[pjc50]

I think it's the other way round: corruption, or at least nepotism, is the natural state of man just as dictatorship is the natural state of government. It takes considerable effort and ideological groundwork to build anything else. Just as you can't airdrop democracy onto countries.

For example in the UK, if one were to write a history of corruption-fighting there would be three big strands since the 1500s. Religion: the replacement of a church that sold salvation with (sometimes extreme) Protestant moralism. Military: at one point commissions in the army were bought and sold. This practice was replaced with more meritocratic promotion in order to win wars. And financial: English law seems to be considered one of the world's fairest regimes for contract law, and is often used for contracts between non-English big companies.