Idea Theft in the Workplace: Profiles, Impacts, and Countermeasures

“Idea theft,” or the appropriation of someone else’s idea, in the workplace refers to the practice whereby a person deliberately attributes to themselves the authorship of an idea, proposal, or piece of work that belongs to someone else, without giving due recognition. In other words, it is the unjustified claiming of another person’s contribution as one’s own. This often shows up in meetings or collaborative projects when an employee presents an idea that was first proposed by a colleague, receives the credit, and fails to mention the real originator. Although the phenomenon is well known in everyday business life, until recently it had not been studied as a distinct topic in the scientific literature and was usually treated as part of workplace bullying or broader toxic behaviour. More recent research, however, documents that idea theft is a distinct form of workplace misconduct and that it is particularly widespread. In studies involving more than 1,500 employees, 91% of participants reported that they had been victims, eyewitnesses, or even perpetrators of idea theft, while 87% had personally experienced having their work appropriated. This suggests that the practice occurs far more often than many would expect and constitutes a real problem for organisations. Moreover, incidents are often perceived by victims as intentional and can have significant consequences, even when the perpetrator claims there was no intent.

 

A key question is what kinds of people are more likely to engage in idea theft. Research in organisational psychology links certain personality traits, especially those associated with the so-called “Dark Triad,” to a higher likelihood of appropriating others’ intellectual work. Such individuals tend to show low empathy, a heightened sense of entitlement, and an instrumental view of other people, all of which facilitate unethical conduct for personal gain. Three broad profiles are commonly discussed. The first is narcissism. Narcissistic personalities are marked by an inflated ego, a need for admiration, and a sense that they “deserve everything.” In the workplace, a narcissistic person is primarily concerned with self-promotion and often has little hesitation about taking credit for others’ work in order to enhance their status. Empirical evidence indicates that people high in narcissism show weaker moral restraint and are more willing to lie, cheat, and steal compared with less narcissistic colleagues. A narcissistic employee may claim authorship of a successful idea even if it was not theirs, sincerely believing they deserve the reward. As a Cornell analysis has noted, narcissists often appropriate credit for others’ ideas and results, typically attributing success to themselves while deflecting responsibility when things go wrong.

The second profile is Machiavellianism. Machiavellians are described as highly cynical and manipulative types who operate with cold calculation to achieve their goals. An employee with Machiavellian traits is likely to view idea theft as a strategic tactic for advancement. Such individuals systematically amplify their own contribution and downplay others’, positioning themselves as the “brains” behind every team success. For example, a manager with these tendencies might present a project to senior leadership as their own achievement, omitting the fact that the original concept or the resolution of a critical problem came from a member of their team. The lack of moral constraints typical of Machiavellians, namely their willingness to deceive and exploit others for personal benefit, means they have little hesitation about appropriating colleagues’ intellectual work when they believe that “the end justifies the means.”

The third profile concerns low empathy and psychopathic tendencies. This category includes personalities marked by a pronounced lack of emotional empathy and remorse, traits often seen in individuals with psychopathic tendencies. Such employees feel little guilt when they harm others or violate rules, which makes them more prone to antisocial actions at work. Studies indicate that individuals who fall within the “Dark Triad,” narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, are characterised by an ability to lie, mislead, and manipulate without remorse. It is therefore unsurprising that they show a greater inclination toward fraud, theft, and abuse within organisations. Research has also found that people with these dark traits are more likely to copy, falsify work, or appropriate outcomes that do not belong to them. A total lack of empathy means such individuals do not reflect on the fact that “stealing” a colleague’s idea may wrong that person or damage team morale. They see only their own benefit.

Whether idea theft will flourish or be contained within an organisation depends largely on the culture and practices promoted by leadership. Indifferent or ineffective management can, often unintentionally, allow the phenomenon to spread, whereas leadership that dares to address it directly can discourage it. According to experts, organisational culture and the norms set by management strongly shape the frequency with which idea appropriation occurs. If such behaviour is tolerated or, worse, indirectly rewarded by leadership, it becomes part of “normality” and can become so deeply embedded that it later becomes difficult to change. For example, in some highly competitive workplaces where only the final outcome matters, managers may overlook who first had the idea as long as the work gets completed. In doing so, however, they send the message that appropriating others’ work is acceptable, establishing a vicious cycle of missing recognition.

Likewise, leadership inaction or complicity leaves victims without support or voice. Many employees hesitate to report that someone “stole” their idea, especially if the perpetrator is their supervisor, for fear they will be targeted or punished for daring to claim ownership of their work. In a culture where leadership does not clearly recognise each person’s contribution, employees learn that it is pointless to complain when they are wronged. Poor management may also mean that supervisors themselves appropriate their team’s ideas. This not only constitutes direct theft of intellectual work but also creates a powerful disincentive for employees to share new proposals, because they know that in the end “the boss will take all the glory.” In other words, when leadership fails to prevent the problem, or becomes part of it, trust in the evaluation and reward system is eroded. By contrast, in organisations where leaders set an example by giving credit where it is due, idea appropriation is treated as an unacceptable deviation and is marginalised.

Idea theft is not merely an ethical lapse. It has very serious consequences for the smooth functioning and innovative capacity of a business. Since ideas and knowledge are critical resources, anything that undermines knowledge flow within an organisation can cause major harm. Researchers warn that appropriating intellectual work is a uniquely damaging form of deviant behaviour that erodes trust and employee morale, putting at risk the success of the company’s knowledge management initiatives. Put simply, when people fear their ideas will be “stolen,” they stop sharing their knowledge openly, and collaboration and innovation are blocked.

One of the most immediate effects is that victims of idea theft become cautious and protective of their work. More than half of employees who have experienced such incidents report that afterwards they avoided sharing information or knowledge, deliberately adopting silence or a defensive stance. They often choose silence in meetings, do not propose new ideas or solutions, and may even hide information and know-how, fearing that if they contribute, their authorship will be “snatched” again. These proactive defensive reactions fall under what experts call knowledge hiding and can paralyse team creativity. As Professor David Zweig describes, the experience of not receiving credit for your own idea can “burn” you and then make you unwilling to share others in the future, creating a toxic environment where information does not flow. This phenomenon “kills” the open exchange of viewpoints that is necessary for innovation, leading teams to stagnate in sterile silos rather than collaborate creatively.

At the same time, psychological safety is shaken, meaning employees’ sense that they can take risks and speak up without fear. Idea theft undermines psychological safety in two ways. First, the victim feels wronged and exposed, especially if they cannot protest. Second, everyone else observes that initiative may be punished rather than rewarded. Thus a climate forms where employees do not feel safe to share thoughts or take initiative, fearing either that their idea will be taken or that they will be labelled “difficult” if they demand recognition. This severely undermines team learning and experimentation, discouraging any behaviour beyond what is strictly prescribed.

The negative consequences do not stop there. They extend to productivity and talent retention. When employees feel that their efforts are not recognised, or worse, that others are taking them, morale drops sharply. Job satisfaction declines and many begin to disengage. They may either work less intensely, thinking “why try, since I won’t get the credit anyway,” or they may engage in retaliatory behaviours that harm team performance. Research shows that those who have been “burned” by idea theft are more likely to engage in counterproductive work behaviours, such as disparaging colleagues, refusing help, or sabotaging collaborations, in response to the injustice they experienced. In the long term, a workplace where such practices are tolerated leads to higher turnover. Capable employees, frustrated by the absence of fairness, choose to leave for healthier environments. This not only creates knowledge gaps and rehiring costs but also damages the organisation’s reputation. If it becomes known that a company does not protect creators and leaves “idea thieves” unpunished, it will struggle to attract and retain top talent. Overall, idea theft undermines innovation, lowers productivity through reduced engagement and cooperation, and destroys trust, a core component of psychological safety at work.

