Why is there so much corruption in Finland, despite its high HDI? — Truth Seeker
I'll write a fuller account later, but the short version is the combination of several factors.
The sort of "zeroth factor" is the context of the global narcotics trade, and now also human and arms trafficking trade, which in turn mostly reduces to racism.
The war on drugs is an obvious failed policy, but it is implemented and maintained because it disproportionally harms black people as tool of control post-segregation. The foundation of a tyrannical system is always criminalizing normal behaviour in the targeted groups requiring systemic repression.
Unfortunately even for white people who like to see this racist system in operation, the long term consequences of drug criminalization is the generation of massive amounts of illicit cash in the global financial system.
The first thing this illicit wealth does is invest in ventures (such as political careers) that are going to protect it and the next thing it does is invest in more criminal schemes that require large upfront capital (i.e. present a barrier to entry, same reason large venture capital firms want to invest in high-capital startups with a large barrier to entry into the space).
For example, the child sex-trafficking (i.e. child rape, torture and murder on an industrial scale) industry could not be booted up organically as it's too expensive to get going. Wheres the drug trade is fuelled by drug use being a natural human activity and so easy to find both users, traffickers and dealers who "believe in it" essentially and also like the money, the same is not true for kidnapping and raping children. You have to pay people a lot more money to go against their nature to traffic in child abuse, so it requires the foundation of an existing criminal organization and high startup costs, for a long list of reasons.
As importantly as needing the criminal capital base to start trafficking child rape slaves on a large scale, law enforcement systems must also already be compromised (thanks to decades of investment in law enforcement careers). There's a strong natural instinct for most humans to protect children, so to organize child abuse on a large scale in a not-corrupt system you're going to be caught. It is essential for law enforcement to be working for the child rapists for such an industry to exist for any length of time. Child rape is not a criminal network that is hard to dismantle by non-corrupt law-enforcement. Whereas for drugs it is a very natural activity and therefore if you arrest 10 drug dealers you'll just have 10 new ones the next day, not so for child rape slave pimping; there is not a near infinite supply of child rape slave pimping and people willing to work at each step in the child-rape supply chain.
Whereas the average sober person turns a blind eye to drug dealing and doesn't narc on the party, the average person does not protect child rapists from accountability.
It's very adverse criminal circumstances that requires a lot of capital to get going and deep penetration of law enforcement and political offices to protect. The core problem of running child rape slaves as an industry (compared to "closed child rape systems" such as in the religious organizations you rightly condemn) is you need clients, therefore it's incredibly easy to compromise these networks with undercover agents. Whereas the demand and essentially moral support for drugs is high enough that police cannot win such a war of attrition against the mafia and cartels, the police would win such a war of attrition against child rape slave pimp networks. Under non-corrupt circumstances it's simply not an easy feat to regularly kidnap children and pimp them out for rape, torture and murder. For such an activity to endure, the protection of police chiefs, police in charge of money laundering, organized crime and specifically the child kidnappings, in addition to the special prosecutors oversee these investigations and judges who oversee them, and finally the politicians that could order special investigations when this corruption comes to light, all must be essentially working directly for organized crime.
Which sounds like "a lot" but could represent literally 20 people in a whole country that need to be compromised for organized crime to run essentially unchecked, so after decades and decades of the corrosive influence of just the "normal" drug money, it is not surprising that the entire organized crime investigation chain can be completely compromised by organized crime.
So above is global circumstance of organized crime which creates the capital and pressure to compromise as many law enforcement systems as possible in which to operate freely.
The conditions particular to Finland are:
First, that low levels of petty and mid-tier corruption attract large scale corruption because wealth is safe also for criminals. Crime bosses don't want to launder their money into unstable countries for the same reason no one else wants to store their wealth there.
Second, if you do launder your money successfully into a developed country with a good international reputation, such as Finland or other nordics, that money will be far less scrutinized when moved on elsewhere internationally (as presumably you don't want to live in Finland but on the Azure coast).
Therefore, stable countries known for low-corruption are extremely attractive for large scale money laundering precisely for those reasons. Successfully laundered money is safe from being stolen by corrupt officials or then endless demands for bribes as well as just safer for basic economic stability reasons (that if you launder your money into a Finnish corporation denominated by Euros, it will more likely retain its value compared to laundering your money into Chile denominated by the Chilean Peso).
These factors are not sufficient in themselves to cause large scale corruption, just explains the "demand" for laundering money through Finland and similar countries, just as a casino having a lot of cash explains why bands of witty and handsome thieves would want to steal said cash.
Just as a casino can have systems preventing all its cash being stolen, so too can countries have systems preventing large scale money laundering.
All of the above explaining essentially the demand by criminal networks to corrupt a country like Finland and for what purpose, mainly the cleaning of money. When money is washed through the Finnish corporate and banking system, it is white as snow. Anyone you might suspect of laundering money in Finland is going to be equally white and in our global system white people are largely immune from investigations started due to reasonable suspicion (their whiteness cancels out most if not all evidence). Some far more tanned banker in Italy is not going to just willy-nilly accuse a white person in a nordic country of suspicious banking activity simply due to evidence. World just doesn't work like that.
So, for the same racism that creates the drug trade in the first place, money is far cleaner when washed through white countries.
The last factors to explain the situation is why Finland is particularly vulnerable to corruption.
The main problem is that Finland has essentially no democratic oversight of law enforcement and the judiciary.
The whole point of democracy is to solve the problem of corruption and incompetence that emerges when people in power have no accountability. So that's basically the system in Finland and would explain why Finland has more large scale corruption compared to its peers, to the extent now of "un-developing" and sinking in all the development rankings.
