Well, I think we can find some agreement here. To put it in very plain terms, we're talking about self-dealing.
Corruption is an exchange of dignity for money. Money is a terrible substitute for interpersonal skills, too.
The only remedy that I can see is to raise generations of human beings that do not believe in the idea of imposing their will on other people. There's a good book that shows us how to do this kind of parenting: Raising Human Beings, by Dr. Ross W. Greene. It's a book about raising kids, but to me, it's a book about creating a humane collection of human beings that we can actually call civilization.
Politics isn't about being civilized. It is a system that draws people who want power and that has psychological effects that corrupt those who have good intentions. Check out the Authoritarian Sociopathy series by Davi Barker as re-published on Steemit by @badquakerdotcom. Part 6 is here, and the parts are each linked back to the previous section
Ok, that's heavy. I'll read that again when I'm wide awake. Thanks for sharing though.
I do believe that politics is the practice of large groups of people figuring out how to live together. In that sense, politics is about being civilized. Civilizations don't bomb and kill others. They work it out. They solve common problems so that everyone may live to die of a natural cause.
I certainly agree that working together to find peaceful solutions is beneficial, but government is decidedly antithetical to that goal, and politics in the modern sense is about political power more than anything else. That is why we need to consider the psychological effects of power and the people lured by power. In addition, public choice economics has demonstrated the root problems in the presumptions of democracy. I would recommend looking into its explanations of everything from governmental waste to voter ignorance and apathy.