Only the institution of eunuchs and celibacy can rescue officials from the corruption

Alexey Chadayev, political analyst

For many years I have been repeating on occasion the phrase: the primary source of corruption is not generals, but generals' wives (children, mother-in-law, mistresses, nephews, cousins, etc.); in short, in the broad sense of "family".

One of the reasons for the amazing vitality of the Christian Church as an institution over a period exceeding the history of all currently existing states is the obligatory celibacy of the highest (and among Catholics - and ordinary) clergy. It is clear that this is a solution that has a lot of disadvantages and costs, but by and large it worked. The family, clan is an institution much more ancient and solid than, for example, the state or the same church, and based on factors much more effective - sex, consanguinity, paternal / maternal / filial / filial duty, etc.

Another interesting, but very tough decision is the institution of court eunuchs in China and Byzantium. Here people at the physical level were deprived of the opportunity to have sex, and thereby removed the mentioned risks.

This is the place for an important generalization. A place in power, and especially in the state apparatus, is a place where you are a function and do not belong to yourself. Not only your life and your time, but also your natural human manifestations, desires and instincts should be limited in one way or another - if it's just another way, you can't resist the temptation to take advantage of the enormous opportunities that this very power gives and turn them personally (and family) for the benefit. And you can somehow explain and build this to yourself - but do the same with your loved ones, who, unlike you, are not there, but only nearby, but at the same time are still "ordinary people" at times more difficult. And I personally, including myself, saw and experienced the effect of this rigid mechanic - when you have a choice either to distance yourself from your loved ones, to “become a stranger,” or to start living according to the principle “all into the house”. There are always either rotten compromises, or tough decisions or / or. In my case, the decision was to move away from the world of "jobs", but this is also a kind of rotten compromise.

Theoretically, it is possible in some secret Hogwarts to train a cohort of non-silver officials who will make decisions worth billions, sitting on a state salary of several tens of thousands, and be guided only by the motives of the common good and greatness of the Fatherland. But it's hard for me to imagine in what kind of Hogwarts it is necessary to prepare for them wives / husbands who are ready to agree with this state of affairs. Especially in a society where this lifestyle, to put it mildly, is not a mass norm.

Of course, there will always be resonators who will tell you that the solution to the problem is to exclude the very possibility for the bureaucracy to make decisions worth billions in offices, by making any procedure completely public. But this is utopia. Okay, there is the military / defense sphere, where decisions, by definition, cannot and should not be public. But here you are, for example, designing a new road - and it would be better to keep secret where it will pass so that cunning squatters do not buy out these lands under the guise of "public procedures" and do not have time to build expensive objects on it. This is just a story from my practice, and there are thousands of them.

Nazarbayev's story is a story about how an intelligent person with a background of a fairly modern administrative system at that time tried to build a sovereign state out of himself, in fact, in an open field. and her.

Now, under Tokayev, they will probably try to somehow transform it into a "real" ethnocracy - also barbaric, but still a somewhat more advanced model. Not sure how it works. The same thing for Russia is sought by "Russian nationalists" - but, I'm afraid, if it comes to practical implementation, most likely it will turn out about the same - the elder zhuz, the main clan, and all the others, although also Russian, but in life there will be mambets. feed with fairy tales about how all sorts of non-Russians eat up their bread. I just don't see any defense mechanisms against such a scenario.

Except, perhaps, the institution of eunuchs.

Original is here.