Gate 50, Line 4 — Corruption

Full breakdown

You've developed a sense for the moment when shared rules start being used for the wrong purpose — serving an individual's benefit rather than the wellbeing of the whole group. You notice this distortion before it becomes obvious to anyone else.

That vigilance protects shared values from being eaten away from the inside. People with this sense are exactly the ones who stop a system from quietly sliding into a state where the rules serve the few at the expense of the many.

It's worth not confusing a real distortion of values with an ordinary, if inconvenient, evolution of the rules. Not every change is corruption — sometimes a system is simply changing, and that's not the same thing as moral decay.