Why Organizations Become Corrupt: The Tower of Babel, Mission Drift, and the Moral Structure of Organizations

Organizational scandals repeatedly show that serious wrongdoing cannot always be adequately explained by the conduct of a single individual.

In 2016, the death of Wei Zexi, a young Chinese cancer patient, drew national attention to Baidu’s paid-search practices. Wei had found a hospital through Baidu and undergone an experimental treatment there. A subsequent government investigation concluded that Baidu’s paid-ranking results had objectively influenced his choice of medical provider and identified serious problems in the way commercial results were ranked and presented.[1] In the same year, Wells Fargo was penalized after employees opened large numbers of deposit and credit-card accounts without customers’ knowledge or authorization. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that sales targets and compensation incentives had contributed to the practice, while Wells Fargo’s own analysis indicated that more than two million accounts might have been unauthorized.[2] Volkswagen’s diesel-emissions scandal revealed a different mechanism. Some vehicles had been equipped with software capable of recognizing emissions tests, allowing them to satisfy regulatory requirements during testing while emitting far higher levels of nitrogen oxides during ordinary driving.[3]

These cases differ substantially in their circumstances, intentions, consequences, and moral seriousness. They should not be treated as equivalent. What they nevertheless have in common is a structural feature that deserves attention. The relevant outcome was not produced by one isolated person acting independently. It emerged through incentives, technologies, procedures, managerial decisions, divisions of labor, and the cumulative conduct of many participants. What began as individual choices eventually acquired the practical force of organized action.

Individual responsibility remains indispensable. An organization cannot become an excuse by which persons disappear into structures, as though institutions acted without human agents. Yet the inverse reduction is also inadequate. When a harmful result depends upon the coordinated participation of many people, it is not enough to conclude that some of them were dishonest, greedy, cowardly, or morally corrupt. Those descriptions may be correct, but they do not explain how individual motives and failures can acquire much greater practical force once they are incorporated into an organization.

Organizations themselves are not inherently evil. Hospitals make possible forms of medicine that individual physicians could never provide alone. Schools preserve and transmit knowledge across generations. Businesses coordinate production, capital, expertise, and labor on a scale far beyond individual capacity. Organization extends the range of human action precisely because it enables people to combine their limited abilities. Yet an increase in collective capacity is not an increase in moral wisdom. Greater efficiency makes an organization more capable of realizing its purposes, but it cannot determine whether those purposes are good or whether the organization remains faithful to the reasons that justify its existence.

Here, corruption does not mean every departure from an organization’s original mission, nor does fidelity to a mission by itself make an organization morally legitimate. A mission may itself be unjust, mistaken, or in need of revision. The concern is narrower. It is how an organization whose stated purposes provide a defensible reason for its existence can gradually subordinate those purposes to incentives, internal interests, and its own preservation. Against this background, the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 can be read as an early reflection on the moral ambiguity of organized human power.

I. Why Was the Tower of Babel Stopped?

Genesis 11 begins with a condition that, considered in isolation, appears almost entirely beneficial. Humanity possesses a common language. Communication is easy. People are able to coordinate their efforts, develop building techniques, establish a city, and undertake a project that would be impossible for scattered individuals. The narrative then turns. They decide to build a city and a tower, declaring that they will “make a name for ourselves” so that they will not be scattered over the earth. God intervenes, confuses their language, and the project comes to an end.

The story can therefore appear puzzling. Communication, cooperation, technological development, and urban life are not in themselves presented elsewhere in Scripture as evils. Indeed, the biblical canon ultimately concludes not with the abolition of the city but with the New Jerusalem descending from God (Rev. 21:2, 10). It would therefore be too simple to interpret Babel as a divine rejection of human cooperation, technological achievement, or the city as such. The more important question concerns the purpose toward which newly concentrated human capacity is directed.

The text gives particular prominence to two intentions. The builders wish to make a name for themselves, and they wish to prevent their dispersal. Shared language and a common project have enabled previously dispersed individuals to become capable of acting together, and this unity produces a corresponding expansion of collective power. The city and tower can therefore be read not simply as architectural projects but as expressions of an emerging capacity for concentrated human action. Thomas L. Brodie, in his literary reading of Genesis 11, places the failed tower within a wider portrayal of the fragility of human institutions and argues that this failure helps prepare the narrative movement toward Abram.[4]

There is no single uncontested interpretation of God’s intervention in Genesis 11. Some readings emphasize pride and rebellion. Others give greater weight to humanity’s refusal to disperse and fill the earth, while still others read the passage against the background of concentrated political or imperial power.[5] These interpretations need not be treated as mutually exclusive, but neither should the text be made to support more than it establishes. For the present argument, the relevant claim is narrower. Genesis 11 presents concentrated human capacity as morally ambiguous. The fact that human beings have become able to act together on an unprecedented scale does not establish that the direction of their action is good.