Given the seriousness of the issue, it is crucial that organisations take specific measures to prevent or address the appropriation of others’ intellectual work. Evidence-based practices and recommendations from studies include, first, recognising the problem and cultivating a culture of transparency. The first step is for management itself to acknowledge openly that idea theft exists and to declare zero tolerance for it. Leaders should encourage employees to speak up when they see such incidents, following the simple logic “if you see something, say something.” Creating safe channels of communication, for example anonymous reporting or open discussions in meetings, increases visibility and helps prevent cover-ups. When employees feel that management will support them if they report appropriation, they are more likely to do so, preventing the normalisation of the behaviour.

Second, there must be an emphasis on giving credit and recognition. Leaders and supervisors should actively assign credit to the right people, providing public recognition for employees’ ideas and work. As experts note, nothing kills workplace motivation more than having one’s contribution go unrecognised. Managers should therefore consciously say, for example, “this idea was proposed by team X,” or “I want to highlight A’s contribution to developing this solution.” This model of leadership accountability shapes behavioural norms and shows everyone that reward comes with a collaborative spirit and respect for intellectual authorship. Over time, such top-down behaviour reduces the likelihood that employees will hide their ideas out of fear, because they know they will receive recognition for what they contribute.

Third, a key organisational lever for change is the reward system and, in particular, favouring team rewards rather than purely individual ones. If evaluation and bonuses are based solely on individual “wins,” employees are incentivised to claim personal credit even for collective work. Experts recommend revising reward structures so that team successes and collaborative performance are rewarded. This reduces the perceived need for appropriation, because the collective outcome is shared and there is no “zero-sum game” over who gets the glory. Recent studies explicitly recommend that organisations focus more on team success than individual success in order to reduce incentives to claim exclusive recognition. In addition, when evaluations are conducted, it is helpful to request 360-degree feedback, meaning evaluation from colleagues, subordinates, and supervisors, so that it becomes clearer whether someone repeatedly absorbs others’ work or, conversely, contributes in a team-oriented way.

Fourth, documentation and idea-protection structures can be useful. Some companies adopt mechanisms to document authorship of ideas inside the organisation. For instance, an internal system may allow employees to submit new proposals with a timestamp and description. If a dispute later arises, it becomes clear who submitted the idea first. Similarly, keeping meeting minutes that record who proposed what can deter would-be thieves. While such measures do not eliminate the phenomenon on their own, they provide a level of transparency that makes appropriation harder to carry out unnoticed.

Fifth, training and role modelling matter. Organisations can invest in leadership training and awareness-building around the ethics of recognition. Managers should be trained to identify and condemn idea theft behaviours in their teams. Through seminars or workshops on psychological safety and teamwork, the value of each member and the importance of crediting ideas to the right people can be emphasised. The visibility of positive role models, for example leaders who earn respect because they always acknowledge the contributions of their teams, also works as a powerful example. Leadership should consistently demonstrate that it values originality and collaboration, not political showmanship at others’ expense.

In summary, idea theft in the workplace is a multifaceted problem. It has roots in individual characters with low ethics and high ego, but it flourishes only in environments that permit it or ignore it. Its effects are deep. It strikes innovation, erodes trust, and reduces performance. Fortunately, international research and organisational experience point the way forward. A culture of fairness and recognition, leadership that sets the right example, and structures that support cooperation are essential. With such measures, businesses can protect their most valuable asset, their people and their ideas, ensuring an environment where creativity is rewarded rather than appropriated.

Sources

1. David Zweig et al., Journal of Knowledge Management (2025). Presentation of the concept of “knowledge theft” and findings on its prevalence.

2. Phys.org (University of Toronto). “Stealing credit for co-workers’ ideas and work hurts a critical organizational resource” (2025).

3. Canadian HR Reporter. “When ideas are stolen: how HR should handle ‘pervasive’ knowledge theft” (2025).

4. Charles O’Reilly III and Bernadette Doerr. Personality and Individual Differences, Vol.154 (2020). “Conceit and deceit: Lying, cheating, and stealing among grandiose narcissists.”

5. Cornell Chronicle. “Workplace narcissists can promote creativity but may steal the credit” (2010).

6. Megan F. Hess. “The Fyre Fraud: Exploring the Dark Triad Personality,” Case Study (2022).

7. LinkedIn (Subhashish Roy). “The Office Machiavellian: Why Credit-Stealing Colleagues Are Kryptonite to Your Company’s Success” (2024).

8. AACSB Insights. “Research Roundup: My Work, Your Name, Our Breakdown” (April 2025).

The Qualitative Universe

We live in a world whose official language seems to be equations. We speak of masses, velocities and charges, of constants and fields. Whatever can be measured is treated as real; whatever cannot be expressed in an equation is suspected as subjective, almost imaginary. And yet, at the same time, nobody actually lives their life as a sum of quantities. We live in colours and sounds, in expectations, fears and hopes, in love and betrayal, in meaning and emptiness. The first question, then, is not whether there is a universe “out there” independent of us, but whether the dominant quantitative picture of it is the deepest possible, or merely one aspect that has emerged from our own limited capacities.

Modern science, with all its power, has taught us something humbling: colours and sounds, as we experience them, do not inhabit the universe but our nervous system. Outside us there is no “red”, but electromagnetic radiation of a certain wavelength. There is no “C”, but oscillation of air pressure at a certain frequency. The brain, for reasons of survival, translates these bare stimuli into qualitative experiences. The conclusion is obvious: a large part of what we call “world” is representation, an inner construction.

It would be superficial, however, to stop here and triumphantly declare that everything is relativism and illusion. For even in order to say that there are wavelengths and frequencies, we must accept that something exists, something endures, something is structured. And this “something” has three features that stubbornly resist every attempt to see it as a mere sum of quantities: it is intelligible, it is relational, and it gives rise to freedom and creativity. These three qualitative roots will be our focus, not as decorative traits of an otherwise mechanical universe, but as the deeper axes along which the world studied by physics, and lived by human beings, crystallises.

The first datum is the intelligibility of the world, the Logos. Not only is there order in the phenomena, but this order is of such a kind that it fits into our concepts and our mathematics. With a limited brain, shaped to hunt and to avoid threats, we manage to describe the behaviour of stars, particles and light, to predict with astonishing precision events on scales we shall never encounter directly. The same equation functions in the laboratory and at the edge of the universe. The paradox is not that we are clever, but that the world persists in being logically transparent. It owes us no understanding at all, and yet everything looks as though it were written in a language that can be translated into human speech.

If we take this excessive success of understanding seriously, then the notion of a universe which, at bottom, is the product of blind chance, without any inner mental structure, becomes difficult to sustain. We do not need to mythologise mathematical beauty, nor deify our theories. But it does seem reasonable to say that the world contains within itself something like a mental skeleton; that Logos is not merely a human tool, but the very way in which being becomes accessible to thought. In theological language, this Logos is concentrated in the person of God as Word: not as a distant lawgiver, but as the deep mental order from which, and towards which, every genuine search moves.

Seen in this light, the virtues that relate to truth acquire a cosmic weight. Honesty, love of knowledge, discernment, humility of mind are not simply “good behaviours” but ways by which the human person aligns with the Logos that structures the world. When we distort the truth, we are not merely playing social games; we are twisting our own access to the mental heart of reality. The spiritual life, at this level, is an act of reverence towards the intelligibility that runs through beings.

