Discursos sobre corrupción en México

Abstract

Rulers, intellectuals and media tend to define corruption as a unique, modern, public and economic concept. Moreover, the comparison with cancer and the indiscriminate association with other social problems, especially poverty and insecurity, can lead us to extract a pessimist final message from these discourses, requiring a radical social change. However, citizens seem to incline towards the opposite view where corruption is considered the normal state of individual and social systems. An analysis of the popular sense of humour allows us to glimpse an operation, compatible with the nihilist culture of high modernity, through which the positive is taken out from the negative in many ways, social tension is neutralized and, and at the same time, corruption is endowed with a ground-breaking social function.