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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
- Individual, it appears as psychic deformation, i.e., moral accommodation and selective interpretation of truth by the person.
- Institutional, it appears in businesses, the media and state mechanisms as a process of reconstructing reality to serve interests.
- 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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