In our everyday lives, most of us go through life with the opportunities and challenges it faces us, it helps a great deal if our incomes allow us to live a reasonable life. As we look around the world and include our own countries we can easily see greater income disparities. Those who have investments in dividend paying companies, wonder if those companies are stable and secure enough for little to happen to it. If you work for a company, it has a culture in it, hopefully it has done good as defined by the standards set out for it both economically and its impact to the communities it serves. but all is never perfect, by the very nature of things cultures are fragile. They can be easily destroyed, however they can also continue to survive. Cultures can be deformed and defaced by conquerors and tyrants and yet survive as long as there are a few people determined to make them survive. These words were written in the book The Corrupt Society by Robert Payne published by Praeger Publishers, NY 1975. The strength of cultures, and their weakness cannot be measured exactly by any known measuring rods. We simply do not know how much residual strength lies in a culture when it is confronted by a powerful enemy determined to destroy it.

What we can do is isolate some of the factors that allow culture to endure: courage, willpower, vigor, a sense of common traditions that bind people together, and their determination to preserve a way of life that satisfies and enriches them. If the arts are flourishing, if the people have a common purpose, if their natural spontaneity is encouraged, we can be sure that the essential core of a nation is healthy; if the opposite it is unhealthy. From a culture point of view the artists are usually the indicators of the strength of a culture.

Confucius said that if you want to know the spirit of the people, you only have to listen to their songs. A modern observer only has to study the arts of a country to know whether it is healthy or corrupt. Paintings, literature and music tell us more than presidential speeches. A presidential speech should flow or it should have live in it.

How does one recognize a corrupt society? People go through the motions of living. The forces of death are stronger than the forces of life, where hope has vanished, where the essential structure is in a state of dissolution and nothing has evolved. Human hopes revolve around the family, and the disintegration of family life also provides a measure of corruption.

A corrupt society has its own language, a corrupted form of an otherwise healthy language, and its own laws, which are the natural laws turned upside down. The basic law is a single word: Obey. The basic aim is conformity. The basic weapons are the well-tried weapons of military force, threats of arrest and deceit. No one should estimate the power of deceit to keep a terrified people in subjection.

Healthy societies are always different, corrupt societies are all alike.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, as buyers of stocks for a longer time period, often we buy because of very good past results and we expect them to continue. All companies go in cycles, business cycles, management cycles, as a shareholder you want to recognize when the company goes into decay so you can buy something else.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.