When thinking about issues or writing posts like the one I wrote this morning I find myself choosing between corruption and idiocy as root causes.
It is difficult for me to think of people as idiots – I really don’t think that is the case. I think we are fortunate to be living in times where information and knowledge is available like never before in human history. I do think that education can be misguided and that there is idiocy out there but for the most part I think that we live in super-informed time and that human nature leans towards Quality.
So, by deduction I am left with corruption … and it makes sense to me. I have personally been through an unrelenting (still ongoing) process of re-evaluating and re-framing my life values. I look back at the world, systems and values I was born into and brought up in and I view them as corrupted … as deviant. I wasn’t born into questioning, I, like everyone else, was born into existing values which were supposed to work for me. Questioning appeared when I realized that not only were they not working for me but they were working against me.
Corruption exists on a plane separate from information and knowledge … you can be an absolute genius and still be corrupt. Corruption is a malfunction of intrinsic motivation. The potential for corruption is built into human nature. I believe corruption to be misinterpretation and misuse of information and knowledge. Which means that it is only natural that in this hyper-information age we are witnessing an increase of corruption.
So I am sticking with corruption.