Corrupted, Not Corrupt

I. One letter apart

The two words differ grammatically, and therein lies everything.

Whoever is corrupt has done something. Active voice. He let himself be bought, weighed the matter and decided. He can be called to account for it.

Whoever has been corrupted has had something done to him. Passive voice. He has adapted to circumstances and constraints and behaves accordingly.

The difference is not a nicety of language but the reason why the usual arguments come to nothing. Whoever accuses someone of corruption generally means his character. The accused rejects it, because he has nothing to reproach himself with — and both are right. The matter itself is not discussed.

II. It happens in small steps

The process has no date.

At the beginning it really was a choice. Two commissions lay before you, and you took the more comfortable one — the one with the quicker return and the lesser effort. That was neither wrong nor reprehensible. It was the sensible decision on that day.

Then again. And again. And at some point you are dancing at several weddings anyway, because one alone does not carry you.

Every single step can be justified. The sum of thirty years cannot. And nobody chose it, because nobody ever had it in front of him.

We have described elsewhere why responses come to events and not to conditions: there was no day on which it became bad — it only became slightly worse on every day. Here it is the same, applied to a person. There was no day on which one adapted.

III. The constraint is real

And it is no excuse.

A freelance has no recurring business. Every engagement ends, and while it runs the next must be won. What brings no return within six months he cannot pursue — otherwise in six months he has nothing.

An employee is not assessed as a person but across periods. Whoever achieved something last year has not thereby justified the current quarter.

An institute whose core funding is set by its earnings from industry cannot pursue anything that cannot be expressed as earnings in advance.

And a party official who begins a change of course loses personally before the party gains.

Four fields, one mechanism. In none of them does anyone act unreasonably. In all of them something comes out that nobody wanted.

IV. What follows: the damage

Here it becomes serious, and this is the actual subject of the text.

The pressure does not attack what someone does. It attacks what someone can do.

Whoever has optimised for short cycles for thirty years has unlearned something: to stay with a matter that yields nothing for a long time. To set it down and take it up again. To bear that nineteen attempts come to nothing.

That is not an attitude one recovers when one needs it. It is a capacity, and capacities wither.

V. And then the opportunity comes

Hans Ley:

And when the possibilities suddenly arise that would allow a change, one cannot readjust that quickly. And the wonderful project, the work one had been looking for, comes to nothing — or one fails at it.

This is the worst form.

The constraint ends, and the damage remains. The opportunity is there, the means are there, nobody is holding you back any longer — and you are not equal to it. Not for want of will. For want of practice.

And whoever fails at it holds afterwards the proof that it could not be done. A proof that is true and misleading: it was not the matter and not the ability, but something that began thirty years earlier and appears in no account.

That is why so few readjust when they could. Not indolence. Not cowardice. A lost capacity whose loss nobody noticed while it was not needed.

VI. The counter-case

Four objections, and they are to be taken seriously.

The text exonerates everybody. If nobody can help it, nobody has anything to answer for. That is false, and it is dangerous. There are degrees of adaptation, and there is a difference between the man who shrinks under pressure and the man who uses it.

It cannot be verified. The claim that most would gladly change it and see no prospect is a conjecture about inner states. It cannot be substantiated, and whoever disputes it can as little be refuted.

There are the others. In every structure there are the few who do it differently — and their number remains remarkably stable. A text that describes only the mechanism explains them away instead of explaining them.

And the price is passed over in silence. Whoever escapes the constraints pays for it. Usually with money, always with security. Not to name that price makes escape look easier than it is.

VII. What follows

Not the exoneration of those who adapted. And not the elevation of those who did not — their position is often merely a different one, not a better one.

Rather two things about how one deals with people.

First: whoever has been corrupted is not unusable. He is unusable under the given conditions. That is a difference, for conditions can be changed and characters cannot.

And that is why the question about a partner is usually put wrongly. Not: is he any good? But: what conditions would allow him to do the thing? If there are none, that is information about the thing and not about him.

Second: the damage is the reason why changes so often fail when they finally become possible. Whoever creates an opportunity has not yet created the capacity to use it.

This is also information for anyone who still has the choice. What one does not do for thirty years, one cannot do afterwards.