Corruption is Inevitable; Revolution is Essential

A Deductive Look at Governance in Representative Democracies

In this essay, I’m going to do a little deductive reasoning about governance in a representative democracy. The way deductive reasoning works is that you build a rational, high-confidence, ideally useful conclusion on the basis of examining and assembling a set of relevant premises.

Here’s one of the most famous syllogisms (compact expressions of deductive logic) in the history of philosophy:

[premise] All men are mortal.
[premise] Socrates is a man.
[conclusion] Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

With that brief orientation to our methodology, let us commence.

Premise numero one: There are sociopaths.

My first premise is that there is a sub-population of humans who, unlike the majority of humans, are highly motivated to assert control and wield power over the lives and behavior of others for the sake of their own benefit and at the expense of those others. Typically, these people are characterized as having little or no empathy, and as being willing and even eager to violate both common ethical norms as well as the rights of others. Lacking any desire to split hairs with psychologists, I call these people sociopaths.

Premise numero two: There are slick sociopaths.

Using the United States of America as a petri dish, note that the population of the USA is approximately three hundred million. Psychologists who pay attention to these matters estimate that somewhere between 1% and 4% of the population are sociopaths. Let’s stipulate on the low end.

One percent of three hundred million is three million sociopaths. Three million is a small minority compared with three hundred million but three million is still a huge number of people. It’s more people than live in Chicago in 2023; the third largest city in the United States.

If you take any random sampling of three million people, some material percentage of them are going to be highly talented chess players. Some will be extraordinary natural athletes. Some will be artists of renown.

If you take three million sociopaths, the vast majority of them are going to be relatively mediocre and untalented at lying and misrepresentation. Sorry, not sorry. But some percentage of them are going to be absolutely great at it; great as in amongst the best in the world. Out of three million sociopaths there are going to be at least hundreds who have historically unusual talent at lying and manipulating others to further their own ends. These dark talents and skills are just like any other human ability; it’s a simple mathematical truth that some people are markedly, even seemingly super-humanly better than almost everyone else at whatever ability you care to examine.

Premise numero three: Political office is highly attractive to sociopaths.

What could be better catnip to our sociopathic cat than an occupation where, lacking any demonstrable skill other than the ability to manipulate people into voting you into office, you get paid a stipend financed by the taxing of society to formulate and oversee the enforcement of the laws that govern how people live, where you are privy to vast troves of non-public information which you are able to profit from illicitly, where wealthy business owners and large corporations have every financial incentive possible to find ways to pay you to enact law that helps their business preferentially at the expense of their competitors and their customers, where — at the very highest levels — you could reasonably hope to influence or even control the comings and goings of literal armies with the ability to force your preferences and desires upon the entire globe.

Conclusion numero one: The majority of politicians in a representative democracy must be slick sociopaths.

Given the premises above, my first ipso facto is that since there are a material number of humans for whom the opportunity to govern is the thing they would most prefer to do with their lives (for self-serving reasons) and who are also unusually talented at manipulating voters into believing that they would faithfully represent voter’s interests, preferences, and values; therefore, over time in a voting democracy, the large majority of the holders of public office are going to be exactly such sociopaths.

It’s a simple logical truism that in a representative democracy with a sub-population of skilled manipulators whose desire is to control others for their own benefit, that exactly those people — those who are precisely least suited to leadership and public service roles from any reasonable ethical or moral standpoint — are those most likely to hold public office by virtue of their willingness and ability to scam voters.

Here’s a simple test of fitness for political office: it they want the job, then they are (statistically) almost certainly morally unsuited for it.

Conclusion numero two: Corruption is inevitable.

And given the fact that sociopaths are willing and even eager to violate legal and ethical norms for their own benefit, and also that positions of public office — specifically with respect to the lawmaking function — are fulcrums of advantage and disadvantage throughout society, it is again a simple deductive truth that ubiquitous corruption in the form of every conceivable manner of bribery and fraudulent quid pro quo absolutely must be the rule rather than the exception in the workings of political power.

Although this must be true to some degree at every level of human governance, the more centralized and powerful the office (the more people controlled, the higher the stakes), the more likely it is to be a sociopath-coveted position. It’s effectively a logical impossibility that Washington D.C. is anything other than an infernal cesspool of graft. And as a brief aside from our deductive method into the inductive, this conclusion certainly seems to be the case empirically.

Conclusion numero three: Revolution is essential.

Finally, given all of the above, it is unequivocal folly to imagine that there is any possible means of righting the ship from aboard. Campaign reform, term limits, curbs on insider trading, limitations on lobbyists, “draining the swamp,” etc. All silliness.

There is no possible way that entrenched sociopaths who have carefully manipulated themselves into a position to illicitly enrich and empower themselves are going to enact law or policy to limit their own ability to capitalize on their position. They may tell you that’s what they are going to do in order to get your vote… But they’re never going to actually do this. Please review the history of passage of bills in congress that would limit graft among the political class in any material way. It’s a predictably short history.

Nothing sociopolitically significant is going to change until the entire edifice of corruption is swept away from the outside, by revolution of a populace who’s been pushed far enough that they finally refuse to tolerate having all of the value siphoned out of their lives by scam artists.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

-Thomas Jefferson

QED.