What Corruption Can't Face

One snowy night many years ago, I waited at the Greenbelt Metro station in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, for a ride that never came. I was to lead a vestry consultation at a parish church not far from there. A taxi sat idling in the parking lot. I pecked on the window. The driver invited me in.

“Where does that lovely accent of yours come from?” I asked as we drove through the dark.

“Nigeria,” the deep bass boomed.

“Ah! I adore listening to Nigerians speak.”

He laughed.

I asked how long he’d been in the United States. He said seven years. I asked how life was here. He said he loved it. “What occasioned you to leave Nigeria?” I asked.

“CORRUPTION!” He answered with authoritative disgust.

He enumerated some instances of the way corruption had spread to every part of life. Bribes were common currency. Government officials could not be trusted. The rich were getting richer. The poor sank lower into the depths of poverty.

The taxi driver, I suspect, would hardly have believed that in a few short years Americans would witness a scale of corruption that would vie with Nigeria’s.

“Ah, com’on,” you may say. “That’s absurd.”

I suggest that it’s only absurd if you draw too tight a knot around the notion of corruption. It’s true. We have laws and a still-functioning justice system that can put some brakes on corruption. But the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slowly.

The corruption we are witnessing in broad daylight is staggering.

That’s saying something. There have been administrations before that were monumentally corrupt. Until the present one, the Grant and Harding administrations held the record as the most notorious, although neither Grant nor Harding was known to be corrupt. Not so Richard Nixon. Until now, the Nixon administration held the record for corrupting and attempting to corrupt the constitutional order of the Republic.

But the guardrails have been largely dismantled and discarded In less than two years. The majority party in Congress has largely abdicated its constitutional role of being a check to executive overreach. In both Trump administrations, the emoluments clause of the Constitution has been ignored or violated or both.

War profiteering going on this very day, while hardly novel, is carried out on a scale that boggles the mind. Tens of millions of dollars are going into the accounts of people directly involved in the prosecution of the Iran war or in the process of ostensibly bringing about its end, notably Donald Trump, Jr., the Trump family enterprises, and Steve Witkoff.

The internet search I’ve done corroborates what you might already know, since it has been widely reported in the media [1, 2, 3]

The trouble with wars, aside from the sheer devastation they wreak, is the profiteering that often ignites them and commonly results in the enrichment of those with a stake in a culture of conflict.

The Great Betrayal

Corruption, by any standard, is never good. That is why those who are corrupt sometimes flaunt their corruption as if to say, “There’s nothing wrong with what we’re doing. It’s not corruption. It’s just being smart. Good business.”

Far more frequently, however, corruption begins with a great big secret. The secret is a betrayal. The first betrayal is always the same: it is a betrayal of oneself. That, of course, assumes a conscience, which, in the case of sociopaths, is non-functional. To commit the first act of corruption, one must lie. “I don’t get paid enough.” “I’m owed this.” “I’m only getting even.” “This is really for the greater good.” “I’m doing my duty to my family,.” Psychologically, this is simple rationalization. Once you betray yourself, all the other betrayals come easily.

From the root of the lie grow the conglomerate actions that externalize corruption in its budding stage. Bribing, cheating, stealing: the agreed-upon rules governing communal behavior are first violated, then trounced, and finally trashed completely. Public servants elected to serve the people cease being accountable and instead see their offices as ATM machines dispensing a ready flow of cash.

The full flowering of corruption is not a flourishing at all, but rather a colossal withering. And a bloody withering it is. Life becomes expendable. Nature is just a landscape to be raped for its riches. Insatiable appetites for accumulating commodities, conveniences, even food deplete resources and devastate the environment. Human lives become expendable. Killing is justified. Blaming the helpless and defenseless is a tool to justify cruelty and to provoke fear and disorientation. War becomes sport. Even genocide is justified. Means of accountability die. And in the final stages of dictatorships and cartel-ruled regions, the apparatus of the State is weaponized to silence adversaries, suppress dissent, punish whistleblowers, persecute truthtellers, rip apart—verbally or more subtly—critics and perceived enemies.