The second datum is the relational nature of reality, love in the broadest sense. Nothing exists in isolation. Even the simplest physical entity is defined by its relations: charge means a mode of interaction with fields, mass is a way of curving spacetime, an organism is a web of interdependencies between cells and environment. In biology, plants and animals do not survive as pure individuals but in relations of mutuality, cooperation and competition, within a complex network. In human history, persons always exist within embodied relations: family, community, language, culture.

If we look at this fact not mechanically but essentially, we see that “I am” means “I am towards”. A being that could never turn towards another, that could never place itself in relation, would lack something of its fullness. In the spiritual tradition, this is expressed as an image of God not as a solitary absolute, but as living communion: love is not something God merely “decides” at some point, but the very mode of his existence. If the world springs from this abyss of relationship, then the relational structure of all things is not incidental but the imprint of the divine mode of being itself.

Thus, the virtues that build relationship – love, mercy, forgiveness, hospitality, justice – are not romantic additions to an otherwise cold world. They are the forms by which the human being participates in the deep relationality of the universe. Every act of love is not only a psychological event but a harmonising with a quality that runs through everything. Every refusal of love, every closing-in upon oneself, every injustice, is not simply a moral breach but an attempt to exist against the very fabric of reality. That is why injustice, however much it may gain in temporary power, leaves ruins behind it: it violates the law of relation itself.

The third datum is the presence of freedom and creation. The world is not a perfect mechanism that, from its initial state, simply plays out a single inevitable script. There is history; there are real ruptures, new species, new civilisations, new ways of being human. In quantum physics we encounter intrinsic indeterminacies; in biology, explosions of variety; in personal life, choices that alter our course irreversibly. Our freedom is limited, but it is not an illusion. We can say “yes” or “no” to callings that surpass us.

If the world were a closed mechanism, freedom would be nothing more than an error in our description. Yet the very struggle of consciousness, the experience of responsibility, the pain of repentance and the joy of forgiveness, all show that freedom is real and weighty. At theological depth, this means that the Source of all things is not merely a static Mind, but living Spiritual Freedom able to create without necessity. The universe is the fruit not of need, but of gift. And our own freedom is a small, wounded, yet genuine participation in this abyss of freedom.

The virtues that give form to freedom – courage, responsibility, temperance, faithfulness – are not arbitrary acts of self-discipline, but arts of using this terrifying power without self-destruction. Temperance does not simply mean suppressing desires; it means protecting freedom from becoming slavery to instinct. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the decision not to sacrifice truth and love on the altar of safety. Thus ethics ceases to appear as a list of prohibitions and becomes a pedagogy of freedom within a universe that deserves our trust.

Someone will quite reasonably ask: how do we know that all this is not merely a set of noble projections? Perhaps we are taking our desires for meaning, love and freedom, and elevating them into cosmic principle. The objection is serious. Yet here an analogy with science may help. The laws of physics are human formulations; but they are not arbitrary, because reality judges them. If a theory fails to predict, it is rejected. Something similar happens in the spiritual field. A worldview that treats consciousness, truth and ethics as mere by-products of blind processes, sooner or later undermines the very Logos by which it is articulated, dissolves the authority of truth and the weight of responsibility. It does not refute itself logically so much as become existentially unliveable: human beings cannot, for long, live as though love, truth and freedom were nothing but chemical illusions.

By contrast, the hypothesis of a qualitative, spiritual universe, grounded in Logos, Love and Freedom, not only does not clash with science, but gives a framework for why science is possible, why moral experience is so compelling, and why the personal existence of the human being does not fit into any mechanistic scheme. It is not proved as a theorem is, but it better withstands the test of total experience.

In such a qualitative universe, God is not one more hypothesis among the list of objects; he is the infinite depth of these very qualities. As Logos, he makes the world intelligible and truth worthy of love. As Love, he grounds the possibility of relationship and turns existence from loneliness into a call to communion. As Freedom, he grants creation the possibility of existing not as an extension of his need, but as a genuine other, capable of saying “yes” or “no”. The virtues, then, are not merely individually agreeable habits but ways of participating in this God: through truth we share in the Logos, through love in the divine Love, through rightly exercised freedom in the divine Freedom.

The qualitative universe is one in which every act of ours has weight, not because someone is watching with a punitive intention, but because every movement of mind and heart either harmonises with or clashes against the deep rhythm that runs through all things. Justice is not merely a social contract, but an expression of respect for the relational structure of being. Truth is not merely agreement with the facts, but an opening of the mind to the Logos. Love is not merely a feeling, but a decision to allow the other to exist within us without consuming them.

Seen from this angle, the quantitative description of the universe is not abolished; it is put in its place. Physics, chemistry and biology remain precious, but as descriptions of the crystallisation of deeper qualities, not as the final word on reality. The human being, as person, then finds himself at the heart of the drama: he is the point at which the qualitative universe becomes consciousness of itself, where Logos, Love and Freedom encounter refusal, distortion, repentance and forgiveness.

If this perspective changes anything in everyday life, it is the way we approach our small choices. In a purely quantitative world, lying, injustice and harshness are survival techniques, sometimes successful, sometimes not. In a qualitative universe, every such act is an attempt to live against the very structure of being, to break the axes on which we stand. And every act of truth, justice and love, even the most hidden, is a small confirmation that the world is not ultimately hostile to spirit, but a place of encounter with the One who is the source of this Logos, this Love and this Freedom.

The qualitative universe is not a different universe from the one described in physics textbooks. It is the same universe, seen not from the side of bare magnitudes, but from the side of the qualities that make it habitable for persons. It is the recognition that, before every number, there is a meaning; before every force, a relation; before every possibility, a call to freedom. And thus, behind the stars and particles, behind our desires and fears, what appears is not a void, but a Person who calls us to become what the universe, qualitatively, is already whispering: images of a God who is Logos, Love and Living Freedom.

Virtue as a reflection of the order of the universe

The order of the world

When we try to think soberly about the world around us we do not find ourselves before a random theatre of events where everything is permitted without consequence. Reality presents itself again and again as a resilient structure in which order leads to stability and disorder to collapse. This is not an abstract metaphysical claim. It is a feature that emerges from physical cosmology from biology and from historical experience. From galaxies that take shape through stable gravitational relations to cells that survive because they carefully regulate energy and reactions the existence of every system depends on balance and consistency. This pattern is not moral in the strictly human sense. It does however provide a background that can support a universal argument for the virtues.

If we begin from the world rather than from the human being it becomes clear that the universe allows life only when there are mechanisms of organisation self restraint and cooperation. Entropy pushes things towards breakdown yet within the laws of physics there are windows in which matter can become structure and structure can become a bearer of information. This is not accidental. The stable patterns of the universe create the conditions for forms of life that can maintain an inner order in the face of outer chaos. This dynamic balance is the first step towards understanding why human virtues are not arbitrary but a continuation of deeper cosmic principles.

Within this framework life cannot be sustained when it is handed over to unrestrained excess. Cells that multiply without limit become destructive and ecosystems that lose their balance eventually collapse. The forms of life that endure are those that develop ways of regulating energy of controlling reactions and of filtering out noise. The kinship with what we call temperance in the human sphere is obvious. Temperance in ethics is not merely a social rule. It is the refined human form of the same principle of self regulation that we find in every living system.

At the same time cooperation proves to be a more powerful evolutionary mechanism than competition when we are speaking of long term survival. In biology cooperative structures such as symbiotic systems and social groups provide a distinct advantage compared with forms of organisation based solely on rivalry. Collaboration reciprocity and mutual support create greater stability and allow more effective adaptation to changing conditions. At this point we can see the ground on which the Christian teaching on love stands. Love is not portrayed as a passing emotional outburst but as a conscious stance that sustains the life of a community. Love as active care thus becomes the human expression of the same cooperative mechanism that we see at work in evolution.

