I've been thinking lately about indestructible machines and the cogs they depend on to run them, and it made me remember this article I read a while back.
The people who control the machine, didn't build it, they just hijacked it and intentionally corrupted the majority of cogs the machine depends on to run.
It seems to leave us believing there are only two options: we either help tear down the machine that took nearly 300 years to build, (which inadvertently accomplishes the long term goal of the men who have hijacked it hoping to replace it with their own), or we take out our frustrations on the individual cogs who have been corrupted, who will then simply be replaced to keep the machine running while we're distracted. Neither is a great option.
What if a 3rd (less exciting, more time consuming and frustrating, but still important) option is to corrupt the machine they've created by inserting our own cogs? What if we just take back our machine piece by piece using their strategy?
the teachers, firefighters, cops, bus drivers, and others whose jobs put them into direct and regular contact with civilians. But they also include the urban planners, economists, analysts, and administrators who operate behind the scenes and at the higher echelons of city government: the people who help write the city’s budget, study traffic patterns, and run grant and incentive programs.
There really should be no divide between white collar and blue collar street level bureaucrats. If we ever hope to successfully gain control of the machine and make it better than what we lost, we have to move forward with the expectation that each one of these beuracrats is an important piece of the machinery. When you lump them into their trade rather than including them all as important parts of the same community system, you create distance and leave their trades (as well as the bureaucrats within each trade) more vulnerable to corruption.
For example, it's much easier to corrupt a police force than an entire community, right? But, police are supposed to be members of a larger group with accountability and loyalty to their local community before allegiance to a trade. (To be clear, I don't mean this in any way to be taken as a knock on unions, even though that's an important and not unrelated aspect of accountability to local communities for all civil servant trade unions, that ties into rights and protections under a competent federal government. For simplicity of this argument, just pretend that this future federal government is competent enough to protect those rights for all workers).
There are a million and one examples of a lack of police accountability that certainly justify the hesitation to view them as neighbors and members of a local community, but that separation from the community, also enables the lack of accountability. It becomes a cycle where less accountability an agency is expected to provide to the public, the further away it drifts from its place within the community and public oversight.
Eventually, the removal from oversight and accountability for corruption becomes the norm within the department or agency, and even the people who may have joined for admiral reasons, often find themselves in a position where they eventually rationalize their own corruption, because if they didn't do it somebody else would.
It doesn't excuse or justify their corruption, but it also isn't an irrational decision. That same scenario goes for every bureaucrat in every department and agency at every level of government.
Over time, a lack of accountability creates distance from the public, and that distance makes it possible to justify and rationalize new standards of conduct. Over time that conduct becomes the norm. If you don't make corruption the irrational choice to make, then you're always going to be left with corruption as the norm and individuals rationalizing their own corruption.