This is a sane advice on face value.

Yet following it in an heavily corrupt organization means you find yourself doing very dirty stuff to get recognized by your peers, oversee and facilitate corruption to get buy in from your superiors, and crush weaker people to stand on top where you’ll get more power.

In the event you yourself get crushed in this process, the only trace you’ll leave in the world will be dirty things you didn’t agree with in the first place and actually strived to change.

I wonder how much that approach bares fruits when it comes to really shitty organizations.

I think it can work, but it requires some kind of laser focus on the "true goal". I also tend to fear what else our (hypothetical) protagonist may do when the ends are (much) more important than the means.

If you did enough dirty work to get to the top of a corrupt organisation you can be quickly removed if you try to challenge the status quo. After all, all your peers have a ton of dirt on you.

The best way to change a flawed system is unrelenting public pressure. As others have said, once you're inside the system, you can either stand up for what should be done and be sidelined, or you can shove aside your idealism in order to gain power before trying to make changes. More often than not, that idealism never returns.

I've thought about this more in the political realm, so it may not apply as cleanly in the justice system. We know that public pressure works in politics because they depend on voters to keep voting them in. The only way to stave off a slide into conformity is to hold people accountable for behaving the way they said they would during a campaign. It's not an easy answer since it requires a lot more public participation, but I think we have been lulled into believing that these institutions are self-maintaining once set up, and that is clearly not the case. A few honest and caring people just entering the justice system are going to have a hard time of it. Millions of people outside the system shouting loudly and unceasingly about its abuses have a better shot at causing changes.

Obligatory New Yorker cartoon: https://condenaststore.com/featured/he-feels-he-can-do-more-...

Out of curiosity, are there good examples of fundamental/systemic flaws -- where it's not that the system needs to be fixed, it's that a new system is needed -- being fixed by people working within the system? The success rate of violent, armed revolution is low, but it has produced some concrete successes (e.g., the existence of the US and more generally the fall of monarchy).

The US is a weird example of an armed revolution because it was a colonial revolt largely by people who already had power and were part of the colonial governments. The layer of government that was being scraped off was relatively thin, locally. For example, both Washington and Jefferson were in the Virginia House of Burgesses, and they're just the first two I googled to find out the details of their pre-Revolutionary political careers.

If the Confederacy had succeeded in seceding, it would have been a very similar revolution - the state governments on down would remain intact, with just a little bit at the top being rearranged. I'm not sure I could name a third, similar armed revolution off the top of my head; most of the ones I'm familiar with involve charismatic outsiders burning down the existing institutions and starting over fresh.

That's a good point - the leaders of the American Revolution were already "working within the system," they just also led a violent revolt. I think there's a good point to be made that that's one of the best ways to make sure that you can successfully burn the existing system down and put what you want in place.

That cartoon made my day.

The problem is that the bad behavior of these systems is emergent. For this strategy to work, your ability to disregard your own self interest (plus others like you) has to outweigh the self-interest of everyone else making up that system. From what I've seen, most people get tired, succumb to their own self-interest, yet continue telling themselves the altruistic narrative.

> A mentor of mine who used to work for a government agency once told me something that I hadn't really appreciated until recently. To paraphrase, sometimes the best way to change a system that is flawed is to work from within. It's harder, sure, since it takes time to get enough power to make effective change, but it's an idea nonetheless.

I believe this is formally called the "SLC Punk Maneuver"

We've banned this account for continuing to violate the guidelines after we've asked you repeatedly to stop. If you'd like to email us at [email protected], we're happy to unban accounts when we believe they'll post civilly and substantively in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Ha, ha ha.

Or, publicly shame them.

There's a reason judges impose gag orders which violate people's right to free speech. They're OK with violating peoples constitutional rights to serve their own self interests.

Who bells the cat?

You've been posting a ton of unsubstantive and/or uncivil comments that break the HN guidelines and have ignored our request to stop. We ban accounts that do this. Since you've been a user for a few years I'd prefer not to ban you, but if you keep this up we'll have to, so would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this?

What it boils down to: post civilly and substantively or not at all. Put differently: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.

I'd like to reply to 'bitJericho here - please start commenting in a tone that makes the HN moderators happy, because the positions you're espousing are ones that I think is extremely valuable, and it would be a loss to the site to lose them.

I realize that it's hard to separate a tone that makes the mdoerators unhappy and content that makes the moderators unhappy (I didn't read the comment above as unsubstantive or uncivil at all!) but you gotta play by their rules.

(Or, I guess, burn HN down and start a new one that isn't subservient to capital. I'll join.)

The question is how to make a forum that doesn't burn itself down. 'Tone' is sometimes a word people use to trivialize that challenge. I don't find it trivial (rather hard in fact), but others might do better. There is surely room for new kinds of internet community, and if anybody starts one that produces better results at scale than what we have on Hacker News, I'll be interested. If they do it without paying anybody ('subservient to capital'), I'll be doubly interested.