The human being does not appear as an alien anomaly in the world but as a continuation of a deeper cosmic logic. Ethics does not descend ready made from the sky nor is it exhausted in a social contract that a community makes with itself. It shows itself rather as the human possibility of bringing freedom and conscience into harmony with the way in which life itself is maintained in the universe. Virtue then becomes the way in which human existence mirrors at a higher level the inner order of nature. Prudence is the refined capacity to distinguish between what promotes life and what corrodes it. Justice appears as the human translation of balance. Gentleness is the transformation of raw energy into creative power instead of destruction.

At this point we can see that the teaching of Jesus does not clash with the Greek moral tradition nor does it seek to cancel it. It takes it from the point to which it has arrived and opens it towards a horizon of universal relationship between human beings. Love of the other emerges as the fullest form of cooperation that allows life to flourish. Humility becomes the clearest form of inner discipline. Mercy shows itself as a higher form of stability that keeps a community alive even when it is wounded. In this way the teaching of Jesus expresses in theological language a logic that nature already enacts on its own level through the laws that govern it.

This relationship is not operating only at the level of metaphor. It touches the very way reality unfolds. The world appears to support whatever has coherence and to let collapse whatever sinks into disorder. Life itself endures and advances where cooperation prevails and it runs off the rails where violent excess dominates. Human societies in their turn sustain virtue and sooner or later collide with hubris. The same pattern returns at every level. Virtue is not decorative ornament for thought. It is the way in which the human being comes into step with the deeper rhythm of the universe.

The history of societies

Once we have described the cosmic basis of order we can follow how this structure passes into the historical journey of humanity. At this point our concern is not to condemn or idealise particular civilisations. It is to see with a calm and objective perspective that those societies which managed to flourish were those that moved in agreement with the virtues while those that were swept along by hubris drifted gradually into decline. This steady repetition in history becomes an important support for grounding virtue as a universal principle that follows the same logic by which the universe itself operates.

In the earliest forms of civilisation it becomes clear that cooperation and trust lie at the heart of the birth of the first cities. Agriculture requires collective organisation if it is to stand. The storage of food presupposes self restraint and foresight. The management of common resources calls for a sense of justice so that the social fabric does not tear apart. Wherever these elements were cultivated societies were able to keep a degree of stability and to survive over long periods. When success swelled into excess and power turned into an instrument of oppression and arrogance the balance was disturbed and the path of those civilisations was either halted or brought to collapse. The history of Mesopotamia of Mycenaean Greece and of the Roman Empire makes this pattern clear. Excess leads in the end to disintegration while virtue is linked with endurance.

The same pattern appears with particular clarity in ancient Greek thought. Aristotle does not treat virtue as an arbitrary moral system. He sees it as the most realistic way for a human being to stand within a world where balance is a condition for life to continue. The mean is not identical with lukewarmness or mediocrity. It states that human action needs to be in step with the inner order of reality. Cowardice and reckless boldness alike end in destruction. Courage that rests on sound judgement allows progress. In the same way wastefulness and greed work against the community while generosity holds it together and strengthens it. These are not abstract moral dogmas. They are condensed experience of life which proves itself valid again and again.

Stoic thought went a step further and saw in the virtues the reflection of a universal web of reason. The human being does not stand outside the order of the world as something foreign. He belongs within it. When human reason comes into line with the reason of the universe virtue appears. Prudence becomes the capacity of the human being to share in this deeper logic. Self mastery expresses the harmony between desire and reason. Justice is the stance of the human person within a universe that is one and mutually interconnected.

At this point the profound meeting with the teaching of Jesus becomes visible. While the Greeks approach the virtues through a rational understanding of the structure of the world Jesus illuminates the same order through the way a person stands towards their neighbour. Love is not presented as a mere feeling but as a way of life that supports and holds together the community in the same way as cooperation in nature supports life. Humility is not identified with self contempt. It is the freedom from arrogance which tears apart every human structure. Mercy is not seen as weakness. It is the strength that allows communities to heal their faults and to continue living together.

When we look at the historical course of these teachings we can see that societies which adopted even partially the principles of cooperation justice self restraint and mutuality managed to secure greater cohesion and more humane living conditions. Where greed oppression deep inequality and violence prevailed decay was almost inevitable. From classical Athens to modern states the pattern is clear. Where the order of virtue becomes the measure of collective life history can move forward and create. Where room is given to hubris history is interrupted fractured and often forced to begin again among ruins.

These recurring historical patterns lead us to an important conclusion. Virtue is not the invention of a particular tradition. It is the human form of the very order that makes existence and growth possible in the world. A person does not become virtuous because an external rule demands it. They choose virtuous action because that is what preserves and nurtures human relationships just as the constants of nature allow life to endure and to flourish.

The inner life of the human person

If we set aside for a moment the physical and historical data and turn inward we meet the most demanding and at the same time the most necessary link in this chain. We meet the way in which virtue touches human existence itself the inner experience and the search for meaning. The question is no longer only whether the universe seems to favour order rather than chaos. It is whether the human being as a conscious person can live truly and creatively while remaining cut off from that rhythm of order that we discern in the world. The answer suggested by the great traditions and by ordinary human experience leans steadily towards no. Distance from virtue gives rise to inner turmoil to conflicts and at some point to a kind of inner collapse. The cultivation of virtue tends to give rise to a sense of peace fullness and freedom.

The inner side of virtue does not stand by itself and it cannot be separated from its cosmic and historical basis. The human being has a conscience that acts like a mirror of the order encountered in the world. When this conscience moves in the same spirit as temperance justice gentleness love and prudence life starts to come together as a single whole. Desire no longer acts blindly. Energy that might have turned into rivalry is transformed into creative force. Other people cease to appear only as obstacles and are recognised as companions and support. Such a way of life is not simply more correct in moral terms. It proves in practice to be more resilient. It gives deeper psychological meaning reduces inner conflicts and cultivates a sense of unity between the person and the world in which they live.

When by contrast a person moves away from virtue their inner world begins to fray. Greed never reaches a point of satisfaction and constantly leaves a taste of lack. Arrogance exposes them to the consequences of their own excesses. Violence in one form or another comes back upon them. Lack of prudence pushes them to follow impulses that sooner or later cause harm. No theological appeal is required at this point. The simple experience of life shows that an existence which turns away from virtue gradually loses its orientation and with it the capacity for genuine joy.

Here we reach the heart of the meeting between Greek thought and Christian experience. The Greeks brought virtue to light as the fulfilment of human nature. Jesus brought virtue to light also as a path towards inner freedom and the fullness of relationship with the other. In the Greek tradition virtue is the realisation of the human being. In the teaching of Jesus virtue is the full taking up of existence. In both cases the virtues do not appear as external commands. They appear as ways of life that see reality clearly and act with wisdom.

If we now link what has gone before we arrive at a single answer to our starting question. The universe seems to move within a logic of order that favours balance and cooperation. Life develops within a logic of self regulation and mutuality. Human history advances within a logic of justice and prudence. Individual existence finds meaning within a logic of love and gentleness. These four levels are not independent of one another. They are different expressions of the same way of being. Virtue in human life can therefore be seen as the reflection of this cosmic order within the space of consciousness.

Within this perspective the teaching of Jesus takes on a different light. Love as active care is not presented simply as a moral duty. It is the human expression of the cooperative principle that allows life to move forward and to mature. Humility is not identified with a sense of inferiority. It is the inner freedom from arrogance which erodes every structure. Mercy is not a sign of weakness. It is the deliberate decision to keep the community alive when it is threatened by rupture and conflict. In this way the moral vision of Jesus does not cancel the natural order of the world. It receives it and brings it to completion on the human level.

