GenZedong

Been musing on the problems of "temptation" and "corruption" philosophy again. Was thinking how "absolute power corrupts absolutely" (and other sayings like it) are the kind of nonsense adage that causes regular conscientious people to fear trying to have a share of the power, while the least conscientious are not moved by at all because they don't give a fuck about being "corrupt".

It also obfuscates cause and effect by hiding the problems with a given power structure behind human temptation and subsequent "fall from grace"; if a particular system consistently produces people in power who do awful shit and face no consequences, one would think that suggests there's something wrong with the system, but to the empty-headed corruption worldview, they can just brush that aside and say the problem is that it was working just fine but it got corrupted by bad people. And this is in fact one way people defend capitalism when they are upset with how it operates but don't want to go as far as anti-capitalism.

I would go as far as linking it to the story of Adam and Eve that some people internalize as foundational to their worldview. In that story, it's never God's fault for putting Adam and Eve in a position where they could very easily do something that would monstrously offend him and cause him to cast them out. It's always their fault for stepping outside the rails and doing the thing they weren't supposed to. So in a way, if the system is presenting opportunities for people to "sin" and if there are "devils" about tempting them, well perhaps that's just like the Garden of Eden, and God's "testing" them, you know? In this way, a system that is fundamentally abhorrent gets turned upside down and presented as a good thing (and I have heard arguments not far off from this from some Christians in years past, who would excuse the suffering in the world by saying it's because people need to be tested somehow or something along those lines).