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Originally Posted by johndallman
Sir's view of these matters is rather naïve. Political contributions, unwritten understandings of the availability of lucrative sinecures, and other kinds of favours make it reasonably easy to work around bribery laws if one is capable of subtlety.
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Highly sophistocated bribery is still bribery. The loss of defference changes the rules of the game.
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I think you're trying to force a lot of varied types of relationships into this idea of "deference" and thereby distorting them.
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No, but distortion is a useful idea here. If you change something basic in society, large or small, every aspect of that society changes. Mass literacy has altered the nature of knowledge and education radically. We still don't know were that change is taking us. Railroads, cars, and transit systems generally have changes human genetics in a measurable way. By that I mean that scientists have measured it and proven that because we are marrying (or at least breeding) with people further away from our home communities, there has been a genetic change in human populations. Note: a modern high school draws on a wider population than most medieval villages contained.
All this is to say that a major change in "deference" as a catagory changes all catagories "deference" interacts with. The
Social Ecology is transformed if you transform a major factor in it. Loss of deference for some catagories while extending defference to new groups transforms all aspects of culture in at least small ways. And, like a small change in the biosphere, these small cultural changes create further unforseeable changes.
Distortion is a valuble idea here, but so is liberation, or creative destruction. One order of society is fading away, it has been for centuries. Predicting that such changes are meaningless and unimportant won't work.