There seems ever more to worry about these days. There’s nothing made up about our deep concerns, unfortunately, and worry is part of the nature of humanity. Put as plainly as one can, we are living in a time of hyper-corruption.

In my series The Steep Climes Quartet (first two books published, the third in manuscript and due in Spring 2026, and the last, which takes place in 2047, is awaiting its own desk date), climate progress isn’t imagined to simply happen, but rather that the fossil fuel corporations and related self-interests mount a countereffort to keep fast climate progress at bay.

I guess I got that one right. I started this work in 2015 and worried that the criminal pushback on the part of Big Oil might seem exaggerated, but if anything, the facts threaten to put my fiction into non-fiction.

As for the above-referenced “human condition,” one may safely say that we semi-wise thinking monkeys are never without corruption, and you don’t have to be a scholar of the mediaeval philosophers to understand this. You need only look around. Somehow America has shifted from the normal state of corruption, when some people, caught up in selfishness or pathology try to gain advantage over others, and this is often considered along the spectrum of selfishness to criminality; today, the level and scope of corruption is hyper.

I’m turning 70 years  and I understood from an early age that people could be good or bad or behave good or bad. I grew up in what I think of now as a “serious” moral family, and a Roman Catholic-inflected one at that, and I was a serious member of this serious family. Among my earliest memories are considerations of sin and grace, not that this is rare for those families where the mother had been a novitiate in a convent before leaving for a secular life and the father a seminarian who had been discouraged from continuing his calling because of an episode of seizure. And no, these two people who went on to become my parents (along with my five siblings, like any good Franco-American Catholic of the day!), they were not caught up in some sort of Abelard and Héloïse scandal, but simply two people from the same home town who went through their religious struggles all on their own in different places only to reunite back in civilian life. They dated, got married, and had a modest brood of kids, so get your mind out of the gutter, boyos.

Of course, keeping one’s mind out of the gutter was a common effort for a serious young fellow like me, right along with legions of other little monkey boys, and when I say others, I’m speaking about pretty much all of us, Baltimore Catechism or not. We’re strange creatures, us humans: capable of love and grace and caught up in selfishness and self-serving.

Even bees do it, I presume. If you want a great example of how wonderful we humans can be, here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia about “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love,” by Cole Porter:

…a popular song written in 1928… introduced in Porter’s first Broadway success, the musical Paris by French chanteuse Irène Bordoni, for whom Porter had written the musical as a starring vehicle.

Bordoni’s husband and Paris producer Ray Goetz convinced Porter to give Broadway another try with this show. The song was later used in the English production of Wake Up and Dream and was used as the title theme music in the 1933 Hollywood movie Grand Slam starring Loretta Young and Paul Lukas. In 1960 it was also included in the film version of Cole Porter’s Can-Can.

The first of Porter’s “list songs”, it features a string of suggestive and droll comparisons and examples, preposterous pairings and double entendres, dropping famous names and events, drawing from highbrow and popular culture. Porter was a strong admirer of the Savoy operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, many of whose stage works featured similar comic list songs.

The first refrain covers human ethnic groups, the second refrain birds, the third refrain marine life, the fourth refrain insects and centipedes, and the fifth refrain non-human mammals.

I’ll argue that Cole Porter shows the capacity for good in humanity’s creativity. I’ll further propose that Ella Fitzgerald’s various versions of this song rank among the best indicators for our capacity for greatness. There are myriad other examples of people’s high moral capacity, and while an English Major such as myself may think of art and high purpose, I also recall more personal instances, such as when my father showed great compassion to a much younger cousin of mine as my aunt and uncle traversed a divorce.

There are many examples in this age of hyper-corruption, and in fact, these examples can seem without limit. One particularly galling example is the behavior of fossil fuel corporations in the face of confident knowledge that the consumption of their products is altering the Earth’s ability to support life, and yet duplicity and denial are the watchwords of this industry. Tied to the world-damaging corruption of Big Oil, Trump et al.’s efforts to abrogate the rule of law seems very much in support of Big Oil’s astonishing selfishness and world-destruction.

But what is corruption? Here’s the denotation:

Corruption is a form of dishonesty or a criminal offense that is undertaken by a person or an organization that is entrusted in a position of authority to acquire illicit benefits or abuse power for one’s gain.

Here’s a broader view of corruption drawn from “Poverty and Corruption in the New Testament Perspective,” by Olusola Igbari, in Open Access Library Journal, Vol.3 No.8, August 2016:

It refers to a degenerate state, debased state, prevention, invalid state, putrid state, spoiled, fainted, vitiates and unsound experience [that] carries a moral or a cultic sense of violation of covenant that expects divine judgments.

This quote serves two purposes in this essay. In the first instance, the reference offers yet another example of how wonderful humans can be in what they create, and in this case not only the journal article itself, but more generally the Internet that brings such a reference to light at the cost of a few keystrokes. In the second instance, this ties to the earlier reference to mediaeval philosophy and its focus on the nature of man and the world, especially in relation to God’s goodness in the face of evil, but I’ll avoid further travel down this rabbit hole. You can always read A History of Philosophy, Volume 2, “Mediaeval Philosophy,” Parts 1 and 2, by Frederick Copleston, S.J., and then there is Volume 3, “Late Mediaeval and Renaissance Philosophy,” if you want more.

An image of A History of Philosophy, Volume 2, “Mediaeval Philosophy,” Parts 1, by Frederick Copleston, S.J, although I could have snap a photo of my own copy that’s sat on my shelf for decades. My copy is somewhat tattered, no doubt because I’d wrestled with it quite a lot. I’ve been meaning to re-read this volume, but it’s an even bet I won’t.

Trump and Gang hits the high-water mark (well, one can hope it doesn’t get worse!) when it comes to corruption, and that is corruption in the modern sense, anyway. This Administration is so bad that the country is facing an existential crisis as a democracy.

There I was (and many millions of others), concerned about the existential threat of climate change to continuing progress of human society and economy, but in America at least, the growing threat from climbing global temperatures and its consequences has been back-seated by political corruption. This corruption means that that the failure to resolve the current political condition of the United States retards progress on the climate progress front and will continue to do so until overthrown.

I wrote a recent post, “Democracy, Climate Action, Climate Fiction… and Criminality,” that addresses this and many other concerns about American climate progress. While the rest of the world (to varying degrees) march forward toward the renewable energy transition, we Americans look on as President Big Oil Stooge does all he can to game the system for the benefit of the fossil fuel industry while viciously suppressing climate action on the national level. Even as the projections for electrical load demand spike, renewables, which are the faster and less expensive way to meet growing demands, are being shut down, defunded, and the climate crisis denied.

Make no mistake about this: Trump is working for Big Oil, Big Money, Big Tech, Big Pentagon, Big Pharma, Big Health Insurance, and the work is the destruction of democracy here in the USA. There’s a simple enough explanation for this anti-democracy effort, which is that too many people—you know, a majority—don’t want the various Bigs running rough shod over the economy in ways that are one-sided. In a working democracy, these extreme series of corruption would be addressed at the ballot box. In an autocracy/oligarchy/totalitarian government, the corruption goes on unchecked, and the plundering of the country keeps happening.

Here in the United States of America, pro-democracy efforts are climate progress efforts, simple as that.