One of the defining aspects of low-corruption societies is that they don’t have the loyalty based systems and instead have rule of law. But now we see how the loyalty systems come about: it isn’t the politician who makes it; it’s the populace.

Given a single deviation from the low-corruption norm, they demand loyalty test based operation and would rather move towards high-corruption.

A low-corruption society is therefore an unstable equilibrium. The moment a norm deviation occurs, the people desire greater norm deviation.