Power Corrupts at Every Scale: Why Governance Systems Are Structurally Obsolete From apartment boards to global institutions, the same pattern repeats—people granted power optimize for maintaining it rather than serving those who granted it
The pattern is fractal—identical corruption at every level of organization. Apartment complex boards refuse shareholders their voting rights to preserve control. National politicians perpetuate problems to maintain fundraising and relevance. Global institutions allow Sudan to starve while resources exist because conflict serves financial and strategic interests.
The scale changes but the mechanism doesn’t: people granted power optimize for maintaining that power rather than serving the purpose that justified it originally. A board member who empowers shareholders loses control. A politician who solves problems loses campaign issues. An institution that achieves its stated mission loses funding justification. The system rewards those who perpetuate need, punish those who eliminate it.
I discovered this through direct experience. After reporting my building’s board to Australian regulators for systematically denying shareholder voting rights, the response was predictable: acknowledge the problem, recommend reforms, change nothing structural. Because the people enforcing accountability operate within the same incentive framework—their positions depend on problems continuing to exist at manageable levels.
I’ve watched wars continue as background noise since childhood—Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, now Ukraine and Gaza. I’ve seen greed celebrated as ambition while depression and anxiety become epidemic. I’ve felt the pressure to perform authenticity rather than be authentic, to optimize for success metrics that contradict actual well-being. Most people I know don’t relate to this society either—they just perform their assigned roles while feeling the dissonance between what we’re told matters and what actually creates human flourishing. These aren’t bugs; they’re features. A population optimized for well-being would be ungovernable under current structures.
Until we recognize governance systems are optimized for elite extraction rather than public service, we’ll keep replacing corrupt individuals while preserving corrupt structures. The political class must be abolished not because politicians are evil, but because the role itself has become obsolete.
The mechanics operate identically regardless of scale or sector. Power creates incentive to maintain power, which requires maintaining the conditions that justify power’s existence. An apartment building board derives authority from managing shareholder interests. If shareholders exercise full voting rights, they might replace the board or question decisions. The rational individual response for board members is restricting shareholder access to information and limiting voting opportunities, ensuring continuity of their positions. When shareholders discover this pattern and report violations to regulatory authorities—as happened in one Sydney apartment complex where board members systematically denied voting rights on new resolutions—the regulatory response validates the pattern rather than disrupting it. Acknowledge the complaint, recommend procedural reforms, impose minimal penalties if any, change nothing about the incentive structure that produced the violation. The board members who restricted voting rights face no personal consequences severe enough to alter behavior, and the structure ensuring future boards will face identical incentives remains intact.
This same mechanism operates in national politics with higher stakes but identical logic. Politicians require problems to campaign against, crises to demonstrate leadership through, and conflicts to justify their continued relevance. A politician who actually solves homelessness, reduces crime to minimal levels, or achieves infrastructure excellence eliminates their own campaign material. The optimal strategy becomes managing problems at levels high enough to justify intervention but persistent enough to require ongoing political attention. This explains why issues like homelessness, infrastructure decay, and social fragmentation persist despite obvious solutions existing. The solutions exist—Housing First programs demonstrably work, infrastructure maintenance protocols are well-established, community investment reduces isolation—but implementing them fully would eliminate the political utility of the problems.
After 20 years running a publishing business, I recognized this dynamic immediately. The content that served readers best—deep analysis, nuanced reporting, uncomfortable truths—couldn’t compete with content optimized for clicks and advertisers. The structure filtered for commercial success over editorial excellence. Politics works identically: the structure filters for campaign success over problem-solving.
International institutions demonstrate the pattern at maximum scale. When Sudan faces mass starvation, the resources to prevent it exist. The logistics expertise exists. The agricultural capacity exists. What doesn’t exist is incentive for the actors controlling those resources to deploy them effectively, because the conflict generating the starvation serves financial interests of arms dealers, strategic interests of regional powers, and organizational interests of aid institutions whose funding depends on ongoing crisis. Solving the underlying political and economic dysfunction that produces famine would require sustained commitment over decades with no immediate payoff for the individuals making decisions. Managing the famine through periodic intervention that prevents total collapse while maintaining chronic crisis provides funding justification, maintains institutional relevance, and creates opportunities for political positioning without requiring any actor to sacrifice their immediate interests for long-term stability.
