Moral Collapse / Corruption Rewards the Worst and Penalizes the Best

This is Essay #4 in the series Truth Be Told.

Moral Collapse / Corruption are not abstractions. Rewarding the worst (those with zero scruples / moral foundation) and penalizing the best (those with high ethical standards) generates self-reinforcing feedback that dooms the system to disintegration: the worst prosper so mightily that they gain control of the system while the best are exploited / marginalized, reduced to Tax Donkeys or indentured laborers serving the worst.

A society and culture that has lost its moral compass loses more than its principles and soul--it loses everything that underpins a functional society and economy, including social cohesion, shared purpose, civility, trust in leaders, institutions, the judicial system and in the fairness (a.k.a. a level playing field) of the entire system, and critically, the belief that honesty and hard work will be rewarded rather than exploited / looted.

Moral Collapse / Corruption consumes all these foundations as the systemic cost of incentivizing self-enrichment to the exclusion of all else. Every component of society's moral foundation is hollowed out by the artifices of The Big Con, which claims to embody all the revered principles it grinds to dust in its relentless drive to accumulate private wealth and power by any means available.

Every source of authentic value is debased for personal gain as empty cliches--increasing shareholder value--are deployed to mask the monopolizing of power to reward the most corrupt at the expense of those powerless to limit the looting of the worst, who encounter no limits on their corruption in a culture and economy in which everyone has their price.

This Moral Collapse / Corruption is self-reinforcing, as those with any shred of ethics either quit / opt out or are fired / sent to digital Siberia, leaving only those in charge who see everything as an opportunity for self-enrichment, regardless of the consequences to others or the system as a whole.

In their pathological narcissism, they see the system as a bottomless feeding trough for their personal aggrandizement, oblivious to the causal results of everyone with a place at the trough gorging themselves: the system collapses.

This corruptive frenzy for unearned money has infected the entire spectrum of American society, rich and poor and everyone in between. From fake disability claims to fake invoices, every form of fraud flourishes in America. This raises four important points:

1. At the lower levels of the social-economic order, there are still some limits on fraud and corruption. Despite the immense resources devoted to evading oversight and audits, fraudsters and embezzlers are occasionally caught and convicted.

2. There are no limits on the super-wealthy, as they don't need to commit fraud to increase their wealth; they just rewrite the rules to suit themselves with their wealth. $100 million is nothing to billionaires, but it buys the entire political-judicial power of the state.

3. This scale of wealth bypasses the need for the consent of the governed, which is why I call America's current status quo Privatized Totalitarianism: the super-wealthy dictate what's legal to suit their desire for "more"--more wealth, more power.

As correspondent Simons Chase so insightfully put it, "what's moral is what's legal, and what's legal is for sale." These eleven words summarize America's terminal corruption.

4. In this terminal stage of moral collapse and Privatized Totalitarianism, passing more laws will not reverse the unraveling of the moral foundations needed to sustain a functional society and economy. Chapter 57 of the Tao Te Ching describes the core dynamics in play:

The more restrictions and limitations there are,
The more impoverished men will be.
The more arms men possess,
The more disordered the country will be.
The more scheming and deceitful men are,
The more strange things will occur.
The more rules and precepts are enforced,
The more bandits and crooks will be produced.

(Translation by my philosophy professor Chang Chung-yuan)

And Chapter 38: (my free-form version)

When the Tao is lost, we have attainment (optimization).
When attainment is lost, we have benevolence (superficial-phony virtue-signaling).
When benevolence is lost, we have righteousness (political correctness / ideological rigidity).
When righteousness is lost, we have rules (propriety for show).
Rules are the dry husk of loyalty and trust, the beginning of chaos.

In this free-for-all frenzy of fraud and self-enrichment, the best opt out and disappear into the woodwork, stripping the system of any talent other than self-enrichment and Big-Con / Ultra-Processed Life artifice. Self-enrichment and artifice are self-liquidating, for once they consume whatever can be looted, there's no foundation left to support a functional society and economy.

This moral collapse includes an intellectual collapse, as "liberty," "democracy," "innovation," etc., are reduced to parodies of their original substance by the artifices of The Big Con PR. Every statistic is gamed, every market manipulated, every principle debauched, and every bit of adaptative vigor is throttled to maintain a grip on power.

This excerpt from The Fall of the Roman Empire by Michael Grant crystalizes the present moment in American history with remarkable aptness:

"There was no room at all, in these ways of thinking, for the novel, apocalyptic situation which had now arisen, a situation which needed solutions as radical as itself. His whole attitude is a complacent acceptance of things as they are, without a single new idea.

This acceptance was accompanied by greatly excessive optimism about the present and future. Even when the end was only sixty years away, and the Empire was already crumbling fast, Rutilius continued to address the spirit of Rome with the same supreme assurance.

This blind adherence to the ideas of the past ranks high among the principal causes of the downfall of Rome. If you were sufficiently lulled by these traditional fictions, there was no call to take any practical first-aid measures at all."

And so as the worst apply Band-Aids to the metastasizing cancers as "solutions" (AI! Stablecoins! Bases on the Moon!), we stand on the beach as the tsunami of consequences of rewarding the worst and punishing the best races toward us.

In this moment, the future no longer seems real, and in the incoherence of the present, the radical action needed to change the outcome seems impossible. If we cannot run, perhaps we can still walk toward higher ground, leaving footprints in the damp sand few will follow.

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