Is it possible to eliminate the “addiction to mammon” and therefore the tendency to corruption that goes with it?
Eliminate it completely, no, but mitigate it, yes. As the American sociologist Robert Merton observed in the 1960s when he it is considered more important in a society if a person than how they got rich, it creates pressure for people to act dishonestly. A pressure that reinforces all the internal and biologically embedded dispositions. It’s the “little things” like who respected celebrities take pictures with and who they invite to their birthday parties. A man with wrong political views is feared, a thief is not.
It can also be expressed that if money can buy everything, it’s very conducive to dishonesty. If you can buy something with money, something is a matter of prestige, something else is a matter of contacts, something else is skill, something else is can be inherited, etc., it encourages people to collect different types of “capital”. To put everything on one card (e.g. money) is too risky. In my youth, we were told that it was as a result of this the pre-Lisbon regime was corrupt and that if everything was clearly available for purchase for clear sums of money, it would bring it would have brought a piece of honesty. Today, when we have real experience, it would not say probably nobody would say that.
By the way, note that when someone bemoans the corruption behind pre-Lisbon regimes, it is not the corruption itself that outrages them, but its the democratic nature of it. Namely, the fact that corruption was not concentrated in a few but that almost everybody had a little bit of a hand in it. The dishonesty of the bricklayer, who brings home a sack of cement is seen as something far worse than the dishonesty of a CEO who diverts billions.