Well, technically it is immune to corruption. It isn’t immune to people being terrible and exploitative, but that’s technically not corruption. To be corrupt, you’d have to be given legitimate power, and then misuse it. The popular asshole created their power from scratch.
A system without legitimized power isn’t immune to bad people creating power, but it is technically immune to corruption since there’s nothing to corrupt.
I don’t think it’s possible to have a system without some form of legitimized power, as people will always fill that vacuum. There will be a village elder or judge or peacekeeper or something, as those all fulfill necessary elements to a functioning society, and they will all come with some amount of legitimate authority.
Now, I suppose it might be fair to say that those “legitimate authorities” aren’t prescribed by the system, and therefore any corruption that follows is not the fault of the system. That seems a bit squishy to me, as those “legitimate authorities” are a natural outflow of society, and if the system does not have built in controls on those positions it is tacitly approving of any corruption.
But I’ll grant there may be a purely semantic argument that the system itself is immune to corruption, in the same way that a starving person doesn’t have to worry about food poisoning.
But I’ll grant there may be a purely semantic argument that the system itself is immune to corruption, in the same way that a starving person doesn’t have to worry about food poisoning.
Yeah that’s what I was alluding to, hence “technically”. You’re correct that power is inevitable, and your system not prescribing power only limits its ability to moderate that emergent power.
Well, technically it is immune to corruption. It isn’t immune to people being terrible and exploitative, but that’s technically not corruption. To be corrupt, you’d have to be given legitimate power, and then misuse it. The popular asshole created their power from scratch.
A system without legitimized power isn’t immune to bad people creating power, but it is technically immune to corruption since there’s nothing to corrupt.
I don’t think it’s possible to have a system without some form of legitimized power, as people will always fill that vacuum. There will be a village elder or judge or peacekeeper or something, as those all fulfill necessary elements to a functioning society, and they will all come with some amount of legitimate authority.
Now, I suppose it might be fair to say that those “legitimate authorities” aren’t prescribed by the system, and therefore any corruption that follows is not the fault of the system. That seems a bit squishy to me, as those “legitimate authorities” are a natural outflow of society, and if the system does not have built in controls on those positions it is tacitly approving of any corruption.
But I’ll grant there may be a purely semantic argument that the system itself is immune to corruption, in the same way that a starving person doesn’t have to worry about food poisoning.
Yeah that’s what I was alluding to, hence “technically”. You’re correct that power is inevitable, and your system not prescribing power only limits its ability to moderate that emergent power.