People will do what you pay them to do. For everyone who objects on moral or social grounds there is at least two others who will not care. It does not matter how harmful their actions are to others, to the environment, to social order, or to any notions of truth, there always will be enough, be more than enough, who will do anything if the money is plentiful or guaranteed to last long enough.

        Governments sometimes delude themselves into thinking they can control this. They do a better job convincing their populaces that they can. To a certain extent they can. Where government intervention in opposition makes something not profitable, or unduly risky, takers will be fewer. The greater the risks, the greater the rewards must be. If the reward is thought to be great enough, many will do almost anything. In these matters, governments wills are meaningless. And if the potential for profit is great enough, the governments will be bought as well, being made up as they are of individuals, vulnerable to temptation, greed, fear, and manipulation of their own interests.

        Beyond the weakening of governments against their own interests by corruption, they will always seek to ally themselves with those who can deliver the goods, provide for stability, insure continued revenues, minimize potential treats to their long term survival and their own interests. Those individuals, corporations, or organizations which can best provide this will always have their governments favor. Laws will be written especially to suit their interests, where this is not possible, enforcement of contrary rules and regulations against their interests will not be enforced. This is not corruption in the traditional sense, this is reality, business as usual, and unlikely to ever be changed. 

       Corruption as we define it is when one or two of the leaders go too far, too openly profit personally at the obvious expense of others or the public good. These instances provide a good show for morality's sake. They are chastised or incarcerated, occasionally executed, for not holding the publics interest always at heart, for overstepping the bounds of trust. This is what the public sees. What is really happening is either they made mistakes so obvious someone had to call them on it or the balance of power shifted, they lost the support of those who put them in power or those against them saw an opportunity to humiliate them and was able to make use of it. 

        Such minor corruption is insignificant. One persons failings whether set up or self-inflicted, are usually only exposed to gain shifts in public opinions on policy matters or in attempts to wrest power from one group to another. It is the previously mentioned business as usual that poses the real threat to the public good. Laws will be written, industries formed around whatever will guarantee the safe existence of any particular leadership or state. The greater the threats, real or imagined, the more extreme the laws will be in their scope. The more apprehensive the public is to these supposed or real threats to their nation states, if that is where their primary loyalties lie, the more they will be willing to sacrifice their rights to object, or to put up with what always will be called "temporary" inconveniences to their own interests, health or well beings. In reality these are rarely let up when the threats ease for they rarely will be told when it has. 

        Where a publics primary loyalty lies is the real gauge by which to measure attempted political shifts. Each nations national government would of course like its citizens primarily to think of themselves as members of their particular nation first and foremost. The more they are able to do this, the greater power they wield. Economic institutions, corporations, have taken much of that power away. As events have shown, governments may come and go but corporations go on and so will their jobs. Germany within a number of years when from Democracy to Fascism and back but several well known corporations were so well rooted as powers in their own right, more or less kept chugging along. The names of the people at the top may have changed but the jobs remained, so the opinions of the workers mattered not as much as their need to survive and in a modern society most must work continuously or lose whatever they might have. Those who write the paychecks for large percentages of the population have power more entrenched than those who think they can regulate this, unless public will is so far united behind a particular leader or cause that the governments can affect more than just token regulation. 

        Rarely do national governments have even this much power as to have a great majority of its citizens thinking first and foremost of themselves as members of their nation state. The United States has done well in this regard given its diversity, being able to focus on certain pivotal points in history as sources of pride and nationhood as being open and inclusive while doing a pretty effective job at minimizing what might tend to disprove these assumptions. Iconizing Lincoln and Martin Luther King glazes over slavery and a lack of equal treatment for all, which had always been an American ideal if not in fact. The best success for selling this is the successes of those who would be and have become its citizens. The ability to ensure individuals that their goals will be or at least might be attainable or more attainable because they are in a place which values them more. Whatever the reality may be in any given age, the so named American Dream remains its governments greatest asset at home and abroad. 

        European nation states also have great majorities of it citizens thinking of themselves first and foremost as members of their particular nations. This is due to by and large to long standing established borders of ethnocentric groups speaking within those borders by and large common languages, though obviously this has been changing recently. Countries with newer borders or large diverse ethnic groups within their borders speaking different languages cannot achieve national identity as easily and rely much more on propaganda, indoctrination of patriotism of children at young ages, or simple suppression of expression of other national, sub-national, or cultural identities. 

