What does 'corrupted' (world or society) mean? Several people (several questions and answers) in this topic use the word "corrupted", especially applied to "the world" and "society".


What does the word "corrupted" mean?
Does it have a standard meaning in Buddhism, or is it idiosyncratic?
Is it an objective (observable, shareable) property (of the world), or a subjective (personal) feeling?
Do all schools (or yanas) define it the same way?
Is it mentioned in any suttas?
Is it related to the idea that the Buddha's Dharma may (or will be, has been) lost, misinterpreted, over time? Or is it a different perception, applied to "society" rather than "dharma"?
Why would someone say that the world or society is becoming more corrupt? Compared to when and where, or what? Do schools (and/or teachers) differ in their view of whether the world is "progressing", i.e. whether it's improving or regressing?
I'd say it's idiosyncratic.  Each school has a somewhat different take on it.  In Zen, we often refer to corruption as "red dust".  Han Shan, for instance, refers to it often:


  I was born just thirty years ago,
  but I’ve wandered a million miles already. 
  Along the River through the green grass on the 
  banks, out to the borderlands, where the red dust roils. 


I think the footnote in my copy of his poetry does an excellent job of explaining this idea:


  "The word we usually translate as “dust,” or “the red dust,” is a
  conventional epithet for the klesas, or “defilements,” of life in the
  everyday world, everything from simple dirt, to the deep moral
  defilements we accept in the compromises and little hypocrisies of
  everyday lay living."


From Cold Mountain Poems translated by J.P Seaton