The Social Root of Corruption



   My basic rule is that organizational immensity seeds corruption always
and so is to be avoided as a means of invoking social control. Moral
integrity, as I appreciate it, appears unreliable on a neighborhood or city
level and almost absent at an international level. In the story of the
United Nations and the early United States of America this was a premise
held by everyone. The basis for organizing both was to establish a
disinterested third party to assist in conflict resolution. In both cases
the new party has in the long run developed its own interests. I attribute
this to the mistake of creating the organization entirely separate from its
members territory and assets. The excuse for the separateness is supposedly
to avoid conflict of interest but in my view it is illusion to imagine that
interest conflict can be avoided. Better to have a recognized conflict of
interest that inspires an overt limiting of authority by the members. There
is no question in my mind that the central governments of both the United
States of America and the world have their own interests that are quite as
independent of the common good as any member local government. In my view
an organization that can justly be called a governing body as opposed to a
business is one that meets the simplest definition of being nonprofit.
   It has been my assumption all my life that an organization can only
be called nonprofit if it actually has no taxable corporate income. I had
a job for a couple of years with such an organization, called Burley Design
Cooperative. Burley has never made a claim for 501 c(3) status with the
federal I.R.S., but, having never had what the I.R.S. defines as an income,
the business has never been taxed on a profit. So I call Burley nonprofit.
In the conventional sense Burley is a business making and selling bicycle
equipment but in reality it is a governing body facilitating that activity
solely on the part of its members. When the members all are at home Burley
ceases to exist as a source of independent interest in anything.
   For several of the founding members this lack of a point of focal appeal
was quite frustrating to their interest in getting creative with business
possibilities. I was also blocked that way, eventually evicted by the group
for being uninterested in full time employment. My assessment is that the
diplomatic purity of Burley innately has this limitation. Only an entity
with self-interest can be a focal point for technical creativity.
   Almost everyone I have ever seen address this kind of situation in their
own life has promoted the evolution, in the governing body, of some kind of
organizational core that can and will respond to personal dreams. If their
promotion succeeds the result is always a frankenstein monster with its own
dreams backed by a frightening and oppressive collective authority. The best
example of this is the anti-recreational drug effort. Thwarted by local
sentiment, the drug culture has appealled to the authority of the federal
constitution for protection against the majority tyranny of the mainstream
alcoholic and sugar culture. As with hard alcohol the federal government has
responded by going into its own major production and sales of the drugs and
taken advantage of mainstream public sentiment to engage in brutal theft and
jailing of the private competition.
   The more publicly visible sovereign Citizens make the same mistake,asking
a big scale government to fight a local one for them. The basic argument is
that a local governing body can not require a sovereign Citizen to be
licensed if they drive, taxed on noncommercial assets or have regulation on
their weapon ownership based on that the federal Constitution forbids these
sort of rules on the part of the federal government. This is a gross denial
of the tenth Amendment, guaranteeing the local governing constituency
authority over the federal one. The main result has been federal encourage-
ment of the local limits and even national "anti-terrorist" laws.
   Most of the State and local governments were created after the federal
one and got sucked into at least an image of being subserviant to the
federal authority so the Citizen confusion is understandable but there is no
way for anyone to beat this in the long run. Every appeal to the big scale
further entrenches its independent organizational "ego", and encourages a
precedent for all other governing bodies to develop their "egos".
   My wish is for all governing bodies, with control of my world, to be
genuinely nonprofit, to such an explicit degree that it is beyond dispute.
My wish goes even as far as denying the right of incorporation in any form.
I would rather that all business and government was arranged on the model
of Burley Design,though that would probably imply rejection of my membership
from most. Realistically I am an outcast anyway,having little use in my life
for privilege and a desperate need to be technically creative, but if the
whining of those around me was generally recognized by all as being unworthy
of government notice then a major basis for cynicism would evaporate.

 

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