The narrative sequence becomes particularly significant as Genesis moves from Babel to Abram. At Babel, human beings seek to “make a name” for themselves. In the next major narrative movement, God promises Abram, “I will make your name great,” and connects that promise with blessing that extends beyond Abram himself. Mark A. Awabdy has argued, on narrative-critical grounds, that Genesis 11:27–12:9 functions not only as the beginning of the Abraham narrative but also as a response to the preceding Babel episode, with verbal and thematic correspondences involving reputation, migration, settlement, and human capability.[6]

The contrast does not imply that possessing a great name is itself morally suspect. Both passages concern greatness, reputation, and the extension of human significance, but the structures are different. At Babel, collective power is directed toward securing the builders’ own name and resisting dispersal. In the Abrahamic calling, greatness is received rather than manufactured and is connected to a vocation whose significance extends beyond the recipient. The question posed by Babel is therefore not whether human beings may become powerful, technologically capable, or institutionally organized. The question is what collective power is ultimately ordered toward. Once human beings possess the ability to achieve together what none of them could achieve alone, the moral importance of the ends they pursue becomes correspondingly greater.

II. How Mission Gives Way

Organizational efficiency is morally indeterminate. It can increase productivity, coordinate complex action, reduce waste, and transform intentions into results with remarkable speed. It can do the same for purposes that should never have been pursued. For this reason, the more effective an organization becomes, the more important it is that the organization remain capable of distinguishing the conditions required for its survival from the purpose that justifies its existence.

In practice, that distinction is difficult to maintain. Organizations do not operate in conditions designed for moral clarity. They require revenue, personnel, infrastructure, reputation, and continuity. Businesses confront competitors. Charities depend on donors. Universities seek students and funding. Churches require leadership and stable communities. Hospitals must remain financially viable if they are to continue treating patients. These requirements are real rather than imaginary, and responsible leadership cannot simply ignore them in the name of abstract purity.

Precisely because these pressures are real, however, they can gradually reorder institutional priorities without anyone formally deciding to abandon the original mission. The problem is often not a single moment at which an organization openly rejects what it once claimed to serve. More commonly, each decision is justified by a consideration that appears urgent and reasonable within its immediate circumstances. Revenue must first be secured, growth restored, competition answered, or a difficult period survived. The organization may continue to affirm its founding ideals throughout this process while the considerations that actually determine concrete decisions slowly change.

The Baidu case illustrates this kind of tension. A search engine derives much of its social value from enabling users to locate relevant and reliable information. A commercial search company also requires a viable source of revenue, and paid placement offers an obvious means of generating it. From the internal perspective of such a company, the commercial logic is easy to understand. Advertisers will pay for visibility, and revenue supports technological development, staff, infrastructure, and expansion. None of these considerations is fictitious. The problem arises when they acquire sufficient practical weight to alter the relationship between what users reasonably believe the system is doing for them and what the system is in fact designed to optimize.

Mission displacement therefore need not begin with a conscious repudiation of mission. It may arise through a series of decisions that are individually intelligible but cumulatively transformative. Each decision can be defended by reference to a genuine organizational need, while the aggregate effect is that the organization increasingly serves goals that were originally subordinate to its purpose.

The Wells Fargo case reveals the same mechanism through institutional incentives. Sales targets are not intrinsically objectionable. An organization requires some means of evaluating performance, allocating resources, and determining whether its activities are sustainable. Yet once numerical targets become tightly connected to compensation, promotion, continued employment, and managerial evaluation, they cease to function merely as neutral measures. They begin to structure conduct. If employees are repeatedly rewarded for achieving a number while insufficient attention is paid to how that number is achieved, the formal mission of serving customers may coexist with a practical structure that rewards conduct contrary to their interests.

This distinction is essential for understanding organizational corruption. An organization communicates its operative values not only through official statements, codes of conduct, sermons, annual reports, or public declarations, but also through the conduct it rewards, the conduct it penalizes, the conduct it overlooks, and the conduct that becomes necessary for advancement within it. When these levels diverge, the formal mission can remain intact while losing its capacity to govern actual decisions.

None of this removes personal responsibility. Economic pressure does not make deception legitimate, and institutional incentives do not transform wrongful conduct into morally neutral behavior. Yet when many people exposed to similar incentives repeatedly make similar choices, an adequate explanation must examine more than individual character. The organization has begun to structure the circumstances in which those choices are made. Mission is then displaced not necessarily because everyone ceases to believe in it, but because other considerations have acquired greater practical authority.