        This is not to say that nations with solid ethnocentric majorities will not use such methods as well. Such nations will resort to such devices in the interest of the long term survivability due to political or cultural threats, or when the government has a tenuous grip on the support of its people once a radical political shift occurs or when it fails to provide an adequate standard of living for large enough groups of its citizens that it becomes in danger of losing power, in a coup or in a fair and open election. 

        The question which everyone wonders at some point or another is who is really in charge? On one level it is the nation states. They can imprison any individual on anything, manufacture evidence to justify silencing anyone, any movement, and get enough of its opinions expressed in both independent media and in those cases, state controlled media, that their publics or some portions thereof, will cheer it. At another level it is the economic entities, individual and corporate, which can tilt whoever is in power one way or the other, support or oppose the official state line in regards to the media, now consolidated in the hands of disturbingly few, disturbingly large media conglomerates which when acting in unison provide the same propaganda power as any nation with state dominated media could wield, yet with the added notion of irrefutability of being free, open, and unbiased. The more faith one has in its media being open and untainted, which even in the best of cases will have its content decided by a relative few determining what is and is not news worthy, and never free completely from having their choices in turn decided for them by those writing their paychecks, the more susceptible these nations are to complete manipulation. No one is manipulated more or as well as one who thinks he is not manipulated at all. We all are, the extent of which we may never fully know. 

        Nowadays it is in vogue in some circles to think that some supra-national clandestine world government is really in control in league with corporations to subvert national control and remove yet one more level of control individuals have over their own lives, for those few individuals left who think they have any control over their national governments perhaps. International governments are beginning to take hold and entrench themselves and mostly riding the support of both international corporations which seek global reach, and the support of developed nations seeking to institutionalize the present economic world situation which is presently in their favor, but this is hardly a secret. Given the military insanity of the human species, the ever present escalation of nations gaining weapons of mass destruction, we as a species are standing in the middle of a minefield with new mines being added exponentially, thus the considerable growing reluctance to make any movements at all. It would be comforting as well as perhaps chilling to think this is all part of some great design for the future of humanity, or as some evil global conspiracy, whether it is true or not. In reality it is the result of both greed and fear, in whatever proportions I doubt anyone could gauge. 

        We also like to believe that it is the public who are in charge. We after all sign petitions, vote in elections, go on strikes, and given things to do to feel that we are the ones in charge. A small victory here and there whether won or handed usually will placate the public need for feeling empowered, but the complexity of international relations or development, whenever a public thinks it can grasp it, such notions are easily shattered. Experts, or so-proclaimed experts, will chart national and international policies, provide convenient fall guys should things go wrong, a barrier of accountability for those in power. And those in power provide the same purpose. If simply getting new experts does not placate the populace, they change the people who hired them, the leadership, though gradually coming to realize that it doesn't really matter who leads, this person or that, this party or that, the big picture remains, the mine field wins. 

        The reality is no one is in charge. Each is reacting to whatever happens. A rogue country does this, a rogue company does that, a nation or leader goes nuts with anti-something furor or, in the case of a leader, just gets too full of himself, and throws the whole plans of everyone out of whack. Corporations have the best long term prospects yet are the most vulnerable. They have no borders, governments can seize their assets, and are made up of, when they actually tend to think of themselves as such, entirely members of the public. Governments though they like to define themselves as calling the shots, often are completely changed overnight, and other than temporary work stoppages and the inevitable reverse coups in some instances, life pretty much goes on the same. 

        Surely people are the least expendable. How can corporations or governments exist if all the people are gone? Obviously in this case people are primary when viewed in total, however they rarely are. Governments can still plan for and imagine worlds without certain others, corporations take into account large losses of life whether by environmental accidents, or by poor product design, or by side-effects or consequences of products which can cause illness or death, and protect themselves with insurance against these possibilities. People as a whole are still valued though obviously no one is considered indispensable, and often in many ways, large numbers of potential casualties are in one way or another taken into account by some organization somewhere. 

