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Bribery & corruption ethical issues
Corruption and ethics
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The role of a government is to protect and aid society. Such examples of successful governments are exemplified by governments like Canada, a country where people have freedom, education, and access to basic human needs like food, shelter, and healthcare. A quality of an effective government is seen in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, an essay that affirms the people’s need for a charismatic and caring leader. Additionally, Karl Marx’s, Communist Manifesto reveals that a government needs to support the working class if it wishes to thrive. Lastly, Aldous Huxley’s “Words and Behavior” demonstrates that governments can use the power of language to inspire society to do many different things. All of these texts demonstrate that the best governments …show more content…
An effective government needs to promote honest communication and education with its citizens if it wants to succeed. Based on Huxley’s “Words and Behavior”, a dishonest government with ignorant citizens will cause many harmful and undesirable decisions to be made. It is only by promoting unbiased knowledge and education that citizens can make good, informed decisions in their country. Throughout the essay, Huxley discusses how language is used to sway both the logical and emotional responses of people. Euphemisms are used to justify harmful acts such as war while propaganda is often used to maliciously target innocent groups. It is because of this that Huxley writes, “Inappropriate and badly chosen words vitiate thought and lead to wrong or foolish conduct”(Pg 46 Par. 1). The “inappropriate and badly chosen words” symbolize the way …show more content…
Based on Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, one can conclude that a government can provide and proect its citizens by supporting the needs of the working class. Throughout the text, it is demonstrated that the ruling class or bourgeois often exploit the working class or proletariats for profit. Marx also warned about the dangers of capitalism as it offers a false sense of social mobility. He wrote that as the industrial revolution developed, workers were, “Slaves of the bourgeois class… they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself”(Pg 31 Par. 2). Marx’s use of the words “enslaved” and “machine” imply that the the members of the working class are being treated as property rather than human beings. This symbolism of slavery reveals that unrestricted capitalism causes people to be exploited like slaves. In these situations, many workers are paid just enough to survive but never have a chance to attain any sort of freedom or peace. This labor crisis still continues today. In California, the minimum wage is not enough to support a living wage for a single adult. People who work full-time minimum wage jobs are forced to live in poverty to insure greater profits for corporations. It is the role of the government to assure something like this never happens. The government needs to provide for and support the
To conclude, Postman's analysis that Huxley's vision of the future has become more of a reality than that of Orwell's. Although the present day is not exactly how Huxley had envisioned it, our society will soon reflect the one created in Brave New World if it continues to progress as it had in the past few decades. Orwell's prediction does not hold much relevance in today's society. Our government is not constantly watching over us, they have more important difficulties to overcome. Government is not concerned with the actions of individuals; they base their decisions on the opinions of the masses. Huxley's travesty holds far more relevance than the prestigious social theory of Orwell.
In Marx’s opinion, the cause of poverty has always been due to the struggle between social classes, with one class keeping its power by suppressing the other classes. He claims the opposing forces of the Industrial Age are the bourgeois and the proletarians. Marx describes the bourgeois as a middle class drunk on power. The bourgeois are the controllers of industrialization, the owners of the factories that abuse their workers and strip all human dignity away from them for pennies. Industry, Marx says, has made the proletariat working class only a tool for increasing the wealth of the bourgeoisie. Because the aim of the bourgeoisie is to increase their trade and wealth, it is necessary to exploit the worker to maximize profit. This, according to Marx, is why the labor of the proletariat continued to steadily increase while the wages of the proletariat continued to steadily decrease.
Most importantly for those who Marx feels capitalism has an adverse effect on, the proletariat. Marx in The Communist Manifesto explains what capitalism is and what it is to be a capitalist: "To be a capitalist is to have not only a purely personal but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion." (Marx, K., Engels, F. and Berman, M. (2011)). Through such a definition of capitalism, he adamantly stresses that capitalist state is selfish, one that has been manufactured by the desire of individuals to have a greater material wealth than his societal
In his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley illustrates ways in which government and advanced science control society. Through actual visualization of this Utopian society, the reader is able to see how this state affects Huxley’s characters. Throughout the book, the author deals with many different aspects of control. Whether it is of his subjects’ feelings and emotions or of the society’s restraint of population growth, Huxley depicts government’s and science’s role in the brave new world of tomorrow.
Huxley illustrates just how a real world government can come to tyrannical power over its citizens through the fear of war and terror. Barr explains this very method when he states. Even more troubling than Huxley's prescient description of technological advances employed to manipulate and control mind and body is the manner in which government seizes on a military threat as the vehicle to not only control the population, but also to convince the people, even as their freedom is being stolen from them, that it is necessary to do so, and that taking freedom will make them free. Barr 850 - "The. Historically, citizens of many countries sacrifice their personal liberties for a sense of security masked as a governmental attempt to push their views onto the citizens.