III. How Division of Labor Dilutes Responsibility

The power of organization depends heavily on division of labor. A complex task is separated into smaller functions, different people acquire specialized knowledge, and the resulting activities are recombined into an outcome that no participant could produce alone. Modern medicine, industrial production, scientific research, public administration, transportation, and financial systems all depend upon this arrangement.

The same structure that permits extraordinary forms of cooperation can also complicate moral responsibility. When action is divided among many participants, each person encounters only part of the total process. The engineer sees an engineering problem, the accountant a financial transaction, the administrator a procedural requirement, the manager a performance target, and the executive a set of strategic indicators. The organization is capable of integrating these fragments into a unified result even when no single participant experiences that result as the immediate object of his or her own action.

The Volkswagen emissions case shows how this can occur. According to materials released by the U.S. Department of Justice, Volkswagen personnel working on diesel engines for the American market confronted difficulties in satisfying U.S. emissions requirements while maintaining established product objectives. Software was used to identify when vehicles were undergoing standard emissions testing, allowing emissions controls to operate differently under testing conditions than during ordinary road use.[7] The relevant deception did not remain a private act performed once by an isolated engineer. Software had to be developed and modified, projects had to proceed through organizational processes, vehicles had to reach the market, and the discrepancy later had to be concealed or explained when independent testing exposed abnormal emissions. What ultimately appeared as “Volkswagen’s” conduct was constituted through actions distributed across people, functions, and stages of the organization.

Division of labor therefore creates a characteristic moral risk. Because each participant performs only a limited function, it becomes possible to evaluate one’s conduct entirely at the level of that function. The engineer asks whether the software performs as required, the manager whether the project remains on schedule, the salesperson whether the product can be sold, and the compliance officer whether the necessary documentation has been produced. Each question may be legitimate within its domain. The danger arises when such local questions displace the more comprehensive question of what the combined activity amounts to.

The bureaucratic machinery of Nazi Germany represents an extreme historical instance of this problem, although it would be seriously misleading to explain the Holocaust primarily as a consequence of bureaucratic organization. The genocide of European Jews was driven by racial ideology, deliberate state policy, coercion, persecution, and the active participation of many perpetrators. Nevertheless, crimes on such a scale could not have been implemented through ideological commitment alone. They also required extensive administrative coordination. Civil servants participated in drafting, implementing, and enforcing laws that deprived Jews of rights, employment, livelihoods, and property, thereby incorporating persecution into ordinary governmental procedure.[8] Mass deportation required railway systems, schedules, routes, rolling stock, records, payments, and communication among institutions. The German railway network became materially involved in transporting human beings to ghettos, camps, and killing centers, while several ministries and state organizations coordinated different parts of the deportation process.[9]

The significance of such examples lies partly in the discrepancy between the apparent ordinariness of an individual administrative act and the moral character of the process to which it contributes. A timetable remains a timetable, a form remains a form, and a signature remains a signature when each is considered in isolation. Their moral significance changes when they are understood as components of an organized course of action. Functional specialization can therefore narrow the field within which a person perceives responsibility even though the consequences of the combined activity extend far beyond that field.

Adolf Eichmann’s defense at his 1961 trial in Jerusalem made this problem explicit. He sought to portray himself as a subordinate functionary within a larger apparatus and claimed that he had implemented rather than determined policy. He described himself as “merely a little cog in the machinery” of destruction. The court rejected this characterization as an adequate account of his role and held him responsible for his substantial participation in the deportation and destruction of European Jews.[10]

The point is not that everyone within an organization bears equal responsibility. Authority, knowledge, intention, proximity to relevant decisions, degree of participation, coercion, and the realistic possibility of refusal all matter when responsibility is attributed. A senior official who designs a policy does not stand in the same relation to it as a junior employee who possesses little information and limited discretion. What division of labor cannot establish, however, is the disappearance of responsibility simply because action has been divided.

Principle IV of the Nuremberg Principles states that acting pursuant to the orders of a government or superior does not itself relieve a person of responsibility under international law when “a moral choice was in fact possible.”[11] The principle belongs to a specific domain of international criminal responsibility and should not be indiscriminately transferred to ordinary organizational settings. Its underlying insight is nevertheless relevant. Hierarchy and functional specialization do not by themselves sever the relationship between an agent and a larger action in which that agent knowingly participates.

Organizational participation can therefore generate a role-relative obligation to understand what one’s function contributes to. The extent of that obligation depends on authority, knowledge, practical involvement, and the consequences that a person could reasonably be expected to recognize. A division of tasks may affect the scope of responsibility, but it cannot by itself settle the moral question.