        Yet the real threat both to humanity and each individual is the redefinition of people or the common good. Surely at least as far as we are concerned, human governments, human corporations, will not outlive humanity. If they err, or we err through having them speak for us as a whole, too greatly and mess the whole thing up, one mine in the minefield too many and no path to any future, then the question of what is an individual and what constitutes the public good will not matter in the least. Barring that eventuality, we must pause now to define what it is we hope our governments and other invented devices for us to interact with each other by, to provide for us a map or measure for the future before we completely have relinquished all power to them and to chance. 

        With media manipulation now an art form, and science rapidly evolving to the point of direct and completely effective control which may one day be effective on a large enough scale to reduce democracy to a to controlled oligarchy by unseen rulers, there is the need to assert now what it is that makes us human, what we as a species value above all else, and how to entrench those values in present or future systems of government that they shall not be lost on future generations or latter incarnations of our own when we have further the power to dampen, confuse, or purge these aspirations through manufactured apathy, solicited greed and self-interest or coercion, or outright more effective forms of direct manipulation. We stand as a species both on the verge of entering into the maturity of being able to do ourselves in but choosing not to, and also as one on the verge of self-inflicted senility of forgetting who we really are by in the end not knowing or thinking what we really want and leaving it up to others, fairly or not fairly, by getting us to believe whatever they decide we ought. 

        The most promising way of guaranteeing as best we can a future of human beings of free will instead of automatons is the codifying of the following ideals. Free will ought to be above reproach on all fronts. Attempts to compromise it for any people or any individual should be treated as tantamount to murder for it most certainly is in the same vein. All action designed to preempt behavior by punishing people for what they have not done yet but are considered likely to do for one reason or another ought to be discouraged by governments and societies in general by the strongest terms possible. Treating the public like children that must be prevented from injuring themselves is tantamount to enslaving them, and all governments in one way or another overstep themselves to treat its citizens in such a manner whenever they are allowed to deliberate real matters vital to the publics interest without a public dialogue or in secret, or by viewing the public as unqualified to judge for themselves this issue or that, this law or that. 

        Complete freedom of thought is an essential, if not the most essential, component of free will. It must be absolute or it will be forever dead. The easiest way to control people is to outlaw wrongful thinking, to use the notion of insanity or mental illness as a club with a greater power to beat down the human spirit than any other. So obvious the example of the use of such a method as political suppression by the former Soviet Union, it is easy to forget that all nations criminalize certain thoughts or beliefs and will seek them out and change them by enforcing or attempting to force renunciation of them in sanitariums. Many of the ideals we hold today of equality, of science, would once have made any individual possessing or expressing them guilty of heresy, of treason, and if allowed to live at all would have been cause enough to be treated as insane. Once any beliefs or opinions are considered out of bounds, however potentially harmful to others or to social order, and are used to remove a person from society, it opens the door for ANY other belief in principle or in practice to be used in the same manner and establishes a precedent which cannot be caged. Since all nations have embraced such methods to varying degrees for extreme beliefs, such continuing abuse of freedom of thought is inevitable to spread. 

        Being individuals of communal societies with interaction with others a necessary component of our existences, the expression of all such views should equally be beyond reproach by legislation or by social as well as physical isolation, save only the extreme instance of immediate harm to safety, such as the notable example of yelling "fire" in a public theater. Any ideas extreme enough will cause any individual to be incarcerated or institutionalized under the premise that they endanger the public safety or encourage unlawful behavior. Unless such harm is immediate, direct, and indisputable by every member of society as being harmful, it is always better to err on the side of too little restraints than too much. Physical harm, and immediate at that, should be the only restraint for preventing one from expressing ones beliefs. Every culture has some sacrosanct areas off limits and unquestionable, and every society will enforce such predispositions with censoring individuals for stating conflicting notions. Thinking this is not so only enables it to spread to other aspects of our behavior unchallenged. No aspect of human behavior or values ought to enforce compliance by the attempt of any government or society or culture to prevent the expression of anyone from giving airs to their disagreements. Without being bothered by such others extreme beliefs, without risk of being profoundly disturbed by others insanity, we are giving up the right, most literally, to think for ourselves. And should any nations law, custom, doctrine, or belief need to suppress dissenting viewpoints, it is most likely one of the ones most in need of being rethought.