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It's not like most european countries are in a good position to justifiably point fingers here ...
The author Domenico Losurdo uses the term mutual demystification a lot, especially in Liberalism - a counter history. When two parties accuse each other of being hypocrites, it often ends up showing that they both are.
I'd like to point out that I'm european, not american - this is the opposite of calling each other hypocrites.
When people are not brain dead by media, both in the US and EU we know all of our problems comes from our own government and fat CEOs.
Foreigners are just one of the many scapegoats they put the blame on.
What it reminds me of is Greeks and then Romans calling them barbarian, from barbar meaning foreigners. This isn't new...
The problem always was power and the unfit nature of human beings to possess it.
I wouldn't expect anyone to deny the existence of corruption or abuse of power, but I think the corrupting influence of power is often used to justify in retrospect the acts of people put into power to do exactly that. It might sound pedantic to say that CEOs or state officials aren't really "corrupt", because they rarely ever intend to represent the interests of the workforce or population, but really it's a total inversion of causality. They don't "betray" because they got in power, they got in power to "betray".
On an interesting sidenote, it also goes against the common misconception that any form of authority ultimately leads to corruption, since those same CEOs and officials seem to stay pretty loyal.
Exact, and I believe most forms of power incentives bad actions and the worse individual to take it.
Wich would entail it comes from our nature, dictating the properties of power.
Good actions done by CEOs or the ones being loyal seems to me is coming from another facet of us.
Our economy is organized around exploitation, I understand the point that someone in power might use this power for their own good if unchecked, but in an economy of exploitation like ours, power is organized around said exploitation. The worst of people go to the top not because bad people inherently do (or as you say, because power incentivizes bad action) but because this system is structured around exploitation, being ruthless and clamping down as hard as possible on those below you.
I don't believe that power generally incentivizes bad action. Outside of the structure of a company or a capitalist state, it's merely a factor to account for, like any other conflict or human element (and is usually handled fairly expeditiously). In my experience in non profit organizations, usual "human issues" are of course presents, but corruption and power abuse only ever rear their heads when the rubber hit the profit road.
This confusion also isn't a mistake, it's a misdirection, perpetually maintained to depict the constant corruption of states and companies worldwide as a mere "unfortunate reality" of human organization, while minimizing scrutiny of the structures this corruption exists in. When Trump, Elon and friends are waging a crusade against corruption, you would think this misdirection is at its absolute stretching limit, but somehow it still holds strong even (and especially) in those critical of them.
Sorry for stupidly long reply, in a word, I think we shouldn't mistake "profit incentive", for "power incentive".
Well I get your point and I do agree with your logic. Your correct about capitalism and our system centered around exploitation for profit.
The reason I generalize is because, although capitalism makes it its center, personal gain and profit still exist nonetheless.
Exploitation isn't as new as capitalism, peasants under their king for instance was a major part of our history.
To me the more power an individual can get, the more he can serve himself, profit and exploit others. I believe this is the rule rather than the exception.
A lesser power would more easily lead to good actions because other incentives would compete with the smaller profit from your power. Hence why non profit organization are more free from corruption. As it's true for mayor compared to president for instance.
(This is why democracy is such an appealing concept, it divide power in such a way that no one as enough for corruption to exist.)
P.S. I'm ok with long reply, I hope you're good with that too...
No absolutely, I talk about capitalism because that's the current rule of the world, but this exploitation predates capitalism by millennia, you're right. The specific aspect of capitalism or feudalism, or any such form of exploitation, is that power doesn't represent the population's interest (even though of course we pretend to live in a perfect representative democracy). If the state protects private ownership by law, and that private ownership gives you incredible power itself (being in control of production, but also media and culture more broadly), you end up with the self reaffirming loop of protecting owners, and not the population.
As an individual, you can have power over me if you hold a gun to my head, but it's virtually impossible to point a gun at an entire nation when it's that same nation that must hold the gun. Capitalism today is a massive ouija board, where anyone doubting the mystical forces is shamed, ostracized, or worse (of course this was much more literal under God's mandated monarchs). But at the end of day, this still requires wide consent, even when enforced militarily.
Another way to put it is that while we often center the conversation around the "conflict of interest" that accompanies power, we ignore what that interest is. If exploiters or their defenders are systematically put in power, they expectedly defend exploitation. The scary communist motto of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" is about recognizing the origin and importance of power in the short-term, and giving it to those whose interests are emancipation. I fully agree with you, personal gain doesn't automatically go away if you get rid of profit, but thinking about this not in terms of conflicts of individual interests, but conflict of class interests allows us to dispel the misleading scary and brutal image of power wielded in any other way than the liberal democracy. The goal of course is a real democracy, one where workers, instead, defend their interests. The expected outcome is the dissolution of that exploitation through the dissolution of class, and eventually the dissolution of the state itself.
None of this magically protects you from acts of corruption or abuse, this is why the communist approach is not to flip the table over and bring a new ouija board except this time with "the good spirit" inside, but to create class consciousness, to dispel the lies and manipulations (because we're not naive and pliable, the manufacturing of consent is a massive global industry), and to continue collectively educating ourselves as we progress so we don't get fooled when someone brings a tipping table.
I swear I'm trying to be brief 😭