We're considering a dramatized dialogue with just two characters, centered on the topic of political corruption. In fact, there are already some, such as Dignity, by Ignasi Vidal. What I propose would star one actor playing the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas and another the Navarrese commission agent Koldo García Izaguirre. Can you imagine? On one side of the stage, one of the last great living European intellectuals (he's 96 years old); on the other, an obscure, semi-literate character. The play could be described as Ethics, simply. All this may seem like an outlandish idea... but it turns out it's already been invented and is twenty-four centuries old. In Plato's dialogues, it's very common for Socrates to engage in dialogue with individuals who, at the time, were recognizable to any citizen of Athens and who weren't exactly great thinkers. In fact, the issue of corruption, broadly understood, hovers over most of his dialogues—let's say. politicians of the Greek philosopher. All of this means that we are facing a problem that goes far beyond our circumstances, our time, our world. I wouldn't dare say it's inherent to the human condition, but it has been documented in all kinds of contexts for millennia.
In this sense, the idea of trying to completely eradicate corruption—or murder, or other crimes—seems rather fanciful. It's another matter to make it difficult to commit these types of crimes by every possible means, as well as to punish them more harshly once they have occurred. This second part would be relatively simple—only the Penal Code would need to be amended—while the first is very difficult. Currently, it's considered the best way to make life difficult for the corrupt is to exacerbate the idea of transparency. This sounds great on paper, but when it comes down to it, it doesn't work. When does this "moment of truth" fail? It's simple to explain. Billing the administration for paltry amounts entails, as some readers may have already experienced, a veritable administrative ordeal. The effort involved in issuing an invoice worth 150 or 200 euros to a city council is grotesquely disproportionate to the amount invoiced. Professional corrupt officials are interested in other ventures that are never decided on an electronic form with a digital signature, but rather arise in the context of a long, after-dinner conversation in a private restaurant. Corruption incubates there. Once the corrupt person and the corruptor have agreed on the objective, the rest is simply a matter of bartending, a few ethical and aesthetic scruples, influential friends, and lawyers, let's say. flexible with current legislation. Transparency, naively understood, can therefore have the opposite effect to that intended. Transparency is demanded everywhere and at all times for insignificant matters, forgetting—I don't know if maliciously or not—that it is the perfect excuse to be dishonest in good conscience about truly significant matters, especially public works. We look at a €150 invoice with four magnifying glasses and five spotlights, and at that very moment, two or three people, in pleasant semi-darkness, are plotting a contract for the execution of works worth €150 million while gulping down the ice cubes from their third gin and tonic.
What, then, should be done that is minimally realistic? The question is rhetorical: you can imagine I have no conclusive answer, nor do I know anyone who has devised an infallible one. However, I am convinced that one way to mitigate corruption related to the awarding of public works would be to transform certain decisions that are now political into purely technical dilemmas, where expert professionals would not only have an advisory role but an executive one. Decisions made by a significant number of prestigious individuals should always be collegial and only valid by majority. The decision to build a bridge or a road would obviously be political; the rest, purely technical. Some might say that things are already done in a similar way, but that is not true, as we have just seen. Nor are projects that necessarily entail subsequent overspending severely penalized, nor are many other things that could be easily corrected. All of this would not serve to sanitize politics, obviously, but it would help reposition the problem beyond the naive narrative of transparency, which at this time, and as paradoxical as it may sound, is what allows the most sinister opacity to go unnoticed.