IV. How Wrongdoing Comes to Appear Reasonable

Organizational deviation is sustained not only by incentives and divided responsibility but also by interpretation. Human beings often do not act while describing their own conduct in the most morally damaging terms available. We interpret what we are doing, assign reasons to it, and place it within a language that allows us to regard the action as intelligible or justified. Organizations provide particularly powerful resources for this process because institutional interests can be expressed in the language of collective responsibility.

Concealing a failure can be redescribed as protecting the institution. Suppressing criticism can be defended as preserving unity. Protecting established interests can be presented as taking the larger picture into account. None of these expressions is necessarily corrupt. Institutions sometimes do require protection, communities can be damaged by destructive forms of conflict, and responsible judgment often does require attention to consequences beyond the interests of one individual. The problem is therefore not the vocabulary itself but the possibility that legitimate institutional concepts will be used to obscure the actual object of protection.

A further distortion occurs when personal interests are presented as organizational duties. A leader may defend his own authority while describing his conduct as necessary for institutional stability. A group may marginalize criticism while persuading itself that dissent threatens unity. Individuals may avoid acknowledging their own failures by appealing to the reputation of the institution. In such cases, the organization provides not merely an opportunity for wrongdoing but a language through which self-interest can appear as loyalty, prudence, responsibility, or sacrifice.

This is one reason institutional corruption can coexist with sincere attachment to an organization’s founding ideals. An institution need not erase its original mission from its public language. It may continue to invoke that mission frequently, perhaps even more frequently as the discrepancy between mission and practice increases. The ideals that once restrained institutional self-interest can then be used to protect it. An organization founded to serve a particular good gradually begins to identify the continuation of the organization with the continuation of the good itself.

At that point, an important conceptual distinction begins to disappear. Protecting the mission and protecting the organization are treated as though they were necessarily the same act. They are not. Sometimes the survival of an institution is necessary for the continuation of its mission. In other circumstances, fidelity to the mission may require substantial institutional loss, reform, the relinquishment of power, or even the recognition that a particular organization should no longer continue in its existing form.

No organization is therefore protected from corruption by the nobility of its founding purpose, the length of its history, its religious identity, its reputation for public service, or the moral seriousness of its official language. Those features may matter, but none can substitute for an examination of what the organization actually does, what it rewards, whom it serves, and what it is prepared to sacrifice in order to preserve itself.

V. Mission Must Remain Above the Organization

Human beings cannot simply dispense with organizations. Many important goods can exist only through durable forms of cooperation. Hospitals, universities, churches, charities, governments, research institutions, and businesses all depend upon structures that survive beyond particular individuals and coordinate action across time. The relevant lesson of Babel is therefore not an argument for institutional suspicion as such, still less for a romantic return to isolated individual action. The more precise warning is that an organization must not become its own final purpose.

Every enduring institution develops interests connected with its continued existence. It requires resources and procedures. It employs people whose livelihoods depend upon it. Leaders acquire authority within it, while members invest years of their lives in its work. Reputations, careers, relationships, buildings, traditions, intellectual capital, and financial resources become connected with the institution’s continuity. None of these interests is necessarily improper. If an organization is to carry out its mission over time, some concern for institutional preservation is unavoidable.

The difficulty arises because means and ends can gradually exchange places. An institution originally created to accomplish a purpose must preserve itself sufficiently to continue accomplishing that purpose. From this legitimate requirement it is possible to move, almost imperceptibly, toward the belief that preserving the institution is itself the overriding purpose. Once that transition has occurred, actions that undermine the mission can be justified on the ground that they are necessary to protect the organization through which the mission is supposedly pursued.

A hospital must remain financially viable if it is to treat patients, but financial viability cannot by itself determine what counts as good medicine. A university requires funding, but the acquisition of funding cannot become the ultimate criterion of intellectual judgment. A church requires leadership, continuity, and communal order, but none of these can finally determine whether it remains faithful to the God it claims to serve. The same structural problem appears in different institutional forms because every organization faces the possibility of identifying the conditions of its own continuation with the reason for which it ought to continue.

Mission and organization must therefore remain conceptually distinct. The mission supplies the reason for the organization’s existence, provided that the mission itself remains defensible. The organization is a historically contingent means through which that purpose is pursued. Their relationship can be close, but it should never become an identity. Once preservation of the means is allowed to override the end, the institution begins to reproduce the logic identified in Babel. Collective capacity becomes increasingly directed toward maintaining its own name, securing its own continuity, and defending the interests that have accumulated around it.

