I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet. Mahatma Gandhi
Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind. Ayn Rand
It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Frank Herbert
Procrastination is also a subtle act of corruption – it corrupts valuable time. Amit Abraham
The aim of the old should be to ensure that the young grow up incorruptible. Justin K. McFarlane Beau
All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power. Clive James
He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider. Ernest Hemingway
I spent an hour last evening on a call organized by LINGAP Canada and featuring an indigenous activist from the Philippines seeking to protect the lands of local people from the onslaughts of both an international mining interest and governments at local and federal levels who enabled this corporate incursion. As is far too common, they offered police protection against the activists pushing back against operations which, in too many instances, have cover in the form of government contracts which are not transparent, which do not incorporate local needs and interests, and which confer large swaths of immunity as mining interests appropriate local water supplies, denude forests and destroy the social cohesion of communities and the biodiversity which once enveloped them.
In the rush to secure the precious metals and other resources that fuel lifestyles in the developed world, corporations are willing to drive hard bargains with government officials as they seek contracts that ensure maximum flexibility and only limited responsibility for the damage done to land and water. For the governments, mining interests promote both “economic development” and, in the absence of genuine transparency, a reliable source of self-enrichment. For the activists seeking to hold mining interests to a standard beyond their technically “legal” obligation, they often face both personal danger and the sad realization that the lands they love have likely been disfigured beyond the ability of any human or natural force to restore. When the mining interests have extracted all there is to extract, the land they leave behind might be little more than a biological shell of its former self, a land now ill-suited to sustain the life it had previously supported for millennia.
This story frames what was a busy week of intersected UN conversations focused on the multiple, negative impacts of corruption together with our still-uphill struggle to reverse climate change, avert a new round of biodiversity loss, preserve what remains of the health of our oceans, and heal our often-battered local ecosystems.
The key here is “together.” What was apparent during a fine UN Special Session (including side events) focused on “measures to prevent and combat corruption” is that corruption is both pervasive and “magnetic,” attracting unscrupulous and self-interested individuals like bees to honey, providing both opportunities and rationalizations for those among us more interested in exploiting fragility than helping it to heal. What the president of the Economic and Social Council, Ambassador Akram of Pakistan, referred to this week as the “criminal misuse of resources” is an indictment that implicates many of us in our current world, a world in which integrity and transparency are constantly butting heads with that part of our nature which, as Sri Lanka’s Ambassador maintained, remains “purchasable.”
As several speakers noted this week, including during an excellent side event organized by the president of the General Assembly, our current contexts make combating corruption a particularly formidable challenge. The global pandemic coupled with the gross inequalities tied to our obsession with “wealth and power” are magnifying opportunities to divert resources from intended to unintended purposes, to maneuver contracts towards personal friends and business partners rather than to those providing the best and most cost-effective services, to deliberately direct vaccines and funds for pandemic response towards political supporters and away from political adversaries, to sign contracts that are full of loopholes enabling abuses and even kickbacks that ultimately rob citizens of development funds, undermine rights and even dampen enthusiasm for change.
But as the week’s events made clear, it is not only about the expanding opportunities for corrupt practices but the range of such practices – and their toxic consequences — that warrants prompt international attention. Our former notions of corruption – of money in a brown envelope sliding under a table and designed to influence decisions — is still relevant but overly narrow. We understand more now about the “trade-offs” that we are much too comfortable making, trade-offs that impede our path towards what the Holy See referred to this week as a “culture of integrity.” We are too quick to rationalize behavior that we should readily challenge instead, thereby “consorting” with the structures of power that we know are often not operating in the public interest. We know that, as Chile’s Ambassador stated, funds and lives are lost when we allow corrupt practices to flourish, when we accede to cultures of corruption that are within our grasp to shift. We continue to allow people to “walk through our minds with their dirty feet,” making compromise with what Mexico declared to be a social “evil” more and more palatable, at least for some, just part of the cost of doing business as an “insider” in a sometimes unsavory world.
And as one speaker after another this week noted, the consequences of corruption are dire, not only for the activists on the ground who must dodge unsubstantiated accusations and at times even bullets, but for the average citizen who still needs to believe that the large governmental and corporate powers that seem to run our lives have at least some of our best interests at heart; indeed that they are able and willing to play by the same rules that they expect the rest of us to play by. The word that popped up over and over in this UN context is “trust,” a term which is hard to quantify and which diplomats are often fond of claiming for their governments without sufficient evidence; but a word which also continues to resonate deeply for many of us.
Naively or otherwise, some of us still need to believe that, within the limits of human capacity and habit, that our public structures are trustworthy or can be made so; that mistakes are due to factors other than wanton malevolence; that the people who run the world operate on energies more diverse than riches and power; that leaders are willing and able to set a better example for those who might otherwise be inclined to join the parade of those convinced that the only way to “get ahead” is at the expense of others. And yet as the director of the UN’s Office of Drugs and Crime noted with considerable alarm, too many of us have become “cynical” regarding both our responsibility and capacity to end corruption, to address an enemy “that shows little signs of retreating.” Despite the contention of Latvia’s minister that his public at least seems be losing its “tolerance for corruption,” it still seems as though state and corporate entities are largely talking a better game than they play, thus setting a tone allowing too many of the rest of us to do likewise.
One of the things we might conveniently ignore in this context is the degree to which trust once betrayed is difficult to regain, in some instances more difficult than restoring a once-denuded Philippines mountainside. And this trust-busting incarnates a multitude of implications beyond government procurement and election results. For instance, how do we as citizens and local communities get on board with healthy oceans, with greenhouse gas reductions, with rehabilitating eco-systems supporting healthier biodiversity if we can’t trust large state and corporate entities to do their part, to honor their promises, to use the resources at hand for public good rather than private interest? How do we inspire sacrifices in communities when those who command the most money and power are reluctant to sacrifice anything of themselves, or even agree to play fair?
And what of the youth who, as one young contributor this week noted, must anxiously watch as their own futures are jeopardized by the corruption which drains public coffers of the funds that could be used – should be used – to clean up our environmental messes and put our economies on a more solid, greener footing. Traditional means of fighting corruption, she maintained, are not sufficient to address levels of self-interested illegality which take up too much space in our current political and economic environment, indeed which are putting more and more young people in the unenviable position of needing to “sell their own integrity” to keep any glimmer of personal progress on track.
This week, Kenya’s president urged the UN community to “raise the bar” on integrity, recommending that states support more education for youth on “ethical values” in this effort. But we must be sure, as the PGA noted, not to “kick this can down the road.” Young people have much to contribute, especially at local level, to building trust and capacity for a more sustainable world. But the rest of us need to set a better example, a more honest and transparent example, an example which communicates our resolve to identify and end all manifestations of corruption from our own lives, even to end the procrastination that rationalizes our putting off until tomorrow what we promised to address today.
The open and lifeless pits our mining interests leave behind are only one of the residual craters complements of our many self-interested and self-deceptive personalities. We have only a matter of years to demonstrate that we can rise to a higher standard, that we can return what has been stolen and then commit not to steal again, that we can repair some of what we’ve damaged and then commit not to damage further. In this way, we might be able to convince other, younger persons that a fairer and more sustainable world is still within our grasp, and that the buying and selling of this world need not include the buying and selling of our souls.
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