The malady at the rotten core of society.....

Shakespeare once wrote "There is something rotten in the state of Denmark" and indeed we have historical records going back to Domesday in 1087AD that suggest that there has always been a feeling that society, and particularly the upper echelons of society are inherently dark and up to no good. The idea that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely has been around for quite a while and when we look back at 15th and 16th Century Italy we see corruption on a truly massive scale. It does make one wonder if there is something fundamentally twisted in the human psyche that prevents us as a species from working co-operatively as a society for anything longer than about a week.

In my own experience I have seen politicians exposed for endemic and widescale fraud, the supposedly independent and honest free press sullied by scandal, the Royal family rocked by allegations of nepotism and infidelity and even the police enmeshed in corruption at the most senior levels. This is no new turn of events however, fifty years ago you couldn't become a senior policeman without being a Freemason. You would be excluded from senior political positions based on the school you attended and the chances of breaking out of your families social status was next to nil. So, if we posit that this is something that is at the core of society, what exactly are we to do about it?

Firstly, let us consider that thinking in terms of a less complex, less pressured society as proposed for communities in developing countries and particularly hunter/gatherer societies is almost certainly a red herring. If we look to the African and South American tribes that anthropologists studied to suggest these ways of life as being fundanmentally better we see some of the most vicious infighting and abuse of status and power imaginable. Similarly if we look at the alternative political structures such as Commnuism we see systems that despite the best intentions of their proponents are invariable destroyed by self-serving individuals trying to utilise the system for their own betterment.

There can be little doubt that as a species we are a product of many generations of evolutionary development to create the creature that we now are, and trying to fight against those developments may be a battle that we can not win in the long term. It may even be a battle that, as a species we may be better off not winning in terms of our chances of survival, but on an individual day to day level, surely, it is a fight that we should make every single day......