"Anyone who had no silver for bribes was put in the foremost assault ranks. But if a man was able to spread a bit of money around he stayed in the central army and received frequent commendations for “valor.” There was a great deal of this kind of corruption"
Outlaws of the Marsh. Chapter 78: Ten Commandants Confer on Taking Liangshan Marsh Song Jiang Defeats Marshal Gao the First Time
A brand-name private university degree you are paying top dollar to have it look better than a state school, although curriculum around the country are pretty much the same. God forbid you go to a community college or sketchy for-profit university. Even the free education classes online require you to pay to receive certificates of merit for doing the same work as someone who didn't pay.
Most definitely MIT will bust your ass, and earning a 4.0 gpa there will be respected for the higher degree of difficulty compared to getting your ass to Everest. But for the bulk of mediocrity that is the drunken, coffee resuscitated cram-fest of stressed out and scared 20 yr old children going through the motions it doesn't matter where you learned Calc I and Biology. You'll have forgotten most of it after if not before the final exam.
'Leadership' is a bullshit term used to camouflage corruption. The more business and personal ties you have in workplace politics, the more you are considered a leader.
A retail worker describes feeling overlooked in career advancement for a store manager position, despite seniority and years of hard work, surpassed by less experienced, less motivated, and less capable personal relations of company superiors. http://www.depressionforums.org/forums/topic/130074-invisible-at-work/
"I've held my current job for close to 6 years. I started as a receiver in the back room of the store and quickly worked my way up to what they call a 'key carrier' (lowest level manager). ... I've always prided myself on being an extra hard worker. Get there early, stay late, and take anything on with a positive attitude. My dad always taught me that hard work would get you far. I feel like hard work only gets you more hard work.... I've been at that position for at least 5 of the 6 years
When I started there, a 20 year old kid had just been selected for an assistant manager's position. This guy was no ball of fire and rather than move into managing his own store quickly, he plugged up the assistant's position for 4 years. The only reason he was allowed to park there so long was because he and the manager of our location are BFF's (60-some year old store manager living vicariously through a wild 20 year old but that's beside the point).
I hoped that as soon as he moved on, I would be in line for assistant, and then to eventually take on my own store... Unfortunately, our district manager had other plans and moved someone who had only been with the company 2 years into the spot I thought was mine.
he moved on to his own location after only a few months, opportunity presented itself, but again the DM brought someone else in. This time a girl who was reputed to be a TERRIBLE worker. She proved to be just that and was fired after only two months.
...
I just got word today that they're moving yet another person in."
'Networking' is a bullshit euphemism for socially accepted corruption. The more you use those personal relationships to gain undeserved competitive advantage, the more you are networking.
It's condoned and sanctioned by this society, to act selfishly and irresponsibly with whitewashed forms of corruption that are advertised as 'successful', 'smart', 'talented'. In a corrupt system the only real value is in power to manipulate one's position to acquire more power, using unmerited advantage to gain more unmerited advantage.
There is no equity between reward and contribution. The contribution comes from the bottom, the powerless, the workers. The cream of the crop is skimmed off the top by the ruthless, the unscrupulous, the people who look out for themselves no matter who else gets axed - and have steel nerves, ability, and entitled privileges to force and trap their competitors out of the game.
No person climbs to high power without leaving a pile of skeletons.
Is that a justification to do it? No. A corrupt system eats at its roots, the group's value diminishes year by year until it reaches unsustainable imbalance, at which it collapses and corrects itself with heavy loss of life.
Financial institutions with no concern have factored this in, predicting the next time the market collapses and the government issues a bailout. Hoping to survive each cycle intact, profits unhindered. Always staying on top, no matter how the weather comes down. That's a sure sign of corruption, not discerning the future or talent.
But the life of an individual cannot outlast that of a society. And power cannot be handed down to heirs who have not the capacity to attain that power themselves - it will be seized from them. So what good does corruption do? It will make the group weak for an outside group to conquer by force. It will make an arbitrary select few of the sharks capable of abusing the overwhelmingly outnumbering population.
Does it accomplish anything to have CorruptGuy1 have the riches instead of CorruptGuy2? The corrupt stand only for themselves, and without any higher cause to motivate either, it's a load of wasted resources for them to fight each other for top dog at the people's expense. Reduces the assets available to the group.
The people have to stand against corruption. Corruption is on the side of the powerful, they will never start a movement against their own means of advancement. It is the powerless, the vast numbers of weak who must do something. The powerful take the work you produce and throw it away by fighting among themselves. If anything is to be done against the poisoning effects of the powerful it must be by the collective that sustains them.
But the weak are weak and don't do anything. The system becomes too corrupt and the ever more aggressive virus kills its host so it dies too. In the ruins of the old order, a new organization must work together and promote moral values for shared interests in its survival against nature.
Morality is a simple harmonic oscillator. Swings back and forth with the prosperity of a society. When the organization reaches a critical surplus, the force of corruption again take hold. Turning the advantages of cooperation head under its feet and gaining advantage at the expense of the collective.
Having excess of nice things produces the worst people. Because when people stop having to work themselves against the challenges of the natural environment for individual survival, they benefit more by abusing the population than by collaborating with it.
In order to make an omelette, you have to break eggs. If you want to get something done with the work potential of a population, you need to force a large majority into a perpetually deficient state so that they will produce labor in a vain effort to achieve a sufficient state.
If each man had to produce the food he eats, the clothes he wears, the commodities he enjoys with his own hands... the population would be just and mutually beneficial. The society would not be very productive, no one would have the physical resources or time to accomplish much past simple survival. But people would play nice and be fair.
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