Breathing an Atmosphere of Lies
Unless you have been living under a rock for the last two years, you can probably guess why lying and other forms of spreading untruths fester with new virulence in the minds of the public (that is, that portion of the public who is paying attention to public life).
Communicating untruths, whether deliberate lies or “alternative facts” mistaken for truths through ignorance, is a very broad topic. There are polite lies, “white lies,” or lying to protect a loved one, all of which are in a different moral universe from evil lies. The latter are the kind that constitute Fake News as well as other kinds of dishonest villainy.
If a lie inflicts harm on somebody’s Bad Guys, then justifying it may depend on whose side you’re on.
Subverting the system with lies is OK if you win. That’s where we stand in the days of rank partisanship.
Why People Start to Cheat is Not What You’d I’d Expect
Cheating is a narrower form of dishonesty than lying, although it usually involves lying to cover up the cheat. You may lie to cover your tracks if you’ve made an unintentional blunder, but cheating is premeditated dishonesty.
You’d think, people begin with cheating by design and win as a result. Cheating is the horse that pulls the cart of success.
Not quite. The cart comes first.
An article written by Roberto Ferdman in last year’s Washington Post undermined the idea that cheating starts with the cheat and, if successful, leads to more cheating. Of course! one thinks, or might think if they hadn’t read the article which I link to at the bottom of this post. That article begins with a discussion of Lance Armstrong as a prominent and exposed cheater, and goes on to bigger topics such as the corrosive role of excess competition in society at large (a commentary it’s worth reading the article for, aside from the issue of cheating itself).
But the real meat of the piece was a series of laboratory experiments that pretty much establishes that winning fosters cheating. (Again, see the linked article.) Subjects first competed against each other in a game impossible to cheat (both subjects looking at the same objects). In the next, different game in which cheating was easy, the winners of the prior game cheated more than the losers. (If you’re thinking that the cheaters were habitual cheaters anyway who would not be spotted in the first game, the sample (dozens of people) was large enough that the effect would wash out in the aggregate numbers, since some habitual cheaters would have also lost the first game.)
Counter-Intuitive in My Book
“I Win, Therefore I Cheat?” Yes, you do. Or at least many of the subjects did—more than would be revealed by chance alone. You’d think—I would think, anyway—that initial success playing fair-and-square would encourage continuing to play fair-and-square. Why not? You beat your opponent and you won! You’ve proved to be strong on a level playing field. And you’d think that those who lost would be the ones more inclined to cheat to make up for their deficiencies.
But the experiment seems to support the view of one of the designers of the experiment by the name of Amos Schurr, who says, “Dishonesty is a pretty complex phenomenon—there are all sorts of mechanisms behind it. But people who win competitions feel more entitled, and that feeling of entitlement is what predicts dishonesty.” It’s not a big step to infer that those born to privilege consider themselves winners by inherited status. That’s how the actual game is “rigged.” Being “born on third base” gives you permission to bribe the pitcher to throw wild when you go to steal home.
A Winning Chicken<—>Cheating Egg Thing
Of course, winners who cheat often win and go on to cheat to win again, and soon they’re riding a positive feedback loop, win->cheat->win->cheat->win->cheat etc.
Cheating pays, as it turns out (from research as well as your suspicions): you don’t have to look farther than Lance Armstrong to see what a big payoff cheating can get you—unless and until you get caught, and a lot of low profile cheaters never get caught. Professional cycling has exemplified that sad reality—although there are signs it is diminishing recently.
So, if cheating pays, why don’t more people cheat? It’s too complex to discuss fully here, but I’ll offer one argument: Societies with too many cheaters decline for lack of trust. When you guess that your neighbors are likely to cheat, cooperation breaks down, and without cooperation you get a failing society: the cheaters go down with everyone else. Cheating may pay for individuals but not the community in the long run. Much of the success of our species depends upon cooperation; once it’s gone, your community is toast, and you along with it.
[I apologize for the following content repeating a lot of what I said in the earlier post, “The Creep toward Autocracy.” Maybe too many variations on an overstated theme, but it’s something much on my mind. ]
The Rise of “Strongmen”
Societies rife with the kind of cheating we call “corruption” teeter on the edge of collapse—unless they are held together through violence and/or threats of violence by ruthless leaders: the “strongmen.” Russia led by Putin is a salient example—despite Russia’s wealth of natural resources and a high level of education, the Russian economy limps pitifully along far behind that of Western democracies. In Putin’s Russia, individuals—politicians and business oligarchs —individually profit to the detriment of the society as a whole.
