Jesus the Psychologist, Defining Corruption, Both Physical and Spiritual

        Jesus the Psychologist, Defining Corruption, Both Physical and Spiritual

In this article I'm going to delineate corruption from a psychological and theological vantage point, including a definition and depiction not typically embraced or examined. This is the definition of corruption I found in the dictionary: Deceitful or duplicitous conduct by those in authority, typically involving subornation.

Psychological and Theological Definition of Corruption

Defining spurious education as corruption The dictionary definition abridges the authentic magnitude of corruption and does justice neither to the word’s true resonance on culture nor society. This engenders an association that is fallacious. It neglects to encompass the full connotation of the term and how it ought to be applied to all dimensions of life and civilization. Jesus characterizes corruption as any comportment that is unscrupulous in essence by any individual or any entity, whether corporeal or metaphysical. The Bible instructs that words are corruption—a deleterious spiritual conduct, especially when wielded to fabricate and mislead deliberately.

Corruption is a psychological construct that fosters myriad vices and Moral disengagement: Individuals rationalize unethical comportment by trivializing its ramifications, deflecting culpability, or reinterpreting the act as permissible. Cognitive dissonance: Individuals undergo unease when their deeds contradict their presumed rather than their authentic principles, and they reconcile this by modifying their convictions or vindicating their transgressions through fabrications and corruption. Social learning: Corruption is frequently acquired through scrutiny and emulation; kin, peers, or figureheads engage in it with or without repercussion, and others emulate.

Psychological inquiries reveal that augmented fiscal influence can attenuate compassion and amplify hubris, precipitating corrupt tendencies. Emotional catalysts like avarice (yearning for excess) and trepidation (of forfeiting stature or assets) eclipse ethical verities and discernment. Offspring aren’t innately corrupt. They assimilate through observation, mimicry, reinforcement, and cultural indoctrination. Spurious doctrines and instruction from both domestic and external sources engender corruption in the adult.

Modeling by elders: guardians, relatives, confidants, educators, civic exemplars who circumvent norms, prevaricate, or defraud, inculcate these behaviors as permissible. Flaunting the evasion of levies or the suborning of an official are corrupt acts that legitimize unscrupulous expedients.

Moral relativism: In our spurious media as well as in academic and domestic spheres, the ethos that “everyone does it” is promulgated. Society has begun to perceive corruption as a stratagem for subsistence rather than a moral lapse. Aphorisms like “It’s not cheating if you don’t get caught” or “You have to play the game to win” perpetuate this. The ends vindicate the means.

Incentivizing transgression: is the sole archetype of triumph depicted and embraced today in our spurious media. The institution one attends correlates more with affluence than genuine aptitude or potential. All universities disseminate ubiquitous curricula, yet celebrity progenitors are discovered defrauding to secure their offspring’s admission into so-called prestigious academies for prospective pecuniary advantage. As though the content imparted in pedagogy is disparate merely because it emanates from a particular university.

We witness corruption at its nadir when individuals discern that corruption remunerates—and this dogma has become endemic and adhered to uncritically.

Ethics and Cultural Indoctrination

In myriad cultures, and via our spurious media today, individuals are indoctrinated to prioritize allegiance to kin or faction over integrity, equity, or legality. Here are just some of the modalities propagated in academia and media that perpetuate societal corruption: “Don’t question authority” stifles moral discernment and acquiesces to unethical directives. “Victory is paramount” rationalizes unscrupulous tactics, inciting deceit and subversion. “The entire system is compromised” cultivates skepticism and detachment from ethical standards.

The “Banality of Evil” and the Shadow Self

Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil” posits that commonplace individuals can perpetrate unethical deeds under specific conditions (e.g., conformity, subservience). But who are these “commonplace individuals,” and how do we delineate them? Are these individuals the adults reared under the ethos of spurious education and normalization of depraved conduct?

A potent media indoctrination from our spurious entertainment is situational ethics: individuals may behave corruptly in exigent circumstances or when they feel morally vindicated. Unintentional depravity rationalized.

