Corruption as a covert protest

The best way to weaken any State is to corrupt its governmental system. Such a misconception is popular among many truth seekers and fighters for social justice. They suppose corruption as something unnatural eroding “natural” communities. They assume a corruption-free government can serve a society much better than a heavily corrupt one. Most probably, they merely confuse the relationships between different layers of the governing systems. Their vision is obscured by some mental cliches that hinder the existing interconnections between entities on a global scale. Besides, romantic beliefs about the System deprive many people of understanding that corruption is a specific sort of a hidden social protest.
When you are trapped in the iron framework of the System, two different types of your protest can emerge — a revolution and corruption. A revolution is an overt type of protest against the System aimed at breaking the latter to build something new instead. Any revolution implies direct violence against governmental bodies. Nobody knows what consequences a revolution can lead to. Revolution is the most radical approach to a currently existing order of the state. History suggests that it is impossible to make a slight correction of the System via a revolution which is always destructive. Revolutionists burn all bridges.
Despite all negative connotations towards corruption, its very essence was never comprehended completely. A desire for change in the system which implies no changes is where corruption reveals its roots. Not retrograde but progressive aspirations can rest at the basis of many corrupt deals, how odd it may sound. Greed and profit alone can unlikely motivate those individuals who deliberately step on the dangerous path of corruption.
Profit above all else is inherent rather in sharks from a corporate sector than in the state bureaucrats whose wealth is too ephemeral in the light of the risk to be caught red-handed at any moment. There are hundreds of other less stressful ways to satisfy your personal greed and vanity than the continuous balancing on the edge of arrest on corruption charges.
Imagine a progressively thinking individual who is rational enough to understand that the current system cannot be radically changed in a legal manner. The system serves only a relatively small group of people from an upper class. No effective upward mobility is available for common people in the system. The local legislation is designed to sustain the system untouched as long as possible. The entire situation looks like a conspiracy of elites against the rest population.
The society has to accept the system once no revolution situations seem to happen in the foreseeable future. It is quite a typical social inertia when no active protestants are available in a modern state in sufficient numbers. But the people suffer from injustice inherent in the system. What would an active and generally law-abiding person do if s/he needs to act beyond the legal scope of the system?
The only possible way is to get integrated into the system to corrupt it from within. It is necessary to act as a secret agent behind enemy lines. It takes so much courage to steal millions from a state budget. Both composure and creativity are needed to arrange corrupt deals in the modern environment of repeated data leakages. Fools and cowards cannot be big-picture corrupters capable of resisting the entire nation state’s machinery.
Moreover, they resist the transnational powers whose objectives contradict national interests in most cases. The average people who are taught to curse corruption do not oftentimes realize how grateful they should be to some corrupt dealers. They do not understand the very evil which could be brought by foreign investments to their national economies unless that dirty money was stolen by their local corrupters.
Dozens of nuclear power plants, hundreds of chemical factories, thousands of grounds for nuclear waste from abroad have not been built both in Russia and Ukraine over the last two decades just due to corruption. Hundreds of millions of dollars invested in those horrible projects by international funds were stolen by the local corrupt bureaucrats of all levels. They converted the stolen investments into cash to deposit it on their private offshore accounts. The more money was pumped into the local economies by the Western World, the more cash was sent back to the West by patriotic corrupters from Russia and Ukraine.
They were struggling against the covert international invasion to defend thousands and thousands of their compatriots from the foreign poison. They were risking both their personal freedom and the wealth of their families. Some of them were caught by foreign secret services. The others were killed by criminals. But corruption as a system of countering the current global order survived. Moreover, it keeps evolving in accordance with the changing situation in both national and international legal systems.
Huge tectonic plates of hidden meaning are available in such undervalued phenomena as corruption. It is simply vulgar to take corrupters as mere villains. When they transform a purely virtual value of investment transactions into solid cash, villas in Switzerland, luxury yachts, and bars of gold, they commit a magical recovery of our physical world where we all are losing guts in feeling what is truly worth.
Nothing but philosophical impotence keeps many of us far from recognizing a contemporary Robin Hood in brave actors of a value-saving corruption. No, they do not distribute stolen money between the poor. But they show the poor an alternative way how to get rich in defiance of the seemingly inviolable system of the current social status quo.
And the largest benefit brought by corruption to a general socio-political discourse comes to a clear cut between the State and society — they are not the same. Corruption is impossible without the State in the form we know it today. Namely, the State triggers corruption at all possible levels. Only idiots cannot see a direct correlation between the solidity of a state and a scale of corruption available in it — the stronger, the larger.
Corruption draws its shadowy strengths from the System‘s attributes — hierarchy, constitution, legislation, social stratification, etc. That’s why a solution for anti-corruption fighters is as simple and as obvious: destroy the System and corruption will disappear on its own. Otherwise combating corruption will always remain an illusion as it happens today.