The Communist Manifesto responded to the situation and created a vision of an equal communist society. The Communist Manifesto was defined by the abolishment of the bourgeois sovereign rule that followed a revolution against capitalism to create communism. This is because it allowed for the emergence of the powerful Bourgeoise, "In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” As Marx explained, the Bourgeois exploited the Proletariats through the means of the long hours the laborers had to endure to receive very low wages, which maximized Bourgeois profits.
Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, showcases a world alternate from ours, in a dystopian setting. Where human morals are drastically altered, families, love, history, and art are removed by the government. They used multiple methods to control the people, but no method in the world is more highly used and more effective than propaganda. The world state heavily implemented the use of propaganda to control, to set morals, and to condition the minds of every citizen in their world. However, such uses of propaganda have already been used in our world and even at this very moment.
This dream of forming and maintaining a utopian society was immortalized in two novels dealing with the same basic ideas, 1984 by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Both of these novels deal with the lives of main characters that inadvertently become subversives in a totalitarian government. These two books differ greatly however with the manner in which the government controls the population and the strictness of the measures taken to maintain this stability. This essay with compare and contrast the message and tone of each novel as well as consider whether the utopia is a positive or negative one.
Karl Marx does not agree with capitalism and views it as a system that incapacitates workers and places them in a category that will almost never attain the wealth that their owners/employers have. Capitalism oppresses its citizens and makes them believe that a capitalist society is best. Society has been able to benefit greatly from capitalism but a major fault in capitalism is the dependency that exists between capitalism and us. The disproportion of wealth amongst the rich and poor in America creates and maintains a group of Americans that will either have too much money and another group that struggles to ascertain a piece of that wealth but will almost never reach the same level of wealth.
“"Propaganda is as powerful as heroin, it surreptitiously dissolves all capacity to think” by Gil Courtemanche connects to the sad fact of using propaganda as a deadly weapon to feed people with false information and stop them from thinking. George Orwell’s novel, 1984, describes a totalitarian dystopian society where the Party is constantly brainwashing its citizens with information that is beneficial to its own rights. On the opposite side, people are working for the party just like dominated slaves for their masters without knowing what’s going on. But, in order for the party to achieve this goal, they have to use different techniques of propaganda in Oceania to create fear for people so that they can obey the rules. The use of propaganda in the society of 1984 takes away freedom from individuals because of the absence of privacy, thinking and making decisions.
The political philosopher believed that communism could only thrive in a society distressed by “the political and economic circumstances created by a fully developed capitalism”. With industry and capitalism growing, a working class develops and begins to be exploited. According to Marx, the exploiting class essentially is at fault for their demise, and the exploited class eventually comes to power through the failure of capitalism.... ... middle of paper ...
...008, American economy suffered a great economic crisis known as “The Great Depression” that affected the country tremendously. This crisis comes from the greed of capitalists and lack of information and understanding of capitalism from the people. Each of us, especially the government, is responsible for allowing such crises to happen. Karl Marx’s critique serves as a guideline for us to understand capitalism and acknowledge its negative effects to our lives. By doing so, we can forecast future crises and preventing from happening.
“Under capitalism workers receive only a small fraction of the wealth that they alone produce, while the lion’s share goes to the capitalist owners and to the bankers, landlords, insurance companies, lawyers, politicians, and all the other parasites who live off the back of labor and perform no useful work.” (SLP). Thus, laborers are paid much less than the value of the labor that they contribute. As Karl Marx said, this is stealing, or exploitation of labor. The wages for these laborers are often too small to live off of.... ...
Critics may charge that by abolishing private property, the communist is instead eliminating the “groundwork of all personal freedom, activity, and independence.”(235) Standing in defense of communism, Marx states that wage labor does not really create property for the laborer. In fact, it only creates capital, which Marx defines as being a kind of property that works to exploit the worker rather than benefit him or her. (235) The worker works just to increase the wage of his boss, while his wage remains stagnant. Marx states that this capital in the modern bourgeoisie society is based on class antagonism, which makes it become a social power. Communists do not want to abolish property as right, but rather want to abolish the class character associated with property. Keeping capital private will continue to give the bourgeoisie the ability to have more power over the workers of the world. (236) By making capital public, it eliminates the class antagonism that is attached to that
Karl Marx was a German philosopher and political theorist. He developed the socio-political theory of Marxism. One of his most famous works is The Communist Manifesto that he co-wrote with Friedrich Engels. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx discusses his theories on society, economics and politics. He believed that “all societies progress through the dialectic of class struggle”. He criticized capitalism, and referred to it as the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie". Marx believed that capitalism was unfair because the rich middle and upper class people manipulated the system and used it for their own benefit while we get the short end of the stick. We, being average Americans— like myself— who go to college full-time, juggle a job, and yet are constantly struggling just to make ends meet: the unappreciated, exploited and underpaid every day h...