the truth of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”; we’re all capable of deeply morally ambiguous acts each and every day.
But they also point to something maybe even more important: corruption often emerges not from our basest instincts, but from our highest loyalties—the desire to protect those we love. Sometimes corruption comes cloaked in our most meaningful relationships, in the things we live and would die - and would bribe - for.
Even today, I don’t know what I would do if faced with the choice of bribing a public official in a foreign country to save my idiot kid from a decade in prison. I can only hope that my kids never put me in the situation to have to make such a choice.
Ultimately, human behavior is deeply contextual. People often make decisions under enormous pressure, in situations where the right path is unclear. None of this excuses corruption - just because we understand the cause doesn’t mean we have to accept it - but it should complicate our understanding of how and why it takes root.
This is just as true on the individual level.
The case of the Polish girl - I’ll call her Celina, but that’s not her real name - was especially tragic. She traveled to Ecuador as a 20 year old college student studying abroad. She was very young and extremely naive. She was still naive and innocent a few years into her sentence. The other women in the prison were deeply protective of her and it wasn’t hard to see why. Quiet and shy, from a nice lower-middle class family, with a Madonna-like face, she’s the last person one would have expected of drug trafficking. She didn’t even use drugs. Had never tried pot. Rarely drank.
In the black-and-white world of morality, if someone asks you to swallow a balloon filled with heroin, the answer should be a categorical “no.” But the way she described it, I could see how it had happened. She had fallen - hard - for an older man. He was sophisticated and showered her with affection, gifts, and experiences. The kids these days call it “love bombing” and it’s apparently a red flag. But in the 80s of mine and Celina’s youths, love-bombing was the dream: it was John Cusack outside our window with a boom box.
Celina described how after months of being love-bombed, she was asked to do a favor for someone who claimed to love her and whom she thought she loved deeply. It was an act that would secure their future together, he said. He had all the right morally-adjacent justifications and precisely because she was so innocent and so above suspicion, the risk was very small (he said).
And so she did something that should have been unthinkable. She swallowed a balloon full of heroin, which promptly leaked into her stomach while she was still in the airport, almost killing her. When she woke up in the hospital, she was handcuffed, eventually convicted of drug trafficking, and given a 10 year sentence in the Quito women’s prison where I met her.
I can’t say for certain, but I feel pretty sure that Celina would never have tried drugs let alone trafficked heroin had she stayed in Poland. She would have finished college, gone on to graduate school, married a nice boy and had some children. She was smart and kind and pretty and almost absurdly normal. Instead of meeting her at some academic conference in Poland, I talked with her while sitting on the dirty steps of a women’s prison watching the Ecuadorian kids born inside the prison play soccer in a cramped concrete courtyard. Incidentally, many of those kids’ mothers had been impregnated by men who came into the prison to pay for sex, under the watchful eyes and outstretched hands of the prison guards.
That women’s prison was the most morally complex world I had ever witnessed. My own 21-year-old brain didn’t quite know how to process it all, but I do know that I felt deep compassion and very little judgment for everyone inside. These weren’t moral monsters. They were complex human beings who had done impossibly stupid things and were paying a deeply painful price.
Cautionary Tales for Societies
My time in Ecuador taught me something else: once corruption becomes normalized, it is very difficult to uproot. When societies come to accept it as inevitable, decline follows. Ecuador today is far more fractured and dangerous than it was twenty years ago, the product of both external forces and the long-term erosion of public trust in institutions.
The United States, as many of us fear, is not immune. Normalizing corruption—treating it as just the way politics works—risks aligning us with the worst tendencies in human nature.
The problem, of course, is that corruption often steals up to us looking like something entirely different.
My friends’ parents - good, upstanding moral citizens who would not have batted an eye before flying down with a suitcase of cash to bribe a judge - are the kind of good liberals who decry the various examples of Trump’s corruption we’ve seen in these first 100 days. And they’re right to do that.
At the same time, every single one of them - including my own deeply law-abiding parents - admitted that they would have bribed a public official to save their child from the consequences of their own idiocy.
The best of human nature can wreak havoc on institutions.
Maybe it felt different because we’d be corrupting someone else’s country and not our own. Maybe it felt different because corruption was already expected in Ecuador, while it wasn’t the norm in the United States.
Whatever our internal justifications, it still would have been corruption no matter how you paint it.
And my point is not the facile one that humans are hypocrites. I wouldn’t necessarily call any of these people hypocrites.
The point is that humans are humans.
Our decisions are made in relational context to other humans. They’re made against hard constraints and impossible choices and perverse incentives and terribly unfair systems and against the backdrop of love and fear and anger and heartbreak.
President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter likely emerged from love and a life marred by deep tragedy and unimaginable losses. President Trump’s more crass enrichment of his children probably emerges from a different context, but a context nonetheless.
I’m not drawing a moral parallel between the two, but merely pointing out how easy it is to gloss over different kinds of corruption. Biden, like my friends’ parents, wanted to protect his son from the consequences of his own actions.
He acted out of love.
The best of human nature can wreak havoc on institutions.
Unstable Moral Equilibria
What does all this mean?
Mostly that that there is no “end of history” where we can assume our institutions will protect themselves. Human nature will always respond to incentives, to context, and to relationships. The best of human nature can become the worst of human nature, as Greek and Shakespearean tragedies remind us.
Because of this permanent human nature, democracy requires vigilance. It requires a citizenry willing to expect more, willing to say, this is not who we are.
It requires that we do this even when corruption emerges from the best of who we are as human beings.
And it requires that we do this (more than ever) when it’s our in-group - our family, our political party, our friend - who is stretching the rules.
The road to protecting our institutions starts with the recognition that each one of us is one small step away from a deeply immoral act.
I don’t know what that act is in your case. I can only guess what it could be in mine.
But whatever that act might be, it’s more important than ever to avoid the extremes of thinking either that corruption is what happens to other people or that corruption is inevitable so why bother.
Corruption is common because humans are fallible.
It can be limited because humans have reason and we’ve spent thousands of years learning what kinds of institutions restrain corruption and prevent it from metastasizing.
Once we recognize the moral vulnerability we all face every day, we’re much better positioned to recognize the power and fragility of liberal institutions and why they’re so worth protecting.
In the end, it comes down to a complex and fragile kind of agency. When a society expects better from its leaders, it gets better governance. When a society expects corruption, it gets more corruption.
But we don’t get better governance because one side has triumphed, finally and forever, over the other. And we don't get better governance because of some kind of wishful thinking, Secret-style, manifesting good governance into the universe.
We get better governance because we have replaced determinism with vigilance, replaced personal feelings with institutions, and because we have decided that a reasonably neutral rule of law is worth a range of sacrifices - including the sacrifices of our own best intentions - along the way.
I’m not sure this kind of nuance is something we can expect from imperfect people making imperfect decisions in oftentimes seemingly impossible situations, which is why liberal democracy will always be at best an unstable kind of equilibrium.
But it’s an equilibrium we have a better shot at maintaining when we give up black and white myths that corruption is what happens to other people or that corruption is simply how politics works.
I will always believe we have moral choice. That choice becomes more meaningful and more powerful when we grapple with our own imperfections and how they interact with all four dimensions of our shared landscapes. That means recognizing the contextual and relational nature of human decision-making, demanding more of both ourselves and of others, all the while maintaining compassion for people who go astray.
Because whatever we think of our own moral rectitude, some day the person going astray might be us.
Your Turn!
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