The human dimension reveals how reasonable people operating within corrupt structures produce systematically corrupt outcomes. The apartment board members denying shareholders voting rights likely didn’t begin their tenure planning to violate governance requirements. They probably joined the board believing they would serve owner interests competently. But once in position, the incentives shifted. Every decision that empowered shareholders created potential for their own removal. Every transparency measure increased accountability they’d prefer to avoid. Every question about their management threatened their authority. The rational response to these incentives—restrict information, limit voting, consolidate control—emerged not from individual moral failure but from structural pressures inherent to the role.
I reported my building’s board to ASIC after documenting systematic denial of shareholder voting rights. The response validated everything I’d suspected about how power operates: acknowledgment of the violation, recommendation to follow procedures, zero penalties, zero structural change. Within months, the same board members resumed the same practices. That’s when I understood—the system wasn’t broken, it was working exactly as designed.
The pattern repeated in Italy. During two months near my family’s home, a wind turbine generated acoustic noise disrupting the neighborhood. Locals told me it had been operating this way for 20 years—two decades of complaints achieving nothing. I wrote one letter threatening to copy the Prefetto (regional authority), and within weeks they turned it off. Not because my complaint was more legitimate than 20 years of others, but because I threatened to escalate beyond the local power structure that had ignored residents for decades. The turbine operators responded not to the problem but to the threat of accountability reaching someone outside their sphere of influence.
When reported to authorities, board members likely believed they’d done nothing wrong because the behavior that violated formal rules aligned perfectly with the informal logic of power preservation.
Politicians experience this dynamic with greater intensity and sophistication. The candidate who enters politics idealistically discovers that solving problems threatens campaign viability. The representative who prioritizes constituent service over party loyalty loses committee assignments and funding. The legislator who refuses corporate donations can’t compete with opponents who accept them. At each decision point, the choice that serves public interest conflicts with the choice that serves political survival. Over time, the individuals who remain in the system are those who learned to optimize for survival rather than service—not because they’re more corrupt than those who left, but because the structure filtered for compatibility with its incentive framework.
International officials managing crises face similar pressures without electoral accountability providing even minimal constraint. The aid administrator whose program successfully eliminates the need for aid in a region eliminates their own organization’s mandate for that region. The diplomat whose negotiation achieves lasting peace removes the justification for ongoing diplomatic presence. The institution that achieves its stated mission faces funding cuts or dissolution. The rational organizational response is ensuring problems remain at levels requiring ongoing intervention but never achieving the transformation that would make intervention unnecessary. This creates perverse incentives where success metrics focus on inputs (money spent, programs launched, meetings held) rather than outcomes (problems solved, self-sufficiency achieved, intervention rendered unnecessary).
Historical precedents illuminate how power structures optimize for self-preservation across centuries and contexts. The medieval Catholic Church derived authority from mediating between believers and salvation. If believers achieved direct spiritual connection without clerical intercession, the Church’s role became obsolete. The institutional response was creating complex theological frameworks requiring priestly interpretation, selling indulgences that only clergy could authorize, and maintaining exclusive control over scriptural access. The corruption wasn’t incidental to the structure—it was the inevitable outcome of incentives favoring complexity and dependence over simplicity and autonomy.
This mirrors what I observed in my building. The board didn’t need to violate rules overtly—they created procedural complexity requiring their interpretation, controlled access to information only they could provide, and maintained exclusive authority over decisions affecting everyone. When challenged, they claimed to follow proper governance while the complexity itself prevented meaningful accountability. The Church and the apartment board operated identically: create dependence through complexity, then extract power from being the only ones who can navigate it.
When reformers challenged these practices, the Church didn’t reform the incentive structure; it suppressed reformers until the structure fractured entirely during the Reformation.
