Corruption: A Guide to Social Manipulation
It’s important to understand corruption because very few people set out one morning to become corrupt. And by understanding how you corrupt it teaches you how to avoid corruption in your own career. Note that the tools of corrupting are also a devastating social weapon in expert hands that you don’t want anywhere near your business processes.
How to Corrupt (or Crush) Individuals
The reason for the reference to individuals is that even systemic corruption is borne from the motivations and worldview of individuals. Long before the research, prison inmates have understood that everybody tells an internal story about who we are and what we stand for… a story that, once you know it’s flaws, can be manipulated to create and remove stress.
A second factor in how to corrupt individuals is that nobody wants to be the worse person in any environment. In a prison context, the guard looking over 100 inmates has a human social weakness to belong. If he/she is the most hated individual on any day they will manipulate the story in everybody else’s mind to push some poor inmate down the totem pole.
Once you’re aware that human beings are for the most part weakened at certain points… corruption by strategic manipulation becomes a possibility.
The Three Steps of the Corruption Funnel
There are intentional phases to this type of social manipulation – getting the person to buy into your created worldview, creating a situation of isolation, then burning the bridges to their old worldview. The steps include:
- The Hook: they believe they are in possession of a trusted secret (or an elite group membership)
- The Line: they are given small tasks to move them from worldview A through worldview B
- The Sinker: they are made to believe the only option (worldview B) is their worldview and stress is created and relieved to support the corruption funnel outcomes
Prison Guard Corruption as an Example
To explain this with an example. A prison guard’s story is that he is there to defend society from dangerous criminals… and this worldview has to be stronger than the life he/she sees within the prison including rapes, beatings and systemic corruption that surrounds them. So what does the prison inmate do?
The first thing is to befriend with a mix of true and false stories to shift the worldview just a fraction. “Officer, it’s winter and I know I’m not allowed to make phone calls but could you just give my wife a call when you go home tonight… she needs wood and our children are cold.” To be successful, this strategy has to include the corruptee being human enough to buy into that membership. A useful tool is to share a trusted secret (a robbery or other crime) or elite group membership (that precludes them ever being the most hated person in the environment).
The secret forms a special function that isolates the guard from their compatriots. There is the lesser secret of the telephone call, of course, but at this stage it’s only a minor infraction of policy. The big secret (the complicity of trust involving an external crime they really don’t know exists at all) is something that can’t be shared. Secrets like that consume people from the inside out.
So a few more small tasks follow… another message to the wife; being sent to deliver an uncensored letter… a couple of joints or a flask of whiskey to come into the prison on their birthday. And BANG. Corruption.
The next week three thugs walk up to their front door in broad daylight with two ounces of speed and a half dozen syringes and they’re told to take it into the prison. They will object… but the evidence is damning. They’re now a criminal (and an expendable one). Every time the guard steps out of line they are rapidly addressed with ultimatums (stress is applied and relieved to support the funnel).
The Lesson to be Learned in Business
The obvious lesson is that if you don’t know how the mechanics of corruption work then you’re on the back foot. And the secondary lesson is that people within your organisation need to understand when they’re at Step 2 they can return to their original worldview without losing their employment. It’s so easy to be caught in the early stages of corruption and feel like there is no way forward except to transition to the imposed worldview.
And the really interesting thing is that none of this is new… it came to Australia with the First Fleet and no doubt it’s learned in Borstall’s and Super-Max prisons throughout the world. It’s a tool and a weapon used to great effect by reasonably uneducated and unintelligent gangs.
How much more effective and damaging can these corruptors be with formal qualifications and a job in middle management? What story do you tell yourself – it’s a big reason why introspective reflection is an important part of authentic leadership.