At this point we can see more clearly that virtue is neither a random choice nor a construct of the human mind. It arises as the natural consequence of the way in which the universe brings forth and sustains life and of the way in which the human being seeks and shapes meaning. Virtue is the place where human freedom meets the stability of the order of the world. It is the way in which conscience enters into the deeper rhythm of reality. For this reason it does not need to be imposed from outside. It shows itself on its own as the most coherent form of life in a world where order gives birth to creativity and disorder leads to destruction.

The synthesis of virtue

If we now try to see everything that has been said as a single picture we can recognise virtue as a principle that runs through the universe life history and human existence. This synthesis does not aim to force reality into a ready made ideological scheme. It seeks to highlight that the same constants reappear at every level of being and show that virtue is not something added from outside to the world. It is the natural extension of the way in which the world remains viable resilient and creative.

When we look at the universe with as clear a gaze as we can manage we see that existence does not resemble a chaotic set of random events. It looks more like a field in which stability and organisation make creation and development possible. The formation of galaxies the creation of chemical bonds and the constant presence of stable physical laws all bear witness that anything which lasts through time needs a delicate balance between energy and form. This balance is not in itself a moral concept. It is however the first foundation that allows us to understand what virtue means. The Aristotelian sense of measure can thus be seen as a reflection of this cosmic logic. Excess leads to instability. Deficiency leads to weakness. What truly generates and sustains is always balance.

On this cosmic foundation life comes into being. The existence of the living is nothing other than a continual resistance to disintegration. In order to stand it needs self regulation cooperation and the capacity for discernment. Organisms regulate their energy so that they are not crushed by their own excesses. They gather into cooperative structures when this gives them greater stability and better adaptation to their conditions. They learn to distinguish stimuli that benefit them and to move away from those that harm them. These elements which biology recognises as conditions for survival are translated in the human being into the virtues of temperance love and prudence.

History then shows that societies which were organised on the basis of such virtues endured longer and became fields of creativity and culture. Every stable society needs justice so that the relations between people can be ordered. It needs self restraint so that it does not fall into internal explosions. It needs trust so that people can cooperate and build something larger than themselves. When these elements are missing history comes to look like a chain of collapses that follow the same logic as physical disintegration. The hubris of political powers the unchecked imposition of force and the rupture of balance open the way to chaos again and again.

Within this picture human existence is the point at which the structures of the world’s order gather and take on a human form. Conscience has the capacity to recognise the pattern and to adopt it. The human being becomes the bearer of a possibility that nature expresses without awareness. A person can master their desires not only to secure survival but in order to taste the experience of freedom. They can choose cooperation even when they are not under pressure of necessity. They can stand justly not simply to avoid conflict but to acknowledge the worth of the other. They can love not because a tradition commands it but because in this stance they discover the deepest form of stability they are capable of knowing. Seen in this light Jesus does not appear as a lawgiver who imposes rules. He appears as the one who makes visible the way in which human life can become a mirror of the very logic that holds the universe in being.

If we now reverse the journey and begin from cosmic order moving to life from life to history and from history to human existence it becomes clear that the virtues do not come as something foreign imposed upon the world. They arise as the natural outcome of its very structure. The order that we see rewarded in nature takes in the human person the form of prudence. The cooperative logic of life becomes love and mutuality. The self regulation of organisms becomes temperance. The historical need for balance is expressed as justice. The conscious freedom that is called to embrace all these takes the form of gentleness that turns power into humanity.

In this way the circle of this connection closes. The virtues do not appear as external commands laid upon the human being. They are the human expression of the constants that make the universe habitable and life possible. When a person lives virtuously they share in a rhythm that existed before their own presence and will continue to exist after it. Virtue can be seen as the harmony between their inner life and the order that shapes the reality around them. It is the point at which human consciousness meets the natural logic of the world and for that reason it is not only something worth pursuing but something that proves necessary for any existence that wishes to be true.

The Distributed Dictatorship of Mediocrity

The history of human civilisation is filled with figures who transcended the limits of their time and, for that very reason, were persecuted. From Socrates to Galileo, from Van Gogh to the modern voices that challenge mass thought, the same pattern repeats itself endlessly. Excellence provokes resistance. Today, this conflict no longer manifests through persecution or prohibition, but through something subtler, the quiet, almost invisible revenge of mediocrity.

Mediocrity does not despise excellence because it considers it evil; it despises it because it mirrors it. It reminds everyone of what they might have become, had they dared to move beyond the boundary of safety. Society, for its part, has developed mechanisms that reinforce this conflict, and psychology has provided precise explanations as to why.

In the 1950s, Solomon Asch experimentally demonstrated that people prefer to be wrong with the many than right alone. Even when the correct answer was plain before them, the pressure of the group was enough to distort their judgement. A few years later, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann described this phenomenon as the spiral of silence: the fear of social isolation leads individuals to suppress minority or original opinions.

This is the first stage of mediocrity’s revenge, conformity. The more distinctive someone is, the more they threaten the cohesion of the group, and the group reacts. As Kipling Williams showed, social exclusion triggers the same kind of pain in the brain as a physical wound. There is, therefore, no need for persecution or violence; isolation, mockery, or silent contempt are quite sufficient.

Yet mediocrity does not stop there. Within institutions and organisations, it is structurally favoured. Individuals and systems have a natural inclination to preserve the status quo, even at the expense of progress. As Samuelson and Zeckhauser demonstrated, this status quo bias leads decision-makers to choose what is safe and familiar rather than what is innovative or uncertain. Research by Foster, Rzhetsky, and Evans has shown that genuine scientific innovation is often rejected in its early stages because it is deemed too risky to fit within the established framework.

This pattern repeats itself everywhere, in universities, in businesses, in the media. Systems of performance metrics, indicators, and targets all operate within Goodhart’s logic: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to measure what truly matters. Thus, those who learn to play the system, rather than transcend it, are the ones rewarded. Mediocrity becomes the rational choice.

Technology has come to complete this process. Social networks and algorithms do not distinguish the essential from the superficial; they measure only resonance. Experiments such as those of Salganik, Dodds, and Watts demonstrated that social influence amplifies inequality dramatically. When users see what others prefer, they tend to follow the crowd, reinforcing what is already popular. As a result, original content sinks into the long tail of invisibility. Innovation exists, but it remains unseen.

Behind all this lies a deeper psychological mechanism, the need for equality. Social psychologist Norman Feather showed that people often feel satisfaction when a highly capable or successful person fails. The downfall of another restores the balance of their own sense of inadequacy. Excellence, in other words, is not condemned because it is wrong, but because it serves as a reminder.

The same occurs in the realm of knowledge. As early as 1968, Robert Merton described the Matthew Effect: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Established and recognised scientists receive a disproportionately greater share of attention, while younger, often more creative researchers remain in obscurity. The result is the reproduction of the same cycle: innovation lingers at the periphery, while mediocrity occupies the centre.

All this forms a coherent pattern: mediocrity need not conspire against excellence, the system does it on its behalf. Through psychological pressure, institutional inertia, and technological algorithms, society favours the safe and the familiar. Yet progress never arises from safety.

If there is a remedy, it lies not in the pursuit of elitist distinction but in building a culture resilient to difference. Excellence does not require privilege; it requires tolerance, an environment that recognises that dissent, failure, and unconventional thought are not threats but essential conditions for evolution.

Mediocrity will always exist, as it always has. The question is whether we shall allow it to continue avenging all that makes us human, our capacity to surpass ourselves.

The triumph of mediocrity is not merely a psychological or social phenomenon. It gradually gives rise to a new form of power, gentler yet far deeper than classical authoritarian structures. In modern democracies, power no longer needs to be imposed from above; it operates through networks, regulations, systems of evaluation, and technological platforms that diffuse conformity across every layer of social life. What emerges is a distributed dictatorship, a web of control without a tyrant, where obedience is not enforced but internalised.

