Dear Friends,
It seems to me, once corruption in government has got to a certain point, we could call it the CP, or Corruption Point, that government is unsalvageable. Why? Because any whistleblower who exposes the corruption will be attacked from all angles. The department they work in will ostracize them, they’ll lose their job with no possibility of reinstatement, and possibly face criminal charges. That’s why Edward Snowden lives in Russia. Once the CP is crossed the cost of virtue becomes too expensive for anyone to pay. This gives us a mechanism to gauge if a government has passed the CP. If whistleblowers are destroyed while the corrupt are rewarded, the courts openly and notoriously abandon law for politics, and the citizenry has grown a nihilistic attitude towards fixing it.
How could it be that once a tipping point is crossed that a government would be doomed? One could point at history, a path can be drawn from Pericles in Athens through the Soviet Union, right to the US and EU. Pericles used Solon’s ostracism to get rid of those who favored democracy, by claiming they were threats to democracy. The corruption in the Soviet Union and indeed all centrally planned nations is storied. This brings us to the Gulag Archipelago, which is nothing but a damnation of corruption. Those and hundreds of nations and civilizations in between have collapsed in corruption. Why, because corruption turns a nation from being productive to being extractive. It becomes a mortal Ouroboros. It eats itself until there is nothing left to eat… then it dies.
Math people love to quantify things, that’s what gives math is amazing power. CP is a humorous way to illustrate the point that there is a line that once crossed leads inevitably to ruin. Only time stands between that line and obliteration. One could say that it was Marius and Sulla where that line was crossed in ancient Rome, others say it was when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, yet some like me… think it was when the Republic abandoned its societal myth. No matter who is right, we all agree there was a line, that before it there was a chance to turn the ship but after that chance had passed. All that was left was to ride the horse into the ground while staying on top as long as possible. At some point the suffering of the horse becomes a thrill… and then the aim.
Once the CP is reached the most important thing becomes to protect the corruption, not govern. Because too many people are involved. No matter if they are enemies in politics they are allies in corruption. This is one reason the uniparty exists. To protect the grift machine that the West has become. In this paradigm an elite has no problem being on video molesting a kid, because it’s a ticket into the club. You know…. the Big Club, that you and I aren’t members of? Corruption has become the golden ticket because the corrupt can only trust the blackmailably corrupt. Say a word and they expose the blabbermouth’s closet skeleton. This keeps the corruption train rolling down the backs of the citizenry. Of course, in a transparent and limited government that wouldn’t be possible.
The innovation of the Twentieth Century was the administrative state. Without it the trillions in grift couldn’t flow. Just as the Holocaust was made possible by bureaucrats, so has it allowed the fleecing of the West. When government is elected churn doesn’t allow corruption to get out of hand. This is because there is no permanent government for the corruption to grow in. If the soil is plowed regularly, weeds can’t grow, but if it’s left fallow for years, nothing but weeds will grow. Too many years fallow and the field transitions from tillable acreage, to pastureland, to scrub-land, and then forest. Once it’s forest it takes a huge effort or wild fire to turn it back to tillable acreage. The same is true of government, once it becomes overgrown it’s basically unsalvageable, without burning it to the ground.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
