The Authority of Lived Experience

Sor Juana defended her learning not through abstract philosophy alone but through lived experience of intellectual exclusion and institutional constraint. She insisted that her experience of injustice gave her authority to speak about it. Applied to corruption, this concept elevates the testimony of those directly harmed: communities poisoned by corrupt environmental non-enforcement, patients harmed by corrupt medical systems, workers exploited through corrupt procurement. These voices possess irreplaceable knowledge about how corruption operates concretely. Yet anti-corruption work often privileges academic studies, official investigations, or elite whistleblowers while dismissing lived experience as merely anecdotal. Sor Juana's tradition insists we invert this hierarchy: those who experience harm are experts. Corruption-fighting strategies should center the authority of affected communities in diagnosis, solution design, and accountability mechanisms. This doesn't mean rejecting analytical rigor but integrating it with experiential knowledge. People living corruption daily understand its mechanics, impacts, and possible remedies in ways that distant analysts cannot.