Did societies evolve to be corrupt?

[Hexen]

I have stumbled across this article from i09 that claims that corruption "holds societies together"

http://io9.com/5714685/why-evolution...ociety-to-work

Thoughts or any responses to this?

[Broletariat]

First of all they used game theory.

Second of all they say corruption is necessary because "law enforcers often need a little extra incentive to devote their time to holding society together, and that takes the form of mild noncooperation."

Instead of corruption we could simply integrate that "extra incentive" into the system so it wouldn't even BE corruption

Third, the article is making clear cynical assumptions about human society. Namely that humans cannot hold it together. That it takes some elite group of people entitled to certain privileges to hold things together. It's very reminiscent of Animal Farm when the pigs made the argument they should receive more since they hold everything together and such I suppose.

I might be a little fuzzy in my explanation, if so just ask for elaboration.

[Cane Nero]

"Their findings make a lot of intuitive sense - most people will continue to cooperate to keep their society together, in part because they don't want to be punished by law enforcers. People will tolerate a certain amount of corruption from their leaders and law enforcers as long as there isn't too much of it. Above a certain level of corruption, people stop seeing the point of cooperating and society begins to break down."

Hey if you stop exploring me, I will not live in society with you!

[thesadmafioso]

Different structures of power distribution will breed different social conditions, it is as simple as that. If individuals are properly immersed in an egalitarian society, then it will follow that they will take up such values. If the opposite is true and they are conditioned by a society of social and economic hierarchy and competition, then their values will be representative of that upbringing. The question at hand should not be if corruption has evolved to be a prominent and necessary part of modern society, but rather of how to structure society into a social organization capable of eliminating the spread of such.