Shadow Self (Jungian psychology): Every individual harbors latent impulses that, if unregulated, can materialize as unethical behavior. What did Jesus impart regarding our most veiled emotions and how to address them? “The truth will set you free.” No emotion is latent—all emotions can be restrained and circumvented if we assume dominion and employ truth as a compass for conduct. Repentance is the gospel’s antidote to our current corrupt divergence.

Revamping Education to Counteract Corruption

How can we recalibrate our extant scholastic framework to emphasize instruction against corruption? Let’s scrutinize the corruption in artistic pedagogy, for instance. Is it corrupt to obstruct a child from acquiring medical knowledge or neglect to instruct them in medicine, while expending their invaluable time, energy and vigor on ostensibly trivial minutiae—like who frescoed the Roman cathedral vaults or the Mona Lisa? Is this depraved and spurious historiography? Compelling children to venerate and even idolize Christopher Columbus—a colonizing human trafficker of his epoch. Compelled to learn Columbus’s role in history as an esteemed and revered figure, endeavoring to obfuscate and veil his genuine legacy for humankind.

The gospel designates these teachings as corrupt because they warp cognition and endorse, normalize, and even mandate depraved conduct. Let’s examine the subconscious more meticulously and cease fixating solely on what is paraded before our eyes by a depraved society with a depraved educational apparatus.

Must We Recalibrate Education to Oppose Corruption?

In my manuscript: The Gray Area: Rushing into the Great Tribulation, I elucidate how we must recalibrate education both domestically and institutionally. What merit is there in admonishing a child not to lie or engage in human trafficking if we then extol Columbus in academia?

Is this not a truncation of information—a perplexing schema? Some assert we ought not malign the deceased, but Jesus advocates for veracity regarding all persons and history, dead, living, past, present, and sundry.

To substantively confront corruption in education, we must impart the most pivotal disciplines of our existence—medicine for vitality and jurisprudence for harmony and equity. Integrate ethics into every discipline, cease the truncation of information, abandon the spurious philosophy, science, historiography, and economics we currently propagate—leading us toward ruination.

Here, imparts the truth: “The love of money is the root of all evil.” The spurious content we consume daily is that knowing who frescoed the Sistine Chapel ceiling (Michelangelo) or the Mona Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci) constitutes cultural erudition. In academia, this spurious content is taught, and the media incessantly reiterates it in cinema and other portrayals. A cultural legacy that subliminally fosters veneration of men and disparity among men. This is taught as being cultivated and cognizant of our paramount accomplishments. Our paramount accomplishments—as though you or I could claim Angelo’s or Da Vinci’s feats as our own—when in truth, they yielded no benefit, corporeal or spiritual, to the average individual.

This parallels professional sports aficionados who are deluded into believing they partake in the game, that their home team is theirs—spurious teachings so that the ordinary fulfill their sole function: subsidizing the veneration of teams and athletes. It’s an investment with hollow dividends—and worse, an investment bequeathed to posterity—a spurious cycle. This is what I term spiritual subliminal corruption of our psyche.

Questioning Cultural Legacy and Its Ramifications

In summation, I declare: dare to label corrupt an educational paradigm rooted in archaic corrupt teachings that perpetuate disparity and privilege for a select few, and idolization of others’ anguish, affliction, and desolation for the multitude. Idolization of truly inconsequential feats from a genuine societal perspective. Idolization of human traffickers, of slave proprietors—reprehensible individuals and deeds in the eyes of Christ.

Final Reflection

The contribution depicted by our cultural indoctrination is merely performative; it has betrayed society—ushering us to the precipice of our own annihilation, the extinction of our species, and a Great Tribulation denouement to all civilization. Let’s interrogate the very bedrock of how we conceptualize corruption. Let’s investigate it with the gravity it warrants. Let’s not persist as the blind shepherded by the blinded of yesteryear.