This idea finds its roots in Michel Foucault’s analyses of biopower and the panopticon. Foucault showed that power does not dwell in a single centre; it circulates through institutions, rules, and everyday practices. In the past, authoritarianism was visible in the faces of rulers and the mechanisms of repression. Today, it manifests in the very structure of systems designed to serve us.

The distributed dictatorship functions as an invisible mesh of mutual surveillance. Citizens, workers, and digital users are simultaneously observers and the observed. Shoshana Zuboff described this phenomenon as surveillance capitalism, an economy in which human experience is turned into data used to predict and guide behaviour. Power no longer needs to say “no”; it merely steers what is deemed normal, acceptable, or socially desirable.

In public discourse, this reveals itself through overinformation and speed. As Byung-Chul Han observed, contemporary society is no longer repressive but hyperproductive. It overwhelms the individual with stimuli, opinions, images, and models of success. Suppression has been replaced by saturation. Those who cannot keep up with its pace simply vanish. The individual feels free but lives in an environment where their choices are already shaped by algorithmic filters, social expectations, and institutional norms.

The same occurs in work and education. Employees and students learn to monitor themselves, to measure, record, and assess their own performance through metrics and targets. Power has become an internal mechanism of self-regulation. Control is no longer imposed from the outside but experienced as duty, a condition Foucault once called discipline without a warden.

Technology magnifies this effect. Social media platforms and rating systems have introduced a new form of social panopticism. Each person is both observer and observed. As Zygmunt Bauman noted, the modern society of transparency does not grant freedom but perpetual exposure. Acceptance, visibility, and social approval function as mechanisms of conformity far stronger than the threat of punishment.

Within this framework, mediocrity becomes a cultural mechanism of stability. Because it is predictable, adaptable, and harmless, it serves as the ideal cell of this new form of power. The excellent, the creative, the different are not treated as enemies but as anomalies in need of correction. The pressure is not institutional but social. Those who fail to conform to the pace and tone of the age are simply excluded.

This distributed dictatorship, therefore, has neither leader nor face. It is a self-regulating system in which mediocrity has found the perfect environment to survive and dominate. The more people learn to censor themselves, to monitor their own behaviour, and to compete for social approval, the less anyone needs to control them. Freedom is not curtailed by force but by behavioural programming.

At this point, sociology and philosophy converge. The German sociologist Ulrich Beck spoke of the risk society, where the demand for safety creates vast structures of control. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard warned that we live in a world of hyperreality, where representation has replaced experience. And Han, in his more recent writings, argues that psychological exhaustion has become the new instrument of power: people obey not because they are afraid, but because they are depleted.

The distributed dictatorship is, then, the final stage in the revenge of mediocrity. A society that fears difference and excellence ends up designing its institutions so that no one can truly stand out. The result is a kind of courteous slavery, where everyone is free to speak, but only as long as their words fit the collective narrative. Power has become a shared habit.

Corruption as an Interpretive Act

Abstract

This study redefines the phenomenon of corruption beyond its legal and institutional dimension by introducing the term interpretive corruption. It is argued that contemporary corruption does not manifest only as illegality, but as a distortion of the very meaning of truth. Through phenomenological and sociological analysis, the article examines the transition from the individual’s psychic deformation to institutional decline, with emphasis on business organisations and the information era. Interpretive corruption is defined as a new form of social pathology in which the distortion of discourse and values replaces the act of lying, rendering falsehood socially functional and culturally tolerable.

Keywords: corruption, interpretive corruption, institutions, psychic deformation, social justice, business, contemporary society, information, truth

Conceptual framework: corruption in its classical and expanded sense

In the scholarly literature, corruption is defined as the abuse of power or trust for private gain which violates institutional or moral norms with the aim of extracting material or immaterial benefits (Transparency International, 2023; Nye, 1967). Corruption is not merely a legal or moral aberration; it is a social phenomenon that emerges when institutions lose their legitimating basis and when the relationship between power and responsibility is ruptured.

The principal types of corruption identified in sociology and political science include:


• Political corruption, namely the manipulation of public decisions, laws or institutions for partisan or economic advantage (Heidenheimer & Johnston, 2002).

• Administrative or bureaucratic corruption, referring to the abuse of duties by public officials through bribery, favouritism or procedural violations (Rose-Ackerman, 1999).

• Economic or business corruption, manifesting through unlawful or unethical practices in market transactions such as fraud, tax evasion, falsification of accounts, conflicts of interest (Johnston, 2005).

• Moral corruption, which transcends the legal level and concerns the erosion of social values, that is, society’s gradual habituation to dishonesty or cynicism (Williams, 1999).

Research has shown that these types do not operate in isolation, but mutually reinforce one another within broader cultural and institutional environments. Alatas (1999) speaks of ‘systemic corruption’, a diffuse condition in which improper practice becomes the operative norm of a system.

However necessary it may be, the traditional sociological view of corruption gives primacy to its legal and institutional dimensions, leaving aside a subtler and more fundamental form of degradation: the corruption of truth. When actors, political, economic or institutional, interpret facts, rules or values according to their own interests, they undermine collective trust, the very core of social cohesion.

Corruption, therefore, is not merely an act but a discourse; not only a material transaction, but a process of constructing realities. In an environment where information has become the pre-eminent field of power, the distortion of truth functions as a mechanism for maintaining prestige, control and profit. Thus the conventional framework of corruption must be complemented by an interpretive perspective, in which the alteration of truth constitutes its most insidious and corrosive form.

This extension leads us to reconsider corruption not only as rule-breaking, but as an interpretive act, a social mechanism of falsifying meaning, which shapes how we perceive reality itself.

From psychic deformation to institutional decline

Corruption, sociologically understood, is not confined to its institutional manifestations. Every form of wrongdoing presupposes an inner substratum, a moral and psychic erosion that precedes and feeds it. Without a prior inner renunciation of truth, institutional illegality cannot flourish.

Psychic deformation appears as a perversion of conscience, a gradual habituation to falsehood and expediency. Individualism, the instrumentalisation of values and dependence on success lead the person to interpret reality not according to the just or the true, but according to interest and outcome. As Charles Taylor (1989) notes, modern moral retreat is not the denial of morality as such, but its replacement by an instrumental rationality: truth is measured in terms of effectiveness rather than inner consistency.

Within this frame, psychic deformation functions as a pre-institutional mechanism. The person who learns to bend truth within, to justify the small lie, the minor exception, the personal ‘necessity’, will sooner or later become the bearer of a system that does the same at the macro level. Émile Durkheim (1912) would call this a form of anomie of the self, where the inner moral rule loses its binding force. Renouncing inner responsibility gives rise to social anomie.

Hannah Arendt’s (1963) philosophy further illuminates this dimension through the notion of the ‘banality of evil’. The corrupt is not always malicious or consciously criminal, but often the ordinary person who stops thinking critically and surrenders to the routine of obedience or expediency. The weakness of critical self-awareness, the absence of an inner dialogue, renders corruption inwardly normal before it becomes socially acceptable.

Psychic deformation may thus be described as the anthropological root of social corruption. It does not arise from economic need or institutional deficiency, but from mental and moral habituation to inaccuracy; from the gradual loss of the capacity to distinguish the true from the convenient. Paul Ricoeur (1992) would term it ‘moral forgetting’, the loss of memory of one’s duty towards truth.

This inner phenomenon, however, has social consequences. Institutions mirror the people who compose them. When individual conscience is trained in accommodation and silencing, institutional systems do the same. Businesses, state mechanisms and organisations carry within them the moral stance of their members; in this way, psychic deformation turns into institutional decline.

