There are no good organizations, only ones that aren’t completely corrupt yet. Consider that to start and maintain an organization takes significant capital and energy expenditures upfront, which means you need to fund them from somewhere and ask sources of funding are corrupted. Consider: there are no long lasting egalitarian, distributed power, grassroots organizations that can compete at a level of social influence that can overcome or resist the existing power structure.

I’ve looked at every possible organization that could theoretically fit including; MSF a.k.a. doctors without borders, swords to plowshares, goodwill industries (who employ significant numbers of disabled people for sub min wages while the CEO makes 3M+), Mondragon etc… and they all have exactly the same fucked up incentives

why? because there is no way to survive as a structure, if your org is made up of people who want to eat and don’t want to be a monk.

unless your organization is the lead maximalist resource dominator you will be overrun by some organization with no ethics

Ultimately it comes down to the fact that people have to trade physical and mental work for money to survive. So there is no alternative to do the “right thing” without also risking your own safety and stability in your chosen society. 99.99999% of people are completely unwilling to risk their life on behalf of any particular philosophy - if only because those people don’t feel strongly enough about any particular philosophy to actually put themselves on the line for it.

So whoever has the most money, has the ability to get the most people to work for their goals.

Unfortunately the people with all the money/power do not care about anything other than growing their own personal power

I would love to hear more about your definition of corruption and why it is inevitable. From what I can tell it is that an organization with “morals”, meaning some sort of code restricting their possible actions, will be out competed by an organization without “morals”, whatever that might be. I think it is compelling at face value, but I’m not sure I see a world of wolves out there. Maybe I’m naive.

I want to argue that the rule of law is one moral system that applies to all organizations. Sure, some overstep and may gain some advantage due to that. But in principle and hopefully on average the result should be net negative. In democratic countries the laws are more or less directly the will of the people, about as egalitarian as we can get, no? Anyways, following the rule of laws should lead to “morally sound” corporations as defined by the people. Corporations can go further than what is legally required, too. That is often used in marketing.

Finally i think the same principles apply wherever humans (or other species) compete. Humans on the whole are not entirely cruel barbarians, we try to care for individuals who are not able to care for themselves etc. Whether “true” altruism exists is another discussion, but it certainly looks like it. So if that’s how people act, why should corporations be more corrupt than the bodies that make them up and govern them?

Who makes the laws?

The rich and powerful through lobbying and direct corruption. Here’s a link just from today: https://www.somo.nl/the-secretive-cabal-of-us-polluters-that...

So any “rules based order” simply locks in the rules of whomever has the most money to bribe politicians

There are no corruption free entities because they are starting with corrupt roots and grow through nepotism and political favors

The proof of this is dripping out of every seam of human organization

Have you looked at sports federations (especially in Europe, not in US). They're primarily funded by membership fees, some survived over century, and while they have some governance issues (like conflict of interest due to wearing two hats – regulatory function and event organiszing one), it would be a strong claim to say that they're corrupted by their roots/nature.

In fact one of my close friends is a co-owner of the Kraken

Sports teams and leagues are primarily owned by billionaires - like the amount of discussion around who is the owner is a significant portion of sports reporting

The only exception I know off the top of my head I believe is the Packers are community owned but even then I would be skeptical as to how the power dynamics play out in practice

> Sports teams and leagues are primarily owned by billionaires

My question was about sports federations, and not about leagues and commercial clubs (and definitely not in US). Take FIS (International Ski and Snowboard Federation) for example, or smaller European national and regional federations.

You could point to any organization smaller than 1000 people is being reasonably coherent I don’t think that this is relevant for the context we were discussing the Amish also doing a pretty good job and maintaining stable community but they are irrelevant

What do you think about the idea of workplace democracy? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy

I think it’s a weak form of a mutual cooperative - which unfortunately doesn’t have the ability to defeat a state-billionaire backed corporation in the market.

I guess I don't know what you prefer, I'm guessing anarchy in the academic sense?

But I want to add, that workplace democracy would be turning the billionaire owned companies into democracies themselves. That is the goal of economic democracy at least, changing the fiefdoms into democracies can't be a worse system.

I don’t prefer anything

At the most basic biological level the human species can’t organize action larger than a few hundred people in any kind of coherent way.

There are no coherent organizations that are larger than a few hundred people.

It is a biological impossibility for the human species to maintain long lasting (thousands of years) groups that can have social structures that last long enough to encode genetic fitness changes at the rate of environmental change.,

We do not have the ability to comfortably maintain coherent heirarchies, and subordinated structures, around a coherent epistemological grounding.

Humans are not eusocial.

I just fundamentally don’t see any future for the species level organization whatsoever

> ask sources of funding are corrupted

What does it mean, exactly? (I assume it's a typo - s/ask/all/, "all sources funding are corrupted")?

Yes its a typo - should’ve been “all”

> all sources of funding are corrupted

Still, what does it mean? Why all sources of funding are "corrupted"?

That means there does not exist a mechanism for one person or group, who has excess resources to reliably transfer those resources to another group in a way that does not have an implied return or reward function of some sort to the giver

Because of the nature of this transactional process it corrupts any possible transfer of power

So consolidated power in any form, is not equitable and the state of physics doesn’t allow for another regime. It’s a munchausen trilemma

> why? because there is no way to survive as a structure, if your org is made up of people who want to eat and don’t want to be a monk.

The worse offenders in terms of corrupting power structures seem to be religious organisations, so being a monk is out too.

That power eventually corrupts shouldn’t rule out an organisation, but if it does, start your own and keep it to one employee.

I’d be curious what you identified as the shortcomings of e.g. MSF or Mondragon. I might throw semi-decentralized social ventures like the IFRC in the mix there too: that emblem alone sure carries an almost-talismanic degree of social weight, seemingly worldwide, I think in large part because they’re foresworn from swinging around their influence outside of their lane.

And I mean… “don’t want to live like a monk” seems like a telling qualifier: the whole monastic lifestyle seems pretty widespread and enduring across cultures and through time… is the humbler mode of religious devotion an example of what you’re looking for?

In any case you’ve clearly thought deeply and widely about this question—I’d be interested to read your thoughts if you end up collecting them somewhere!

I’m simply acknowledging that only a tiny fraction of any group will find themselves devoted to the group in the “monastic” way of self erasure