The corruption of the courts, of the political and bureaucratic systems, of the centrist institutions of the society, are all manifestations of the parallel system of honor/shame that is working and motivating the actions of those men operating the institutions.
On the one hand we have the smooth working of official systems where bureaucracies and lines of authority operate by sacred sanction and the consequent intersubjective exercise of a sense of duty that is personally felt. On the other hand we have the challenge to such a smooth bureaucratic, official, duty-bound system – the honor/shame system where the operation of society depends on the local, particular station of the person who stands at the head of the honor unit.
The measure of that person's strength, and thus the representation of his honor, is the arbitrariness of his ability to exercise prerogatives. The more abitrary, which is to say, the more the decision-making can be seen as useful to his personal whims rather than to the general welfare of the group – the more potlatch-like the action – the more honor he has.
The difference between a system of power distribution that is official, and a system of power distribution that is personal, is the amount of power the decision-maker wastes, and for what purpose. In the honor/shame systems the decision-makers waste power to aggrandize themselves; in authority/bureaucracy systems the decision-makers waste power to humble themselves. This humbling is the act of explicitly divesting oneself of power prerogatives in an act of submission and subordination – of reverence – to a higher authority, to the entire system of authority.
The honor/shame system engenders fiefdoms; the authority/bureaucracy system engenders processes and laws.
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