The sociological consequence of this process is a cultural relativism in which the notion of responsibility is weakened. The more the individual is trained to regard their own interpretation as superior to objective criteria, the more society as a whole loses the ability to distinguish authentic from distorted knowledge, legality from the semblance of legality. The result is a society ‘corroded from within’, where institutions collapse not under external pressures, but through an inner loss of meaning.

In sum, psychic deformation is the latent precondition of institutional decline. There is no corruption in institutions without prior corruption of conscience. And, as Ricoeur emphasises, the restoration of truth presupposes moral remembrance — regaining the inner responsibility to see, to think and to speak with clarity, even when it comes at a cost. Only then can external integrity acquire real substance.

Corruption in the information age and in business

The erosion of meritocracy and relationships within the organisation

Before examining the outward dimension of corruption in business, that is, policies, communication strategies and institutional practices, it is necessary to shed light on its inner form, which is born in the everyday operation of organisations. This form does not concern breaches of law, but the erosion of values: the loss of justice, meritocracy, trust and respect among the members of a company or organisation.

The modern enterprise is a microcosm of power. When hierarchy is used not for coordination but for imposition, when the recognition of effort is based not on merit but on expediency, an environment of inner corruption is created. Employees learn that reward depends not on quality or integrity, but on compliance and strategic visibility. Thus injustice becomes a survival mechanism.

The loss of meritocracy constitutes the fundamental form of corruption within business. When promotions, opportunities for advancement or even day-to-day recognition fail to reflect actual contribution, and instead depend on favour networks, political alignment or internal alliances, the organisation ceases to operate on the basis of truth. It creates an artificial reality in which appearance prevails over substance.

Unfair competition among members, often tacitly encouraged by management as a ‘productivity incentive’, is another manifestation of this corruption. Internal rivalry undermines the sense of common purpose, dissolves cooperation and turns falsehood into a tool of survival. As Richard Sennett (1998) has observed, the new capitalist spirit produces ‘corroded characters’ — people trained to adapt to roles without stable moral reference points, with deception becoming part of their professional repertoire.

The distortion of recognition, when effort is not rewarded or truth is punished,  leads to psychic deformation. The worker loses a sense of meaning, detaches from their work and develops coping mechanisms that perpetuate the very system that wrongs them. Thus corruption acquires psychological reproducibility: the person who feels wronged will, sooner or later, legitimise their own small wrong as a means of survival.

The absence of moral leadership completes the cycle. When leaders do not exemplify justice and transparency, the organisation becomes a system of reflex hypocrisy, everyone adjusting to what ‘must appear’ rather than to what is. Max Weber would say that formal rationality asserts itself at the expense of substantive rationality: process overrides meaning.

This inner erosion, often invisible, is the root of outward corruption. From it arise policies of moral display (CSR, ESG, diversity statements, etc.), which attempt to cover the moral deficit with rhetoric. Without fair recognition, without meritocracy and without truth within, no enterprise can be ethical outwardly. The corruption of policies begins with the corruption of relationships.

From inner erosion to outward policies

Corruption that nests within an organisation’s culture seldom remains an internal matter. Over time it assumes political and institutional form, expressed through programmes, corporate strategies and communication narratives that seek to offset or conceal the moral deficit of the internal environment. Internal injustice, bias, lack of transparency and hypocrisy gradually become the structural elements of outward policy.

At this stage, corruption ceases to be a matter of personal conduct and becomes a technology of communication. Businesses that are not grounded in truth and internal justice resort to systems of ‘moral image management’, practices that generate impressions of legitimacy without substantive content. Communication comes to substitute for integrity.

This tendency is particularly visible in the 21st century, where information is the primary carrier of power. Companies no longer ‘produce’ only products, but narratives; they do not merely sell goods, but meanings. This shift enables the emergence of a new form of corruption we name interpretive corruption: the deliberate falsification of the symbols of morality.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Environmental, Social, and Governance programmes (ESG), codes of ethics and sustainability policies often constitute expressions of this phenomenon. They are not inherently corrupt, but when they arise from organisations lacking inner meritocracy and justice, they become mechanisms for legitimising inconsistency. The inner moral void is disguised as outward ‘virtue’.

This process is extremely dangerous because it institutionalises falsehood. Organisations learn to manage morality as they manage marketing: with indicators, campaigns and numerical proofs of ‘progress’. The result is the creation of an administrative aesthetics of the good, where morality is not lived, but used as a tool.

Jean Baudrillard (1981) described this as ‘hyperreality’: organisations do not try to be moral, but to appear moral so convincingly that the difference becomes invisible. The same occurred historically with the language of politics; the notion of ‘transparency’ is used more as a rhetorical device than as practice.

The digital era has amplified this dynamic. The culture of display, obsession with public image and data management have turned transparency into a performative event. Businesses publish ‘accountability’ reports, present statistics of ‘ethical behaviour’, showcase videos and pledges, while the real question — justice within — remains unseen. Thus an externalised corruption of morality is produced, where responsibility is replaced by communication.

What we ultimately observe is a reversal of the moral axiom: instead of inner virtue producing just policies, policies attempt to construct the image of virtue. The organisation that wrongs within will pseudo-legitimise itself without. And as society becomes accustomed to this symbolic reversal, the meaning of corruption is completely emptied. It becomes an aesthetic matter, not a moral one.

Outward corporate corruption, therefore, is not merely a communication error; it reflects the organisation’s inner moral structure. As the body cannot hide its illness for long, neither can an organisation conceal its ethos. In the information age, corruption is not hidden, it is represented.

The social dimension of interpretive corruption

As revealed by contemporary social reality, corruption is not confined to particular institutions or individuals. It diffuses culturally, shaping a new social type of degradation in which truth loses its universal value and becomes a product of management. This process is neither simple mendacity nor isolated dishonesty; it is a systematic distortion of the relation between language, values and action.

This study designates the phenomenon as interpretive corruption. It is the process whereby individuals, institutions or collective systems reconstruct the meaning of truth or justice so as to serve their own purposes. They do not merely falsify facts; they falsify the framework through which facts are interpreted.

Interpretive corruption thus constitutes a third form of social corruption, beyond the institutional and the economic. While the first concerns the abuse of power and the second pecuniary exchange, interpretive corruption amounts to an abuse of meaning. It is a system’s capacity to impose its own ‘lawful falsehood’ (Bourdieu, 1991) and to transform falsification into normality.

At the societal level, interpretive corruption generates cultural relativism. When all truths are treated as equivalent, when the criterion of the true is replaced by the ‘useful’ or the ‘effective’, society ceases to possess a common axis of meaning. This connects with what Habermas (1984) calls the distortion of communicative rationality: the point at which language functions not for understanding but for imposition.

Interpretive corruption has three principal dimensions:


1. Individual, it appears as psychic deformation, i.e., moral accommodation and selective interpretation of truth by the person.

2. Institutional, it appears in businesses, the media and state mechanisms as a process of reconstructing reality to serve interests.

3. Cultural, it appears as social habituation to false interpretation; when society learns to accept the ‘version’ as a substitute for truth.

This form of corruption is self-reinforcing: the more it spreads, the harder it becomes to recognise. Society becomes accustomed to the ‘plausible falsehood’, and the distinction between sincerity and strategy fades. People learn to live amid ‘post-truths’, as modern social thinkers point out (Keyes, 2004; McIntyre, 2018).

Interpretive corruption therefore has multiple effects: it weakens democracy, erodes trust in institutions, nullifies the possibility of dialogue and undermines education as a space for the pursuit of truth. Ultimately, it amounts to the social institutionalisation of illusion.

