The correlation between corruption and the sense of well-being in a society is irrefutable. Much academic work on the subject has been undertaken, and the fact continues to be borne out by the latest investigations.
The 2024 World Happiness Report, conducted by Gallup in partnership with the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre (Oxford University, WHR), the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and the WHR’s editorial board, includes “perception of corruption” in the life evaluations used in the latest survey.
Purchasing power, social and family support, life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, and generosity to others are the other factors surveyed that together show significant links to our sense of well-being.
Happiness is an elusive emotion, and I often wonder why we relentlessly pursue it, but the science reveals that our state of mind determines our physical well-being. So, almost in a primordial way, we are wired to seek happiness for our very survival.
It is worth bearing this in mind when we consider that the most powerful and highly resourced country in the world, which dozens risk their lives daily to enter, is also now one of the more unhappy places for its residents. For the first time, the US has dropped out of the Top 20 happy-people countries.
Previous World Happiness Reports showed that countries with low corruption levels have happier citizens, and they live longer as a result. I wonder how much of the growing discontent derives from the daily murder sprees in the US and also the terrible air of social, and political mistrust created by Donald Trump. He has undermined every US institution and every human virtue through his personal corruption.
Last week, our Prime Minister felt obliged to acknowledge what many TT citizens have long suspected, if not known, to be true. Dr Rowley reported that our state agencies are corrupt. The nature of the revelation, though, was particularly disturbing. Many, if not most, citizens already profoundly distrust the arm of the security services we most interact with – the police.
To learn that the Strategic Services Agency (SSA), which gathers intelligence to fight drug, gun, and people-trafficking crimes, has been infiltrated by criminal elements is perfectly unsettling. The SSA exists to keep us and our country safe.
What are we to make of the revelations about some pastor posing as a secret agent and his cover being blown, while gun battles rage in the capital’s public housing involving the police and friends of politicians?
The PM is right to deduce that citizens sheltering criminals and hiding important information contribute to the low crime detection rates, but people’s reluctance to help the police was not borne out by a telephone poll on a local radio station, in which about 65 per cent of responders said they would report criminal relatives to the police. That’s encouraging.
I would like to think that I would, too, but it never occurs to me to call the police when I need help. I know from experience that they are unreliable,
