Cheaters Never Win

Hang on. My muse has amused me and pointed me in many directions with this theme.

Kids (and grownups) have two ways to play - co-operatively and competitively. The ways can combine, as when team members co-operate to compete with an opposing team. The ways can also conflict, as when a team member is more interested in personal triumph than the good of the team. Kids hear early that “cheaters never win”. It is usually first heard from the mouth of some righteous kid who has just been walloped by a rule breaker. That the rule breaker did in fact win the game of the day is rationalized by the righteous one, who believes if he follows the rules, he will be victorious - some day. Enter religion or Karma or whatever leads one to believe in an afterlife, and today’s loser can be mollified by the thought of the cheater perpetually burning in hell or being re-born as a turd blossom [hmm, so that’s how Karl Rove came to be].

Put the title of this piece in quotes and do a Google search and you get over 60,000 hits. The first is an interesting blog entry from a thoughtful teenager, Megan in Massachusetts, who readily captures the adolescent frustration of bringing childhood idealism into the reality of adulthood. Shakespeare helped me make that transition. In high school, as my Christian beliefs waned, I heard Polonius tell Hamlet, “This above all, to thine own self be true”. To me that meant that the most important rules to follow were those felt in one’s own heart. That worked for me. A good God would not let our hearts mislead us. A rule against the heart is a bad rule and should not be followed, and if that conflicts with the rules made by those in power, then follow the heart and take the consequences. It is better to win in your heart and lose on the field than to win on the field and lose in your heart.

Bartlett’s has surprisingly little cheat quotes to offer.
A pessimistic Dryden in 1676 wrote:
“When I consider life, ‘tis all a cheat;
Yet, fool’d with hope, men favor the deceit;
Trust on and think tomorrow will repay.
Tomorrow’s falser than the former day.”

Cornelius Vanderbilt, in the essential attitude of the robber baron, wrote in 1853 to former business associates, “You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you.”

In a somewhat gentler vein, in the early 20th century, Marcel Proust wrote of grief and oblivion in “The Sweet Cheat Gone”, about how people are bound together in the mind, allowing our memories gladly to cheat us into an illusory connection, in spite of the fact that “Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.”

The word cheat comes from the Latin word meaning to fall upon. Our English based legal system early on coined “escheat”, the concept that in the absence of a Will or of heirs, the property of a decedent had to go to someone as a last resort. That “someone” was the King or the Lord of the Manor. Resentment of such Regal or Lordly taking probably led our peasant ancestors to apply the shortened word “cheat” to the taking of anything by unfair advantage. In modern democracies, escheat property goes to everyone, via the government for the benefit of the taxpayers. I had a couple escheat cases in my days of law practice and found the government attorneys to be very receptive to continuing attempts to locate heirs without rushing to declare there were none.

Does the government ever cheat us? Many Republicans today talk like the very concept of government, particularly in the regulation of business and collection of taxes, is a cheat. Many Democrats, and an growing number of Republicans, believe the Bush Administration is cheating people out of our Constitutionally protected rights and liberties. Cheating by Bush should not be a surprise, given his life record of cheating, such as how he jumped ahead on the Air National Guard list, sold his oil stock before the business collapsed and stole the Presidency.

Do we ever cheat our government? Our Federal government estimates we cheat it out of about $350 billion dollars of taxes every year. Many tax cheats wear American flag lapel pins, drive cars with “Support Our Troops” ribbons, and are livid over “illegal aliens” consuming the benefits for which our taxes pay. They secretly rationalize tax cheating by their belief that government taxes and regulations are cheating them. Sound familiar? It should, they are called Republicans. But Republicans have no monopoly on tax fraud. Like young Megan said, “Everybody’s doing it”. Tax cheats seem to be saying that because so many people are cheating, those who pay their taxes in full are really paying extra to make up for the cheaters.

How do you beat a system that is rigged against you? Frustrated computer gamers know that games cheat. The algorithms are stacked against you. To “level the playing field” [1,270,000 Goggle hits], you need a “cheat”. Google for “game cheats” and you’ll get over 4.5 million hits. Cheats seems to trump leveling. In competition you need an “edge”. When you go over the edge, you are cheating. The current sports world is full of stories of cheaters. So is our White House. The current occupant tells us we are in a war against terrorists who want to destroy us, and so we must let our commander-in-chief cheat to protect us. He needs to be able to spy on us, “render” people without warrants or hearings, torture detainees. John McCain does not usually inspire me, but he did when spoke out against America embracing torture, by saying that the knowledge America did not torture was what sustained him during his prisoner of war ordeal.

The credit and insurance industries have been using algorithms that “score” us as a basis for deciding how much to charge us. The validity of these practices has been called into question. I just spent an hour on the phone with my own auto insurer of 40 years, questioning why my perfect driving scores did not prevent a 40% liability premium increase under their new formula. These algorithms may be a form of cheating, or just fuzzy math. In either case, government regulation is starting to address them. In the meantime, certain behavioral modifications can be made to improve a score, without cheating. In a similar vein, the book whose picture adorns this article purports to advise how to honestly break all the dishonest rules to get ahead in business, which two reader/reviewers found helpful, though there are over a quarter of a million books at Amazon which are better sellers.

I do like the idea of paying back an individual cheater, by cheating him, as when a student athlete in college tried to copy my test answer and I purposely wrote the wrong one down and showed him, before I replaced it with the correct answer. As an Air Force paper pusher, I was required to pass a multiple choice test on computer knowledge or else be re-assigned to more physical or dangerous duty. Copies of stolen test answers circulated, but I chose not to avail myself, in part wondering if they were as bogus as the ones I offered the college athlete. Cleverly, the Air Force graded the test on the curve, and whenever the curve started getting quite high, they knew cheating was taking place and would design a new test. So I waited for the new test and took it, giving my best guess answers based on whatever made the high priced computer system sound wonderful. I passed, without studying and without cheating. Those who tested after studying the stolen scores failed.

The trigger for this article was my car trip home from the library on Tuesday morning. As I coasted down the big hill toward home, first one, then a second driver flashed high beam headlights at me. My car has daytime running lights so I thought maybe I had them on bright. As I fiddled with the light lever, I slowed down to examine it more closely. Then when I looked up I saw the motorcycle cop waiting at the next intersection. The hill is a natural speed trap, but my hesitant lever checking, and the warning flashes, saved me from a ticket. Were the other drivers cheating the traffic cop? I’ll choose to say they were just warning me to slow down for safety. In my heart, I know I am a safe driver who does not speed and would not have deserved a ticket, but rather a warning from the officer. I will watch my speed on that hill from now on. I don’t want to skew my score and turn the insurance algorithm against me. I also don’t want an accident to happen.

I saved love for last. Cheating on one’s spouse or lover is the cause of much grief, sometimes not just for the spouse and the cheaters, but also for the whole world. Think Bill and Monica. Unheralded by Bartlett’s, Hank Williams wrote and sung a summary of my feelings on cheating, “Your cheatin’ heart will tell on you”.