I was just answering the jealousy question, trying to think about it from the perspective of what survival advantage does it confer. Now it’s making me think of cheating in the same way. This is not to address the issue of whether cheating is ok, but to seek to understand cheating at a more fundamental level.
Clearly, cheating sexually allows successful cheaters to spread their genes further. I once read that there’s a surprisingly high proportion of children who have not been fathered by the person their mother is married to, even though the parents were married during the time the child was conceived. It’s been a long time, so I don’t remember the percentage. But it really surprised me.
Cheating, as is breaking the rules that everyone else abides by is a somewhat high risk strategy for survival. If you get caught, you get ostracized or thrown in jail, or killed (depending on culture and time we’re talking about). However, there will always be some people who are very successful at cheating (Kennedy’s, other drug runners, drug king pins, robber barons, etc, etc), and they grow wealthy and have lots of kids, and pass on their cheating ways.
Obviously, the more sophisticated you are about your cheating, the harder it is for other people to detect, and the more likely you are to get away with it. I, for one, consider the current President to be a very successful cheater. He’s managed to help his cronies make billions in the oil and military contracting businesses. He’s done it on such a large scale, and under the protection of an election (if not two), that most people consider it to be legitimate. Whatever.
So is cheating ok? It seems to me that the United States, as a whole, condones all kinds of cheating. We just look the other way, pretend we don’t see, and never (or rarely) label it as cheating.
I don’t know if we do this on a more local, personal level. I know it goes on, and people get away with it: cheating on tests, cheating in business (think of all the lawsuits over breeches of contracts), cheating by telling your friends one thing when you have no intention of doing that.
So, in my opinion, cheating goes on all the time, and is tacitly condoned by society. However, in public, we all make a huge fuss about how moral we are, and how we never cheat. Given what actually happens, it makes one wonder about folks who say they don’t. Surely at least some of them are hypocrites, if not a lot of them.
I think this is like the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy the U.S. military has towards gay members of the forces. You can be gay; just don’t make it obvious. The same, I believe, is true of cheating. You can cheat; just don’t make it obvious. And, for God’s sake, make sure you shout loudly that you never cheat!
Folks. In case it isn’t obvious: I NEVER cheat!!!!!!!!
And one more thing. Cheating is not OK in my book. And I’ve spent my life trying to root it out in it’s more difficult to find hiding places.
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