In the meantime, HN is merely one specific kind of community, and it has specific rules which, if people want to participate, they have to follow. Those rules are at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. They're not hard to follow for anyone who wants to.

>The system is corrupt and should be burned to the ground.

Ok, so we burn the system to the ground. Then what? Crown bitJericho king?

Write a new Constitution given the lessons of the last few centuries.

But we already have a method in place for changing the Constitution, no revolutions necessary.

The architects who wrote that method also claimed that it would inevitably become ineffective.

Is there evidence that it has become ineffective?

What type of evidence are you looking for? Constitutional rights are violated every day on a large scale basis by those who have sworn to uphold its principles

Failed attempts at a Constitutional convention which should have succeeded?

What good would a failed attempt be when the congress which would conduct the convention is corrupted?

Then adopt saner system like the ones in most european countries.

It's such a silly mindset. Do what we currently do in US or anarchy. There are over hundred other countries on earth and significant fraction of them is doing way better than USA in most aspects.

What seems silly to me is the premise that completely destroying the existing system would somehow result in a saner and more just system replacing it.

Adopting something more akin to European style democracy (which is what I assume you're mostly referring to) is already possible within the US system. That it hasn't been done yet isn't evidence of corruption within that system, but of the culture of the US simply not wanting it.

Yes. It's a silly premise. But almost equally silly is the premise that, a system where so much money and power relies on its insanity can be gradually turned into something different, saner.

You need really a lot of disregard of previous system and power to make any significant changes. You'd need either revolution or invasion. Obama inaptitude shows that the system can't be touched from within even by smart person in position of highest legal power.

Having a flawed legal system is what you call a first world problem. For comparison in China prosecutors have so much power that the conviction rate is a tiny almost immeasurable sliver of a fraction below 100%. Conversely with weak rule of law you get lynchings, vendettas and retributive violence. Incarcerating innocent people is terrible and I appreciate the sentiment that it's better that 10 guilty people go free than one innocent is incarcerated, but not that no guilty people are ever brought to justice.

Anarchic theories are premised on the idea that everyone would act as individuals and treat each other equally, but that's not what happens. People naturally form alliances, tribes, religious groups or out and out criminal gangs.

The prosecutorial assumption of infallibility is just one symptom of a wider malaise. IMHO what America needs to appreciate, as a nation, is that it's nothing special. It's just big and therefore powerful, but it really doesn't have any special moral status or exceptional ethical immunity. You see the ideological belief that it does throughout American History from Manifest Destiny to America First, both the isolationist movement of the 40s and today.

America is a great nation, yes. It's a bastion of democracy, true. But it's a very long way from moral infallibility. There's the perception that e.g. Europe is a corrupt den of elites, born from America's struggle for independence from and conflicts with European Monarchies such as England and Spain, but it's ludicrously out of date. The American allergy against Communism is a symptom of this. At it's root communism and socialism is about individual freedom and a caring society, but communism got infected with totalitarianism early on. Individual communists have often been as shocked and appalled by Soviet excesses as anyone else. George Orwell, who wrote Animal Farm and 1984 as critiques of Stalinism was himself as communist, but the distinction between Communists like Orwell and ones like Trotsky is lost on American ideological anti-communism. You really can have a fair and caring society, and real meaningful individual freedoms. They're not absolute, utterly opposed principles and in fact they need each other. You can't have guarantees of real individual freedom without a society that cares about making that guarantee and takes actual steps to protect it. Even Ayn Rand accepted welfare support when she needed it. You can't have a well functioning system of state care and support for individuals without individual freedoms to hold that system to account and drive change when it's needed.

What makes change in the justice system so hard, as in other areas, is this assumption of ideological purity in the American system, mainly by American Republicans I have to say. As a British lifelong Conservative voter I find this hard to cope with but in the post-Reagan era I find very little common ground between myself and mainstream Republicanism these days. It's a bit bewildering realy.

You can't have nothing. Something will fill the power vacuum.

Ok, since now you're crossing into personal attack, I've banned this account until we get a commitment from you that you'll follow the site rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You can email [email protected] if you want to do that.

That makes me privileged, and lucky, and maybe a bit square, but it doesn't prove me wrong.

Said many Iraqi Joes before the US invasion.

While I kind of agree with the sentiment whose to say the replacement will be any better? And who even has the power to replace the system? Working from within and doing what you can to improve it sounds like the most plausible solution to me.

Sounds great, won't work. Nobody who's in the system wants it changed. The only people willing to even work in the system are corrupt or unable to cope outside of the system.

Well that's how we got into this mess in the first place. The only people who seem to work in it are incapable of doing the right thing. Doing nothing isn't going to fix it. And burning it to the ground isn't a realistic option.

Why isn't it a realistic option?