This new term is not proposed merely as a linguistic innovation, but as an analytical tool. Interpretive corruption describes the shift from the corruption of act to the corruption of meaning, from unlawful deed to lawful illusion. Understanding it is essential if we are to study information societies, where power is exercised not only through material means, but through interpretations.

Conclusions

The foregoing analysis has shown that corruption is not only a social or economic pathology; it is chiefly an interpretive act, a way in which individuals and institutions distort their relation to truth. From the person’s psychic deformation to institutional decline, a continuous line of meaning-distortion unfolds, producing new forms of inequality, hypocrisy and moral relativism.

The study has demonstrated that in the contemporary business and social environment, corruption has shifted from the level of act to the level of interpretation. It is no longer necessary to violate explicit rules; it suffices to alter the framework by which those rules are understood. Injustice, unfair competition, the loss of meritocracy and bias operate as key mechanisms within a broader psychic and axiological distortion that prepares the ground for institutional forms of corruption.

From this perspective, interpretive corruption is the cornerstone of every other form of corruption. It is the primary process by which society learns to translate dishonesty into success and deception into competence. When truth becomes a strategic instrument, the social fabric disintegrates: institutions lose their legitimating basis, businesses operate by the ethics of communication, and citizens lose trust in a shared meaning.

Interpretive corruption is therefore a moral and cultural phenomenon, not merely an administrative or political one. It is not corrected by laws, but by reconstituting moral conscience. Restoring truth requires a transition from informational ethics to existential ethics: from the communicative image of the good to the inner consistency of action.

Scholarly speaking, the notion of interpretive corruption offers a new tool for understanding information societies. It interprets phenomena such as pseudo-transparency, the ‘politics of image’ and institutionalised, and indeed codified, hypocrisy as expressions of a deeper anthropological crisis. Morality does not disappear, it is reframed according to interest and appearances.

The sociological implication is clear: as interpretive corruption expands, society loses its capacity for self-critique and self-correction. Falsehood ceases to be an anomaly and becomes common ground for communication. Only the recovery of inner justice, justice towards truth, can restore balance.

This study does not seek to moralise, but to reveal the shift of corruption from the field of act to the field of meaning. ‘Interpretive corruption’ is not merely a new term; it is a new condition of contemporary society. A society that subsists on pseudo-truth will, sooner or later, cease to generate genuine trust, genuine education and, ultimately, genuine democracy.

Postscript

Truth is not a concept; it is a stance. It does not dwell in data, but in the will of the person to see without expediency. The greatest form of corruption is not that which deforms institutions, but that which deforms our capacity to distinguish the true from the merely useful.

The corrupt person of our time is not always ruthless; he is chiefly unable to see clearly. He has learned to live within a continuous web of interpretations, where every act, every word and every ‘reality’ must serve something. In this condition, truth is not spoken to be saved, but to be used.

If interpretive corruption is the symptom of our era, its remedy lies not in control mechanisms, but in restoring inner sight, that silent moral lucidity which precedes law and surpasses expediency. The person who remains just even when not rewarded is the true counter-cultural hero of our time.

Society does not need more declarations of ethics; it needs acts of truth. It needs people who live without bargaining away the light of their conscience. For only when truth becomes once again a personal duty and not a public strategy will justice - and with it, civilisation - cease to be a mask and become action once more.

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Quantum computing is not just “a faster computer”

In the mid-20th century, Alan Turing laid the foundations of classical computing, showing what a machine could and could not calculate step by step. At that time everything seemed clear: computers would always be machines that executed instructions sequentially on bits, tiny units that take the value 0 or 1. Yet nature itself does not work that way. In the microscopic world of quantum physics, particles do not have only one state but can exist in many possibilities at once.

In the 1980s, physicist Richard Feynman and David Deutsch opened the path by suggesting that if nature is quantum, then a computer based on quantum rules could simulate phenomena that classical computers fail to capture. In the mid-1990s, two algorithms gave substance to this theory: Peter Shor proved that a quantum computer could break the encryption that relies on the difficulty of factoring large numbers, while Lov Grover showed how searching through a massive database could be done much faster than by any classical method.

From then on began the transition from theory to practice. Laboratories around the world tried to implement qubits using different physical systems: trapped ions, superconducting circuits, even photons. The first devices could handle only a few qubits, but within three decades we reached systems with dozens or even hundreds of qubits, enough to perform experiments that no classical supercomputer can replicate. Today, major companies such as IBM, Google, and Microsoft, as well as university research centres, already operate quantum computers, even if still with limitations.

But how do they actually work? A classical computer is based on bits that are either open or closed, like a switch on the wall. A quantum computer uses qubits that can be both open and closed at the same time. A simple picture is the coin spinning in the air: while it spins, it is both heads and tails, and only when it lands does it become one or the other. This is superposition.

In classical computers, multiple combinations of bits exist as possibilities but only one is real at any given time. If we have ten bits, there are over a thousand possible combinations, but the computer holds one at a time and must check them sequentially. In qubits the same ten are not in one state but in a superposition of them all. It is as if all the possible keys to a lock are laid out on the table at once, not hidden in a drawer to be tested one by one. Quantum operations act on this whole mixture of states simultaneously, and then interference ensures that the wrong probabilities cancel out and the right one is strengthened. Thus, a quantum computer does not need to run through all the cases one by one, but works on all of them in parallel.

Interference is familiar from waves. When two waves meet, they can merge and grow stronger, or cancel each other out. This is how quantum computing works too: with the right operations, the wrong solutions vanish and the correct one stands out. When we measure the result, the probability of obtaining the right answer is much greater than any other.

Seen practically, it is like having a lock with countless possible keys. A classical computer would test the keys one by one. A quantum computer can handle them all at the same time and, through interference, let only the correct one appear. Problems that would take today’s most powerful supercomputers centuries could be solved by a quantum computer in minutes.

This opens new paths for discovering medicines, designing innovative materials, predicting the climate, and securing communications. It is not just a faster machine, but a turning point in the way we think about computation itself. It rests on principles that may feel strange to everyday experience but are deeply logical: that something can be many things at once, and that from the interplay of those possibilities order can emerge and a clear answer be revealed. That different perspective is what makes it unique.

References

Feynman, R. (1982). Simulating physics with computers. International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 21(6–7), 467–488.

Deutsch, D. (1985). Quantum theory, the Church–Turing principle and the universal quantum computer. Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Shor, P. (1994). Algorithms for quantum computation: Discrete logarithms and factoring. Proceedings 35th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science.

Grover, L. (1996). A fast quantum mechanical algorithm for database search. Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing.

Nielsen, M. & Chuang, I. (2010). Quantum Computation and Quantum Information. Cambridge University Press.

IBM Quantum, McKinsey & Co., RAND Corporation, CSIS – contemporary analyses and popular science articles on the progress and applications of quantum computing.

Homeland

translation of "Πατρίδα"  

Like a rudderless ship in a raging sea,
your sails in shreds,
torn by winds that spare no soul.
They dress you in flags
only to leave you bare.
They call you Homeland,
then barter you for chairs of power.

Your children leave, hearts like stones.
You do not banish them,
yet you make no effort to hold them.
The old are left to die in silence,
while your streets overflow
with cries no one answers.

To whom do you yield now?
To whom do you whisper?
To what glowing screens,
to which kneeling men?
What gods remain
to receive your fading faith?

Hands unseen bind you at night.
They name you an Idea,
yet measure you in votes and percentages.
They mourn you when it suits them,
but vanish when bribery knocks.

Ah, Homeland…
in whose hands
are you dying
a slow, unholy death?

from the collection
“Herons of Death”
titled “Homeland”