NOTE - This thread actually could have been in politics or philosophy forum, as it really crosses subject boundaries.
This is very close to my own heart/mind. I have read quite a few books (and plenty unread so far) on how things get corrupted in society. I want to clarify exactly what I mean because I think this often gets misunderstood. I have to speak in generality because there is so much here and it is systemic right through society.
When people talk of corruption or things going wrong, they typically think of bad actors or mistakes. Imperfection is part of life and cannot be avoided. People get punished and systems reform (or die) and are replaced. In this naive view of the world, it makes sense to trust authority, experts, etc. Systems and checks and balances are in place to keep things working relatively smoothly (or as smoothly as possible) and there is no need for radical change.
This view is dangerously naive and wrong. In my experience of life and fairly extensive reading, it seems that every part of society and life is open to abuse, and is abused. Even authorities charged with spotting and eliminating corruption or errors, they are also flawed. A big part of this is when private enterprise is at the heart of an institution or company etc. I have been reading about the Drug Industry and how they actively ignore and even demonise natural treatments which are often better than the drug equivalents. This is just one example, I have read about the CJS in US locking people up unfairly to make more money, I have a book about the Holocaust Industry etc. etc.. It seems there is nowhere this endemic corruption isn't thriving, along with people happy to go along with it. Profits over people's welfare and lives and justice. It's a depressing picture. Bias in the news is not widely known about, but exists in even the best news channels (see medialens website for eg.).
But what is perhaps even more surprising/frustrating is the number of people unaware of this (probably mainly Sensors). My ISTJ brother, for eg. cannot believe that a doctor could actually prescribe you a drug which makes things worse for you, without everyone in the health industry and health service being in on a conspiracy. He cannot see how it is all the assumptions he is making in that statement which is where the errors are made (either through ignorance, lack of power, care or willful greed). Every gap is exploited. It's not simply about how good or well meaning each person is in the chain, it is the makeup of the chain which allows errors and corruption which is often almost invisible. But can these assumptions be challenged, or will MBTI limitations of Sensors always be a block? Is this mainly the fault of the mainly SJ world we live in?
Even the whole 'capitalist system' (I know it's more complex than that) to many seems optimum with it's own ethical core. This is also dangerously naive.
Sometimes this awareness has made me feel quite depressed because as an INFJ who cares a lot about these things, and wants to put them right, it feels like I am fighting a futile battle. Many great books have been written, yet the situation persists. It seems that if systems are improved, some people will still find a way round them. But none (or little) of it is inevitable. That's what frustrates me. The willfull ingorance and blind assumptions of many allow the system of abuses to persist, and people suffer as a result.
I think this is the kind of thing that frustrated Jesus. Evil is what men do, not just what a few rogue characters do. Artificial institutions will always be fundamantally flawed, irrespective of their objectives? Anyone have the answer? Are things slowly improving? Am I being too negative?
Some thoughts David - a lot of what I say is speculative because it's a very big topic:
I think that part of the problem is we find what is going wrong, and the evil that happens in the world, far more interesting and reportable than what is going right and the good that happens. So all the bad things get reported and few of the good things. News, fake or otherwise, about the bad things sells well, so they get repeated and analysed over and over again in the media, the internet and the intellectual publications, until we start to believe that the world is going to hell in a coal scuttle. Of course, that's not to say it's all untrue, but it's only a part of the story, and it's also going in the other direction at least as powerfully - it's just that we don't express this in such repeated and psychologically powerful ways. The result is that so many people feel their world is going badly all-wrong when it isn't. Another problem is that it diverts us away from hidden evil that doesn't get reported and festers away for years underground until it suddenly jumps out and surprises us - I suspect the war in The Ukraine is like that and it has burst quite a few illusions about ourselves in The West..
It seems to me that the western world today is materially way, way better than the world my parents grew up in for most people. We have it so good in the West that many folks in the rest of the world are trying to migrate and to live in our countries because life is so shitty in their own compared with ours. We live in a dream world compared with the lives over half the rest of the world have to endure. By constantly running ourselves down and focusing on our faults, we are likely to undermine the good that we do have, and eventually that will destroy it. Far better is to focus on our strengths - what is so good about our societies that makes them so appealing, and let's build on that. I don't mean ignore our faults, far from it, but let's put energy into recognising, preserving and building on our strengths even more strongly.
Some other thoughts.
There is no consensus on what makes a good society - people approach this issue from different value sets, and they compete where they do not align. You yourself seem to have fairly left wing values and some of these that are highly prized in left wing politics are see as wrong from alternative perspectives. There is no really satisfactory solution to this problem. In some parts of the world it is sorted by force majore and dictators or oligarchies determine which values will be the national ones. In the West, in the main, we solve it by democracy - the people choose periodically which values will prevail. This is not a bad compromise, but it comes with loads of issues too, because the periodic transition from one set of values to another comes with some chaos and plenty of costs.
Democracy is of course open to infiltration and exploitation by special interest groups, but it’s up to the people to recognise and deal with this in the way they vote. Something that no politician who wants to be elected can say is that ordinary people in large numbers can become corrupt, and vote for what is wrong and harmful. It isn’t always some great shadowy ‘Them’ who are pushing what is wrong in society, but large numbers of ordinary folks can do this too.
Of course, always, there will be clever or daring people who are compromised morally, or maybe just desperate, who will exploit any system of society values for their own gain. There are also the guys who are born to be autocratic barons and make and try to impose their own rules - I suspect that democracies have a better chance of controlling them than other systems, but they will always exist. They aren't all bad - they tend to generate wealth and security for others as well as themselves, but they definitely need controlling or they will do more harm than good and create imbalances. Personally, I'd rather have such people making good in a Western democracy where there are limits on the power they can obtain, than in a political system than cannot control them or even embraces them. It's fascinating to see how this worked with Trump - an archetypal robber baron who tried to be one in The White House and found that it wasn't possible. This was a triumph of democratic values though I doubt people see it that way just now.
On the other hand there are the guys who risk everything to get themselves a better life. In the UK we have problems with people dicing with death in small boats to get to England from France, because they want a better life and see our society as being that better life. This is illegal - and yet .... are they different from the people who sailed the Atlantic in crappy ships in the 17th Century for a better life? The ones who've made it to our country have solved so many problems and taken so many risks and shown such persistent dedication to get here - my guess is that many of these people are brilliant contributors once they settle in, and the fact they got here in spite of all the problems and risks proves it.
But .. and it's a big But ...
I really do find myself with
@aeon in thinking that these issues are too great for me to assimilate and respond to as a simple imperative. Whatever choices are made collectively, the outcome will have flaws, because that is human nature both individually and collectively. It's hard looking at this stuff as an INFJ, because we feel the big picture deeply and we feel the flaws as something wrong and painful. But what can we do about it? There are two possibilities. We can do what The Buddha said and work out our own salvation with diligence. This means that we live the best life we can as a person within the world that is given to us - and for most people that is as hard as most of us can deal with, so there is no blame for not doing more. The other possibility is to engage with the collective and try to change things for the better. That can be done through either power or influence, and both can be effective and good, but they can also go wrong. Those of us who do engage with the collective and try to make changes are running risks. One of these is that it's ineffective - that's disheartening but not serious. Another is that we are effective, but then we find to our surprise that our solutions lead inevitably to unintended evil as well as some good, and the never-ending story continues.
