The Insidious Consequences of Political Corruption

As corruption has spread throughout our culture, starting with the leaders and trickling down to the masses over time, we begin to see the outlines of dreadful threat to our Nation. This threat is so profound, and so general, and so pervasive it may be that we've already entered the stage where the cancer must be considered terminal. The patient may soon die. And the great American Experiment come to an ignominious end.

The corruption has spread to every level of society. The reason why is because it has been transmitted at a very low level.  People have accepted corruption as "normal".


Was it always so?  No, it most likely wasn't always so.   But to find an era where corruption was held at bay one must return to a very distant era, where honor was held in high esteem, and people believed it meant something when they said "my word is bond".   Our society no longer values honor.  Everyone lies.  Everyone excuses themselves for their own "little" sins.   And so collectively, we are sinking beneath the waves.

Unfortunately, unlike past eras where corruption could lead the fall of a great Nation, or even an entire civilization, in this time such corruption can, and likely will, lead to consequences our forebears could not begin to conceive.  Our capacity for destruction far exceeds our ancestors.  We are capable in this day and age of literally destroying all life on the surface of our world.   All of it.  Completely.   We actually have that capability.   We can turn this world into the moon.   And it would not take long.

The one thing that stands between us and a dead future is our capacity as a race to think, to reason, and to make decisions rationally.  To do that we need to have a society that can effectively resist corruption, as it is the corruption that corrodes and destroys the capacity of people to act decently towards one another.   When integrity and honesty are paramount virtues in a society, that society can resist the temptations of power, lust, greed, and destruction.   When the society succumbs to corruption it can not.   

Often corruption is introduced, like a poison, to a society with the deliberate intent to destroy it from within.   That may well be what happened in our case.   There is evidence to suggest that this is indeed what happened.

Communist Goals (1963)

In the end, it doesn't matter who started the corruption, or where it came from.   It is a disease.   It must be treated as such, or the patient will die.

We need to take all of this quite seriously.   The capabilities of technological devastation that resides in our hands as a species demands that we evolve to a higher plane of moral existence.  It is not hyperbole to suggest that if we do not find a way to lift honor, decency and justice to their rightful places again, we risk the ultimate Judgement - the death of our world.   

To make that change requires that we begin within ourselves.   We must demand of ourselves sacrifices.  We must resist the personal corruption that leads to the societal corruption.  We must stop excusing ourselves.   And then we must stop excusing others.

In fact, in the end, because of the technologies that make possible the kinds of destruction that we can not fathom, we must become a world of people who do not tolerate corruption.   And so we must make ourselves courageous.   And when we find corruption in our midst we must not shy away from declaring it as such, denouncing it as such, and eradicating it as such.  We must become a world of whistle blowers.  We must become a virtuous people.  Or die in 6 billion horrible ways.

The choice, in fact, is ours to make.  If we all begin to lift ourselves as individuals we can influence the world to turn towards a better and far brighter future.