Colonial administrations demonstrated identical dynamics. The explicit mission was civilizing and developing colonized territories toward self-governance. The implicit incentive was maintaining colonial control to extract resources and preserve administrative positions. The result was governance systems that created permanent dependency—education systems training colonized populations for subordinate roles rather than leadership, economic structures extracting raw materials while preventing industrial development, political frameworks allowing participation without power. When independence movements forced decolonization, the departing powers left governance structures optimized for extraction rather than service, ensuring post-colonial governments would inherit dysfunctional institutions requiring ongoing external intervention.
Modern regulatory agencies replicate this pattern in domains explicitly designed to prevent it. Financial regulators derive authority from preventing market failures. If they actually prevented all significant market failures through aggressive enforcement, their expanded budgets and authorities would face political challenge during periods without crisis. The rational organizational response is allowing problems to develop to levels justifying intervention while preventing catastrophes that would trigger fundamental restructuring. This explains the pattern of regulatory capture where agencies tasked with oversight become aligned with industries they regulate—not primarily through corruption in the traditional sense, but through shared interest in maintaining systems at current scale and complexity. Simplifying regulations would reduce need for both industry compliance departments and regulatory enforcement staff. Both groups benefit from complexity requiring ongoing management.
Competing interpretations of governance failure reflect fundamentally different assumptions about whether the problems are correctable within existing structures. Reform advocates argue the solution is better people—more ethical politicians, more vigilant citizens, stronger accountability mechanisms. This framework assumes the roles themselves remain viable if occupied by individuals committed to service over self-interest.
I’m testing this reform hypothesis in real-time—reporting violations, escalating to authorities, following proper channels. In Italy, it worked when I bypassed captured local power and threatened escalation to the Prefetto. In Australia, I’ve now reported violations twice to ASIC—once in October, again last week—and we’ll see whether regulators operating within the same system can enforce accountability, or whether the pattern holds. The evidence so far contradicts the reform framework. Reformers entering corrupt systems reliably become corrupted or expelled, not because they lack integrity but because the incentive structure makes service incompatible with survival. Electing outsiders produces the same outcomes as electing insiders once the outsiders face the same pressures. Strengthening accountability through oversight creates new layers of authority that develop their own self-preservation incentives.
System defenders argue democracy requires politics, that the messy process of negotiation and compromise is the price of avoiding authoritarian alternatives. This framework treats current governance structures as natural and inevitable rather than as designed systems that could be replaced with different designs. The assumption is that any alternative to electoral politics and representative government would be worse, therefore we must accept the corruption as unavoidable cost. This ignores that current systems are relatively recent historical innovations, that they were designed for contexts radically different from present reality, and that technological and organizational tools now exist that make alternatives feasible which weren’t possible when existing systems were created.
The structural analysis argues the roles themselves have become obsolete. The position of “politician”—someone whose primary function is winning elections by appealing to voters while raising money from donors and maintaining party loyalty—creates incentives incompatible with problem-solving. The position of “board member”—someone granted authority over resources they don’t own to serve interests they don’t directly bear costs of failing—creates incentives for self-dealing. The position of “administrator” in organizations funded based on problem persistence rather than problem resolution creates incentives for perpetual intervention. These aren’t fixable through better people or stronger rules. They require replacing the roles with different structures that align individual incentives with collective interests.
The verification challenge in documenting systemic corruption lies in the gap between formal rules and informal logic. When apartment board members restrict shareholder voting, they violate explicit governance requirements documented in regulations. When politicians perpetuate problems for campaign purposes, they violate no laws while contradicting their stated mission of solving constituent problems. When institutions maintain crises at levels justifying ongoing intervention, they meet formal performance metrics while failing their ultimate purpose. The behavior is simultaneously rule-compliant and purpose-violating, making accountability difficult because the corruption operates through the gap between what systems formally require and what they actually reward.
Reporting governance failures to regulatory authorities reveals this dynamic starkly. Submit documented evidence of board members denying voting rights, and the regulator will acknowledge the violation, recommend the board follow proper procedures, perhaps issue a warning. The board members face no personal consequences. The shareholders who reported the violation may face retaliation through the same power structures they challenged. The underlying incentive making future violations rational remains unchanged. The regulator—whose own position depends on ongoing violations at levels requiring oversight but not suggesting complete regulatory failure—has no incentive to pursue structural reform that would eliminate their mandate.