What begins as betrayal develops as enrichment of wealth and power and reaches a climax in self-aggrandizement. Richard Nixon never seemed to be especially interested in money. What mattered to him was amassing and protecting power.

Self-aggrandizement programs are the products of an ego completely untethered from the Self, to put it in the vocabulary of depth psychology. Egos swell out of all proportion when they become the compass by which the person tries to live. We can’t do without the ego lest our personalities become unstable, weak, or completely disintegrate. But egos which serve no greater master are dangerous indeed.

Idolatry is Fashionable

In many ways, the entire story of the Hebrew Bible is about the emergence of monotheism. The Torah (the first five books recounting the giving of the Law or Torah) is about the contests between Yahweh and a succession of false gods. The stories that have come down to us are in a text that chronicles the dazzling attractiveness of swapping allegiance to Adonai (“the LORD”) for some substitute. In times of prosperity, prophets consistently recalled the people to standards of justice for the poor and embrace of the marginalized, occasionally stressing the rightness of being generous to those outside the community, as the books of Jonah and Ruth illustrate. In times of disaster, the prophets speak in tones of solace, exhortation, and encouragement. The North Star of morality is always Yahweh Adonai, the Holy, the True, the Reliable, the pervading Justice regulating all life.

What’s so appealing about idolatry? In fact, why even call it that? “Idolatry” sounds so, well, antiquated, maybe even judgmental.

Idols, whatever they are and in whatever context we meet them, are imposters. They are counterfeit. They are artificial substitutes for the real.

The original betrayal of the Self requires the suppression of whatever conscience there is. In effect, that is the snuffing out of the inner Light, called by whatever name you give it. It is tantamount to eventually decommissioning one’s own sense of Truth.

Conscience having been eliminated, something else will fill the vacuum. That’s where the corrupt person begins to recapitulate the old stories of idol worshipers. Ephemeral things masquerade as eternal. Cash in an offshore account, political favors, a grand title: these things are not eternal. Nor do they satisfy. Like the rich fool in Jesus’ parable, those who put their stock in bigger and better “barns” won’t have a tinker’s damn to show for it when they’re asked to reveal their souls. (Luke 12:16-21) Mortality offers no exceptions and tolerates no excuses.

Idolatry is expedience substituting for trustworthiness. Lies upon lies; blaming, shaming; deflection, distraction, pretense: all are at the ready when called on to substitute for character, community, or truth.

The End of Corruption

If you look at how Nigeria is faring as a country, you’ll see that it is consistently ranked toward the bottom of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), usually hovering between 130th and 150th out of 180 countries. For more than a quarter of a century, Nigerians have been dealing with corruption on a massive scale. In recent years, successive governments have attempted to address corruption. While making some progress, the habitual practices of corruption have often diluted and sometimes undone the efforts to clean up the mess.

The true extent of Nigeria's corruption is measured by what it has cost the population. Despite generating hundreds of billions of dollars in oil wealth, systemic leakages have meant that infrastructure—such as the national electricity grid, roads, and public hospitals—has remained severely underdeveloped. That has directly contributed to Nigeria’s becoming home to one of the largest populations of people living in extreme poverty globally, as wealth is concentrated heavily in the hands of a politically connected elite.

The real sickness of which corruption is a symptom is the delusion that something will save us from Death. Accumulating wealth, power, possessions, and positions; plastering names on buildings, monuments, and currency; obsessing even about our children or our lovers and what will become of them without us or us without them: nothing will ultimately spare us from the grave.

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by reading the encyclopedia. My main ambition was to be included in it. If we’re wise, eventually we learn that it’s not about being remembered for this or that, and certainly not about how many toys you wind up with or how many millions or billions you have in a bank account, but rather about the love you leave behind when you’re gone.

In the meantime, that love is best expressed in little acts of kindness, in laughter with friends, in acknowledging the stranger, in caring about others.

The house of humanity is big enough for us all. What do we gain by trying to claim all the rooms when we can occupy only one?

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2026

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