• Cooperation is a more effective strategy than treachery (see: pack animals; game theory, etc).
• Treachery is parasitic, and survives at a level based on the health of the host and the ability to be detected and removed.
• Technology empowers both the virtuous and the corrupt.
• Earth isn't getting any bigger, and the ability for secrecy is currently diminishing. This makes treachery less viable.
• Corruption reduces the health of the host.
• Powerful oligarchs are still only human; within the human bellcurve of IQ.
• Corrupt oligarchs lack trust in each other. That's a defining feature of being treacherous. They expend a percentage of their resources maintaining their corrupt network.
Every so often technology creates a paradigm shift in civilization. There is an "arms race" to utilize it for your groups benefit. A large war probably happens. The winners set up a system to maximize the output of society for their benifit. Corruption grows with this productivity boom. After a human lifespan (≈80 years) the corrupt network begins to fall apart. New technology threatens to radically change how the system works. The cycle begins again.
In short, I agree with this sentiment. If all of that corruption was in place for so long, by statistical process, someone. SOMEWHERE with enough power would have had something to say about it, and through either guile, force, or blackmail, been able to dismantle the network, whether it's new money, old, someone being raised in this environment who said "no fuck this" or a random drycleaner. A network like that just has so many goddamn points of points of failure. All it would take is someone with just enough power and influence, or someone trusted to suddenly gain a conscience, or worse, be slighted and decide to burn the entire thing to the ground out of spite, and suddenly this entire multi-generational corrupt empire comes crumbling down.
To address the claim of potential "genetic breeding", moral bankruptcy is not something you can breed like genes, it's determined by environment how you were raised, what media you consume and more.
To PL a bit here, by all rights I SHOULD be a die hard liberal who sees trump as fascist, I SHOULD hate everything he stands for. I SHOULD be a foot soldier of globalhomo on account of my upbringing, my surrounding, and my traumas.
But I'm not.
A system you describe as so large, is also incredibly fragile, not because of it's largesse, but because of exactly what it's selling.
Something described by almost every society, and every just society as ontologically evil.
It is in these societies that such a system as you describe would exist. One where so many points of failure exist that it's feasibly impossible. Especially in the modern day.
Who cleans the floors? Who fixes things that are broken? Who do those people talk to? What do they see? Are they too curious? How would you dispose of them.
What about the enforcers you inevitably have to put in place to monitor them? do they have families? Could they break? Could they flip? What are their histories?
What happens in the event of a natural disaster? Or if something is discovered by someone not on your payroll?
How would you pay all of those people off? Everyone may have their price sure. But this "System of the corrupt" as described is something on the scale people ascribe to things like the holocaust, as it's taught in School.
Something that horrible, that evil. That truly vile. Would never be able to be hidden. Not unless the entire goddamn thing is automated save for what you wish to not be, and even with the most advanced technology of today, that simply isn't possible.
A network on the level described isn't possible because such evil would horrify any normal man, and as shown in history, Atrocity is met with atrocity.