This pattern explains why wars continue since childhood despite obvious catastrophic costs, why greed gets celebrated as ambition despite producing inequality and instability, why depression and anxiety reach epidemic levels despite societies being wealthier than ever, why fear-based governance persists despite claiming to pursue freedom. These aren’t accidental outcomes or temporary problems awaiting solutions. They’re the designed outputs of systems optimized for elite extraction of wealth and power through maintaining populations in states of manageable crisis. A population experiencing genuine well-being, authentic connection, and effective self-governance would be impossible to control through the mechanisms current power structures depend on.
The consequences of recognizing governance systems are structurally obsolete extend beyond critique to requiring alternative frameworks. If the problem is individuals, the solution is better selection—elect different politicians, appoint different administrators, empower different regulators. If the problem is rules, the solution is reform—strengthen oversight, increase transparency, impose accountability. If the problem is the roles themselves, the solution is abolition—replace structures optimized for power maintenance with structures optimized for service.
The alternative isn’t anarchy or authoritarian technocracy. It’s administrative governance optimized for outcomes rather than power maintenance. Instead of politicians whose careers depend on problems continuing, appoint temporary administrators whose contracts specify measurable outcomes and expire upon achievement or failure. Instead of boards whose authority derives from limiting shareholder power, create rotating service roles with full transparency and instant revocability.
The technological infrastructure exists: secure digital platforms enable continuous stakeholder input rather than periodic voting, data systems allow tracking outcomes rather than activities, communication networks permit coordination without centralized control. The obstacles aren’t technical—they’re political. The current political class whose existence depends on current structures will resist replacement.
But recognition creates possibility. Once enough people understand governance systems are obsolete, the question shifts from “should we reform politics?” to “what do we build to replace it?” That’s when change becomes inevitable, just as monarchy’s obsolescence made democracy inevitable despite monarchs resisting their displacement. The fractal nature of corruption—identical at every scale—means the solution must be structural, not individual. Replace the roles, not the people occupying them.
This doesn’t mean eliminating governance or administration. It means replacing governance roles that create perverse incentives with structures that align them. A politician whose career depends on problems continuing has incentive to perpetuate problems. An administrator whose contract specifies measurable outcomes and expires upon achievement or failure has incentive to solve problems. A board member whose authority derives from limiting shareholder power has incentive to restrict transparency. A temporary administrator whose role is explicitly service to owners with full information access has no power to protect and therefore no incentive to restrict transparency.
The technological tools for implementing alternative structures now exist. Secure digital platforms enable continuous rather than periodic input from stakeholders. Data systems allow tracking outcomes rather than activities. Communication networks permit coordination without centralized control. The obstacles aren’t technical; they’re political—the current political class whose existence depends on current structures will resist their replacement. But recognition that governance systems are obsolete creates space for designing successors, just as recognition that monarchy was obsolete created space for democracy despite monarchs resisting their displacement.
The fractal nature of corruption—identical pattern at every scale from apartment boards to global institutions—reveals this isn’t about specific domains requiring reform. It’s about a fundamental design flaw in how power is structured. Until the flaw is addressed structurally rather than individually, replacing corrupt people with ethical people will simply create new corrupt people as the structure shapes behavior more powerfully than individual intentions. The political class must be abolished not because politicians are evil, but because systems optimized for elite extraction make service structurally impossible regardless of individual virtue.
When the pattern repeats at every level of organization, and regulatory responses consistently acknowledge problems while preserving structures that generate them, the conclusion is unavoidable—governance systems require replacement, not reform, because they’re optimized for outcomes nobody actually wants except those extracting power and wealth from their perpetuation.
Tags: Political Reform, Governance, Systemic Corruption, Power Structures, Democracy, Accountability, Institutional Failure, Political Economy, Regulatory Capture, Scale-Invariant Patterns