This is also why organizational corruption can be difficult for participants themselves to recognize. The people involved need not cease to believe that they are serving something valuable. They may remain deeply committed to the institution, work sacrificially for it, and understand their decisions through the language of its original ideals. The failure lies precisely in the possibility that loyalty to the organization has gradually ceased to be answerable to the purpose that once justified that loyalty.

The Tower of Babel does not finally ask whether human beings should build. Human beings will build institutions, systems, communities, cities, technologies, and forms of common life because many dimensions of human existence require them. Its more enduring question concerns the direction of the power that building creates. The relevant measure is therefore not merely whether an organization is strong, successful, efficient, influential, or capable of enduring, but whether it can still answer, in practice rather than only in its official language, the questions that justified its existence in the first place:

What are we building, and for whom are we building it?

Notes

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVue).

[1] Cyberspace Administration of China, “Joint Investigation Team Announces Findings of Investigation into Baidu” [国家网信办联合调查组公布进驻百度调查结果], May 9, 2016, The investigation concluded that Baidu’s paid-ranking results had objectively influenced Wei Zexi’s choice of medical provider and identified problems including excessive weighting of paid bids and inadequate identification of commercial promotions. Accessed October 7, 2026.

[2] Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, “Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Fines Wells Fargo $100 Million for Widespread Illegal Practice of Secretly Opening Unauthorized Accounts,” September 8, 2016, The CFPB reported that sales targets and compensation incentives spurred employees to open unauthorized deposit and credit-card accounts and stated that, according to Wells Fargo’s own analysis, more than two million accounts might not have been authorized by consumers. Accessed October 7, 2026.

[3] U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “EPA Update on Recent Volkswagen Announcement,” September 25, 2015, The EPA stated that the affected vehicles contained software that activated emissions controls during testing but reduced their operation during normal driving, resulting in nitrogen-oxide emissions of up to forty times the applicable standard. Accessed October 7, 2026.

[4] Thomas L. Brodie, “Failed Tower and Fading Family: Life’s Fragmentation (Chap. 11),” in Genesis as Dialogue: A Literary, Historical, and Theological Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 197–206, Brodie reads the failed tower and the genealogy of Genesis 11 as complementary depictions of the fragility of human institutions and argues that this narrative failure prepares the setting for the call of Abraham.

[5] Sara M. Koenig, “Commentary on Genesis 11:1–9,” Working Preacher, Luther Seminary, June 9, 2019, Koenig surveys several prominent interpretations of the passage, including readings centered on pride, humanity’s resistance to dispersal, and the political implications of concentrated human unity. Accessed October 7, 2026.

[6] Mark A. Awabdy, “Babel, Suspense, and the Introduction to the Terah-Abram Narrative,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 35, no. 1 (2010): 3–29, Awabdy argues that Genesis 11:27–12:9 functions as a response to the Tower of Babel narrative and identifies correspondences involving reputation, migration and settlement, plot structure, and human capability.

[7] U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, “Volkswagen AG Agrees to Plead Guilty and Pay $4.3 Billion in Criminal and Civil Penalties; Six Volkswagen Executives and Employees Are Indicted in Connection with Conspiracy to Cheat U.S. Emissions Tests,” January 11, 2017, The Justice Department described Volkswagen’s use of defeat-device software to evade U.S. emissions requirements, the participation of company personnel in the scheme, and subsequent efforts to conceal it from regulators. Accessed October 7, 2026.

[8] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The Role of Civil Servants,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, last edited August 22, 2023, The Museum documents the role of German civil servants in drafting, implementing, and enforcing laws and administrative measures that progressively deprived Jews of rights, employment, livelihoods, and property. Accessed October 7, 2026.

[9] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “German Railways and the Holocaust,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, The Museum describes the role of the European railway network in deportations and the administrative coordination among the Reich Security Main Office, Transport Ministry, Foreign Office, and other institutions required to carry them out. Accessed October 7, 2026.

[10] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Eichmann Trial,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, Eichmann claimed that he had not determined policy but had merely carried it out and described himself as a small component of a larger machinery. The judges rejected this as an adequate account of his role and concluded that he had been a key perpetrator in the genocide of European Jewry. Accessed October 7, 2026.

[11] International Law Commission, Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal, with Commentaries, 1950, Principle IV, paras. 104–106, Principle IV provides that acting pursuant to an order of a government or superior does not relieve an individual of responsibility under international law when a moral choice was in fact possible. The principle is invoked here only for the limited proposition that organizational hierarchy or superior orders do not by themselves extinguish individual responsibility. Its legal scope should not be treated as identical to ordinary moral responsibility in noncriminal organizational settings.