The elegant beauty of corruption

In a recent comment on Patricio Mangubat’s A new morning for everyone, Ishmael Ahab came up with a very insightful perspective on how investors perceive corrupt societies as business environments.

I think that it is not corruption, per se, that is shooing foreign investors away. Foreign investors main goal is to generate income for their businesses, and it does not matter if the countries where their businesses were located are corrupt or not. As long as they have a steady flow of income, then they will stay.

Corruption in a country will be a problem for them if the kind of corruption that that country has is unpredictable and unreliable. Businessmen can tolerate bribing officials as long as they got what they need in every bribery dealings.

Maybe the Philippines has that kind of corruption, Unpredictable and unreliable corruption that is bad for business.

This is an instance of very insightful lateral thinking.

A coherent, consistent, and predictable framework of corruption can work for business — probably the way organised crime works with legitimate business in New York City and Chicago for example. As a matter of fact, it is not too different from Ben Kritz‘s own insight on how the Machine works in Chicago — his home town, specifically:

[...] I guess I don’t have quite the same sense of moral outrage that some other people have about corruption among government officials. I can’t help it; I grew up in Chicago, where corruption is a form of government. My early years saw the benevolent dictatorship of The Honorable Richard J. Daley, a mean, ugly bastard who was so crooked he probably needed a corkscrew to get out of bed in the morning. Big Dick had his critics, but for the most part he was wildly adored by the common people of our fair city. That’s because he never forgot that there were more of them than there were of his cabal of political appointees, shady union bosses, Mafiosos, and sleazy Aldermen, and he saw to it that the regular people would continue to see a reason to keep him in office. The streets got plowed promptly when the snow fell, the trash was picked up, and his largesse toward ordinary folks who needed a helping hand — a job, help with medical bills, a little money to buy the kids proper shoes for school — was legendary.

Of course it wasn’t free; sometimes the return of favor was stated — “Vote for Alderman So-and-So in the next election. And tell your friends.” And if one actually believed their vote was secret and tried to go their own way, well…. Suffice to say they’d get an unpleasant visit from someone later on.

The ultimate point of Kritz’s article, which I will go into a bit later, is quite different from the point I will make in this blog article.

The point Yours Truly is trying to make here is this:

Even in the business of corruption, Filipinos are third-rate.

Although the Philippines ranks way up there along with Angola in the business of corruption, we are not exactly famous for turning criminal activity into a world-class management “science” the way the Italian, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese mobs have. Where there is “science” and structure, there is stability and predictability. And guess what, stability and predictability happen to be music to the ears of people we need the most: investors.

Our talent for shortsightedness extends beyond our efforts at legitimacy and well into our culture of crime!

Investors, on the other hand, are forward-looking and as a matter of habit routinely assess a prospect’s risk outlook. Corruption is merely another parameter used to assess risk. And wherever there are unpredictable and volatile parameters, risk goes up and the sex appeal of the investment prospect goes down.

Interestingly enough, I once implied an analogy between Pinoys and tapeworms in a previous article, I might downgrade that comparison a bit further by likening Pinoys more to a lower form of life — the Ebola virus — and in the process cast a more favourable light on the humble tapeworm. Whereas a tapeworm keeps its host alive for years (most of them living pretty much normal lives over a normal lifespan) while it leads a parasitical existence in their gut, the Ebola virus in many instances is so virulent as to kill its victims before it has a chance to spread its own DNA to another host.

Rather than nurture the environment that feeds them, Pinoy chieftains and oligarchs like typical morons pull the rug from under their own feet. The Average Pinoy Schmoe for his part eats up the medieval tagline of organised religion that Corruption is plainly “evil” without first understanding the finer points of this so-called evil; which brings us to the point Kritz actually makes in his article:

People in Chicago have always been willing to sacrifice democratic idealism, so long as they felt the corrupt despot they were putting into office was one of their own. People in the Philippines, by contrast, never champion one of their own.

By eating up the hollowheaded “good” and “evil” morality shoved down our throats by religious dogma, we ironically degrade, convolute, and pervert the social contract we live off on. Just like how the slapping of the “evil” word on divorce has turned the institution of marriage in the Philippines into a pathetic joke and “annulment” into a retail legal business, would-be moral crusaders have shrinkwrapped “corruption” into a bogeyman that Pinoys burn at the stake in the ignoramous way that we usually do things. Instead of understanding and respecting the enemy we prefer to effigize it.

Let’s get rid of our fundamentalist good-vs-evil “morality” and regard corruption and other things pitched to us as “evil” by the Church in a way that modern minds do.

Let’s claw our way out of our culturally-induced ignorance and use a bit of thinking instead.

Back in the Middle Ages, people once thought that disease came in the form of evil spirits. It was only when we started to see the elegant beauty of the organisms behind these “evil spirits” did we truly conquer and tame them.

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Get into the habit of thinking laterally.
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