Unfortunately, Finnish culture is also ideal for large scale corruption as there is a near universal and unlimited acquiescence to authority in Finland. Basically imagine if Nazis (which most Finns were extremely sympathetic to the Nazi ideology of their ally in WWII) found themselves in a democracy. For most Finns questioning authority is taboo, doesn't matter the evidence. The more evidence the more taboo in fact.
And the reason for comes down again to racism. Finns are incredibly racist, don't hesitate to call black people "niggers" in Finnish, and police beat down on immigrants and therefore most Finns simply tolerate, mostly deeply love, the system of corruption and second-class citizenry that enable the police to harass immigrants. Even if the average Finn wanted to put an end to police corruption, there's no direct way to do it as there's essentially no democratic oversight of police, prosecutors or judges in Finland. So a combination of most Finns wanting corruption, as long as it doesn't target them and instead harasses immigrants, and there being no mechanism of democratic oversight anyways, makes the country vulnerable to being essentially entirely captured by organized crime. So it's a "careful what you wish for" kind of situation in that decades of cheering on police corruption against immigrants has now led to large scale systemic corruption and the eroding of the mechanisms of government and institutions that provided the white population a good quality of life to begin with and the whole reason immigrants are not welcome here.
And this is not an exaggeration; every once in a while police go too far in their white supremacy and get caught being involved in literal neo-Nazi organizations, which is not because the justice system isn't a white supremacists organization as a whole dedicated to Himmler's vision of society, but because police are supposed to be a bit smarter than literally dressing up as Nazis. However, with few exceptions all Finnish police would dress up like Nazis if they could.
And when you have a police force nearly entirely dedicated to racism and organized crime, they easily dispatch with the career of anyone (politician, journalists, etc.) that would frustrate their organized crime and racist activities, and they can also easily compromise fully their allies (mostly by supplying child rape slaves to key elites).
Which to tie everything together, this new phase of corruption is worse than what we had before due to the development of the child rape slave industry. For, with drugs, you could easily compromise (and then boost the careers of) key politicians, prosecutors, judges, police, journalists, with drugs, but there's a sort of natural limit to the corruption a normal person would engage proportional to the nature of the extortion. So, a sort of "average" person, for lack of a better word, who knows organized crime has images of him or her snorting cocaine, is going to go along with a lot of corruption due to that extortion (and also donations to their campaign funds) but there will be a limit. Contracts to one business rather than another, sure, why not, but the line maybe drawn with covering up murder or then abducting and raping children. Normal people will have some limit to the corruption they'll enable simply to hide drug use, afterwhich they may simply quit or worse start exposing the corruption as an insider, as you can recover from drug use by "going to rebab" and realizing some things (even in the decades when it was far more stigmatized than today).
However, no one recovers career wise from raping children, there's no "child rape rehab" after which you can go on talk shows and hit rock bottom and then had to turn your life around to fawning attention (due to being male and white of course, and obviously going to jail was never a possibility), therefore it is the ideal corrupting activity.
The whole reason a few (of hundreds out there) of these elite child rape networks have been exposed is because it's not pervasive part of Western governance and there is going to be a few cases that happen to get exposed (then the system learns how to avoid that happening again) due to random chance as well as due to infighting between these corrupt networks (at some point the extortion gets used in such a corrupt system).
Why things seem now at another level of corruption tracks entirely with the growth of the child-rape industry, as people compromised by child rape have no natural limit. "Quitting and going to rehab" is not an option; they can be extorted to stay exactly where they are and also keep taking promotions; and likewise there is no limit to the corruption such as person will engage in, including obviously child rape itself.
Analysts have noticed, and questioned without being able to see the obvious answer, that everything has become really stupid, that there's not even an attempt to try to make obvious corruption make any sense, and there's also zero accountability: journalists, police, prosecutors, judges, politicians, literally zero mechanisms of accountability left in the system.
One final note, it's not that the average person can easily be compromised with drugs or raping a child, but it's a combination of sufficient people can and then the obstacles in their way can be removed. Once you corrupt police and prosecutors you can just make up fake cases against the people that represent some accountability in the system (wherever they are), destroy their careers.
These "big" corrupt moves are in the context of a system that is also corrupting overtime that makes all the decisions in the system vulnerable to influence. For example, a lot of large corrupt outcomes are due to a series of seemingly insignificant corrupt decisions due simply to pressure; in particular the career advancement of people who are 100% compromised is going to depend on a long series of smaller decisions. Those decisions can be directly influenced by various forms of pressure which the target may not even realize is corrupt (such as just spreading rumours and then going and confiding that the alternatives have been accused of this or that, you know "you've heard things"), in addition to things entirely outside the system such as letting corrupt police you're invested in make the odd drug bust or solve some robbery, then they appear like geniuses.
Once corrupt people advance to the top, without top-down accountability and without even trying to hire competent people of integrity, these systems quickly thoroughly corrupt anyways and idiots start doing all sorts of corrupt things all by themselves (plant evidence to catch "who they know are guilty", or taking a little bit of entirely deserved repayment for fabricated expenses, and just doing favours for friends and so on), and this pervasive corruption then makes small forms of corruption even easier as spreading a rumour has limited affect on non-corrupt critical thinkers (may still bias them, but is of limited corrupting influence) but implying knowledge and evidence of some corruption people chose to do all by themselves has a very large corrupting influence.
So, it's not a case where you need literally the whole government to rape children on camera, you just need maybe a dozen key people to do so (whether "tricked" into thing the child was older or just into raping children) and then move those people into bottleneck positions. For any corruption case to go forward in a country may require 1 of as few as 6 people, so as long as those 6 people have raped children or been involved in covering it up, then you essentially control the entire country (the only other weaknesses being the legacy media, but they can be corrupted too and even more easily as you can just buy these institutions with laundered money and aligned "legitimate" business allies, and put your people in charge).