03/16/2025
Solving Corruption
Democracy, Republic, Communism, Socialism, Capitalism, Monarchy, Empire, Authoritarianism, Theocracy and that’s it. Consider for a moment that computers were invented in the 1940s and yet there far more computer operating systems than there are social operating systems and social operating systems have been around as long as humans. Why?
Only casual observation is needed to understand why. Humans self-motivate when it comes to technology and science innovation However, humans need outside motivation for social science innovation. Martin Luther King Jr. observed this obvious fact when he equipped, “Today we have guided missiles and misguided men.”
It is important when addressing a problem to always identify the root causes. One of the root causes for corruption is that humans do not self-motivate social innovations and these lack of innovations have created what appears to be permanent corruption and absolute power corrupts absolutely. As Christopher Hitchens put it, religion is our worst first attempt to socially advance and religion is still with us today. The original IBM computer operating system, not so much.
To whit, if we are going to solve corruption then we must take into account that people don’t self-motivate social innovation.
Religion itself is based upon a much older social structure: hierarchy. Hierarchy permeates every social organization today. Hierarchy is formally called bureaucracy in today’s world. Every single hierarchy is a bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy is well studied concept. Bureaucracy has fundamental problems that are intractable or unsolvable. One of these problems is corruption. Human nature is such that when one person has power over many then that person is corrupted.
There are ways to mitigate corruption:
- Disperse power by limiting hierarchy size.
- Reorganize typically by switching between centralizing and federating in cycles.
- Replace corrupted people.
Many of the corruption mitigations in the US Constitution are just post-hoc, after-the-fact, rationalizations. The fact of the original thirteen colonies was set in stone. Yet the Federalist Papers post-hoc rationalize this fact as good design. Colonies can be labs for experimenting. Small State population versus large state population design of the Senate. These are just two examples. The “design” of distributing power in this way did contain corruption to some degree.
The concept of checks-and-balances was taken from Rome Democracy. Or rather John Adams read Lucius Seneca’s “What went wrong” after Rome’s Democracy fell. Seneca wrote that they fundamentally handled corruption wrong. They had laws the forbid corruption. The penalty was death or something. Anyway, given the Senators were all corrupt then that law was never enforced. Seneca recommended a system of checks-and-balances that allows corruption to happen but checks that corruption.
The inherent problem with a system of checks-and-balances is that the check system has to have relatively commensurate power. Today the Executive branch is bribing and threatening all the Republicans to keep them from impeaching the President. The President could literally have a barbecue of babies on the Whitehouse lawn and the Republicans wouldn’t impeach him. Or, as Trump himself said, he could murder someone in broad daylight in the middle of Manhattan and his supporters would still support him.
There was never much thought given to keeping the three branches of US government co-equal over time. Best case is the initial balance was an opening lab experiment that is still in use today. We never innovated that balance and suffering from that today.
The Federal government co-opted State power by the State income tax. This allows the Federal government to bypass States altogether to collect tax revenue. Just realize that the States themselves passed this amendment.
Hierarchy and bureaucracy are inherently flawed and cannot be fixed to not be overrun by corruption. The fundamental cause is the few, the top of the hierarchy, has arbitrary power over money and resources and ultimately fall victim to self-dealing.
Hierarchy has to go then. The replacement to hierarchy is called mesh society. Mesh society has no vertical grouping. Instead any and all growth in population just adds new mesh nodes. Today the world has around eight billion people, but let’s call it nine billion for simplifications sake. Nine billion divided by thirty is 300 million MGOs. MGOs are fixed size thirty people. An MGO cannot contain 29 or 31. MGOs cannot combine vertically to form other hierarchies. MGOs work together by creating and implementing projects.
Mesh society is impervious to corruption by eliminating hierarchy and bureaucracy. Instead all work is accomplished by meshes of MGOs, or horizontal groupings.
Solving corruption means solving hierarchy. Mesh society does that.
Mesh society also addresses corruption permanently by addressing human nature were people don’t self-motivate social change. Mesh is a permanent foundation that scales infinitely in time and space. Imagine today if an asteroid hit the Earth and instantly wiped out half the Earth’s human population. Further there followed a decades long permanent winter. All the governments of any size would fail. Humanity would be left in total ruins and chaos. Not so with a mesh society. Each MGO is a survival unit with one year’s supply of survival materials always available. If the Earth were 100% a mesh society only the half of the population wiped instantly would die instantly. The other nodes have a year’s supply of survival stuff on hand. Further, mesh nodes can rapidly re-organize horizontally to immediately rebuild. Failed governments of today would take years to re-establish before rebuilding of serious group scale could take place.
Mesh society then is a permanent solution to corruption by being a permanent foundation overcoming human nature’s tendency to not innovate society as well as being corruption proof.