The Antidote to Corruption?

Why do people do unethical things for money?

I’ve thought about this for the last 15+ years. And with the growing amount of scams and “rug pulls” in the Web3/NFT space, I’ve been thinking about it more often. It’s a question you won’t find a neat answer to, and yet you try, and try, and try again. I’ve come to terms that I won’t find hidden reasons a la Davinci Code. However, a good place to evaluate these problems is to try to understand human behavior and belief systems. 

Many people believe that engaging in unethical/illegal activities is the most viable path to achieve financial wealth. They justify the need for financial wealth for a multitude of reasons–most of them being “the right thing” to do for them. Yet, deep down, these individuals don’t believe in their ability to create wealth through alternate means. 

We become prisoners to golden handcuffs. We look the other way when the organizations we work for, or movements we support engage in fraudulent and/or shady behavior. We look the other way because if we recognized certain actions for what they are–unacceptable–we would have no choice but to take action. Otherwise, we risk a pretty significant cognitive dissonance in our identity as “good people.”

To compound these limiting beliefs, our consumerist society creates the pressure that financial wealth is the key metric to success. Abundance for abundance’s sake is celebrated; any attempts to question it are dismissed as envy. 

This leads to a society where we are taught that a successful life is dictated by financial wealth, which is true to an extent. But there are neither the beliefs or systems to help people believe that there are multiple paths to wealth and that we do not have to trade morals for dollars. 

The factory line culture that underpins Corporate America today was designed to make your job the exclusive source of income. The only reason why this idea is now being tested is because people are not making ends meet and a large part of the United States does not earn enough for basic living conditions like living in your own apartment, for instance. 

It’s going to take a long time for people to reassess their relationship with money and for any significant cultural change to happen. In fact, I believe that consumerism will get worse as people start “living” in virtual worlds. People will now have to worry about owning clothes in the metaverse and the real world. 

On the flip side, we can increase people’s belief in their ability to create multiple paths to wealth. Doing so, would decrease the pressure to stay in situations that lead people to engage and/or tolerate illegal/unethical behaviors for financial reasons. It would also help reevaluate our relationship with abundance as a societal value in the long-term.

How do we increase people’s belief in their ability to create wealth through multiple means? Here is the definitive, authoritative, exhaustive, 100% correct list we need to do. Ok, maybe not, but there are three things that merit further exploration:

Make it easier to fail

One of the most misguided beliefs that support the idea of the American Dream is the belief that if you work hard in this country, then you can achieve everything you dream of. Work is a mandatory ingredient, but the recipe is not as straightforward. The cost for failure in this country is relatively high. And the costs for failure tend to increase if you are not born in this country, and/or come from an underrepresented background. 

The why behind this merits a piece on its own. Nonetheless, failure in this country is expensive if you don’t have inherited wealth, or if you don’t have a community to sustain you during hard times. Inevitably, this plays into people’s calculus on how to build financial wealth. What is the path that, in their mind, introduces the least amount of risk and ensures survival? 

It will typically be taking a job at a big company, with a predictable salary, and benefits that the government doesn’t provide like healthcare. Speaking of healthcare, it is still the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States. And we don’t even discuss the fact that there are cognitive penalties for being poor, which again, heighten the costs of failure.

You add all of these elements and you can see how the incentives to try out multiple ways to generate income are fraught with obstacles and risks that are very hard for the majority of individuals to assume. And if we want to change people’s behavior around money to minimize corruption, then we need to make it easier for the majority of people to not fail.

Growth mindsets and lifelong learning

Our current education system does a great disservice by not teaching the mental models and tools to think critically and enable life-long learning. Instead, it focuses on memorization and teaching content in stale and unoriginal ways. Teachers are bogged down by bureaucracy instead of attempting novel ways to teach via stories or games.

So people grow up developing an aversion to learning, “biting the bullet” until you get a college diploma because we’ve been told that this is the key for a better financial future (and statistically, that still holds true). Once college is done, we stop holding our breath and breathe a sigh of relief at not having to learn ever again. But this is precisely the issue–our idea of learning is tied to the environment by which we learn and not the practice itself. 

Changes in how we teach will create the long-term effects of giving people the tools to become lifelong learners and develop a healthier relationship with learning than our current one.

The result: People that develop a healthy lifelong learning practice will likely believe that they can retool their skills and adapt to changes in the labor market or find alternative ethical paths to wealth. This increases their agency to explore multiple paths towards creating wealth and reduces the dependency of staying in a job that doesn’t align with their values.

A society of creators, not consumers

Consumerism isn’t going to go away any time soon. We consume because we have needs. But as a society we need to set the expectation that you should be as much of a maker as a consumer.

The silver lining is that newer generations are engaging with the world not only as consumers, but also as creators. Nearly half of TikTok users are between 10-29. And a big driver for the NFT movement is to increase the economic incentives for creators (particularly in industries like music and visual arts).

You can argue that aspiring to be an influencer, YouTuber, and/or Twitch streamer is pretty banal and can further perpetuate the toxic consumerist ideals that perpetuate corrupt behaviors. At the same time, I’m optimistic that the newer generations that grow up with the expectation to be creators will branch out to other forms of creation in the pursuit of novelty and/or purpose. 

The more people feel like they have the agency to create, the more they can realize that the Internet is, now more than ever, enabling ways for people to economically sustain themselves through their creations. Whether it is through an Etsy shop, a Substack, an App, etc. There have never been more ways to build a business on the Internet. 

This means that people will have ways to diversify their income and increase the belief that they can build financial wealth outside of the traditional norm of Corporate jobs. It’s not easy enough for the majority to do this yet. But I’m confident that the empowerment of the creator economy will lower the incentives for people to engage or tolerate corruption. 

I don’t expect an utopia where making it easier to fail, promoting lifelong learning, and developing a society of creators will cure corruption. However, I do believe that we can lower the incentives for corruption if we focus on these areas and reconsider our beliefs around abundance in the long-term.

Ultimately, it comes down to us as individuals. It comes down to reflecting how we put ourselves and/or are placed in environments that challenge our agency to participate in corrupt behavior. It comes down to having the radical honesty to observe the instances where we are looking the other way. Now this introspection should not lead to being consumed by guilt or self-flagellation. That helps no one.

And to muddy this whole essay and make this even more difficult, there may be instances where we have to accept that we live in contradictions, that trying to live a life free of hypocrisy is like speed running through Super Mario on expert mode with your eyes closed.

But awareness is the first step. It is the necessary step to create a less corrupt world for everyone.