By the Editorial Board, April 5 2016 (LINK to editorial)
"[a ]Sprawling Web of Corruption""Corruption" is a misleading word, because it implies that a non-corrupted state has become corrupted, that the system which is supposed to serve society has failed.
The truth is that the system is doing the job it has always done of facilitating society's SELF-exploitation to the personal advantage of its ruling elites and favoured (especially wealthy and academic/formerly priestly) clients, at the expense of society at large.
When the truth is revealed, as in the present case of the Panama Papers, our political elite acts surprised and indignant, perhaps with sincerity, but if so, with little understanding of how and for whom the system works.
Why have academics (and political editors), who are paid good money as authorities on understanding the system, not recognised its true nature?
Like their medieval predecessors and counterparts, academics (and editors) are privileged clients and employees of the state, i.e. of the system, with a massive personal self-interest (subconscious more than conscious) in rationalising and defending its role, self-image (as our "nation") and ideologies (social, political, economic and ethical), on which the state bases its claim to moral and knowledgeable authority.
Current academic (and editorial) understanding of the system is on the level of Ptolemaic astronomy or Galenic medicine, because still stuck in a pre-Darwinian dark age, as a consequence of a previous generation of academics having made a taboo of viewing their own species from a Darwinian perspective, it in overreaction to the Nazis having hijacked and abused the half-baked ideas of social Darwinism.
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