The example of Russia is instructive for the United States. Why do we have a would-be strongman as President, despite his many and obvious flaws? Our society is beginning to crumble—as Bernie Sanders continues to expose—under the weight of big money manipulating the system to the advantage of the few. Donald Trump claimed he would stand up to Wall Street—it was a joke then and a bigger joke now. But too many voters ate it up because they wanted to believe in him as as a strongman who would rescue us from decline. They ate up “Make America Great Again” because it seemed to answer the question of how are we going to pull out of this mess?
Donald Trump’s gang strengthening the grip of big money on the country, and despoiling our environment are large and deep crimes. It will take a long time to undo the damage he has done. BUT there’s a bigger worry.
What’s to Worry?
It is not Donald Trump the man that’s the greatest long-term threat—he’s too ignorant, scatter-brained, and temperamentally unstable to rise to the stature of a Putin-like strongman, even if the constitutional checks and balances were weaker. It’s the phenomenon that he represents: a significant proportion of the public who refuse to look at the disappointing truth because he appears to be a strongman who would lead them out of the valley of economic despair. Despite their faith in him as a righter of wrongs, it’s OK with him to let the health insurance companies write health care legislation—cheating! It’s OK with Trump for the fossil fuel industry to weaken environmental laws and block enforcement as Scott Pruitt and his underlings do their bidding—cheating! And similar laxity toward Wall Street, Big Pharma, etc. Cheating!
I speak not of illegal cheating, but of working behind the scenes out of sight and out of mind of the voters, and pulling the strings of political donations such that Congressmen spend more of their time raising money than they do legislating. Cheating! This has been going on for years, but seems to be worsening, and Trump, for all his election bluster about challenging a “rigged system,” has fit right into that system like a big baby settling into a warm bath.
What will follow Trump troubles me more than the person himself (assuming he does not start a major war). He has lied and cheated his way into the White House and normalized dishonesty at the highest level—normalized to the extent that no Republican politician will come out and forcefully say, This is Wrong! If they won’t say it to him (for whom many have an ill-concealed contempt), would they say it to a successor?
And if no one in his party is willing to declare it’s wrong, they entitle him to continue. He wins! And the more he wins, the more he cheats, or allows his courtiers to cheat. (The lab results discussed above explain Trump’s obsession with losing the popular vote; in his mind, he has to win to justify his behavior. He has no moral compass. His stock answer to criticism is “I won!” One shudders to think of what he’d try to do if he had won the popular vote.)
Sure, politicians have lied and cheated at every level throughout history, but in the past it was considered wrong and deserving of punishment. Now, with Trump and his allies, flagrant lying and cheating are the norm, and a lying, thieving, corrupt autocrat like Putin has become the leader for the Trump base to admire.
The Path toward Oligarchy
Trump’s presidency has undermined cohesiveness in our society even more than the Tea Party did. And the lack of cohesiveness and erosion of trust are setting us on a dangerous path. It’s the path of decline for a society when cheating proliferates—especially when it is perversely held up as a virtue. If we continue on that path, I would not be surprised to see at the head of the U.S. government during my lifetime a real strongman—well informed, smart, slyly manipulative, temperamentally stable, ruthless, and capable of rallying to his side a large and misinformed segment of the public—an American version of Vladimir Putin. The kind of guy who would be happy inviting oligarchs to dinner with “escorts” on the side—birds of a feather. The kind of guy the likes of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan would bow and scrape to in order not to upset their “base.” The kind of guy the Supreme Court, packed with right-wing justices by 2020, would be happy to oblige by radically twisting the words of the Constitution. This is the kind of guy that Steve Bannon and his ilk will be waiting in the wings to guide to the top—they won’t make the same mistake again of picking an oaf to carry their flag.
I’ll just remind you, if you don’t think the Supreme Court would radically twist the words of the Constitution, then you’ve forgotten Citizens United. That was, in the view of the Koch brothers, a very good start.
Link:
Washington Post Article on Cheating
*On the bright side, the same study found that kinds of success that did not involve direct competition with other people did not beget dishonesty.
Connect Dots: Armstrong – Trump