There’s been a lot of talk about cheating lately, mainly because there have been some big stories about cheaters lately. We had the big story of Arnold Schwarzeneger who fathered a child with his housekeeper, the story of the IMF leader who decided to “allegedly” rape a housekeeper at a posh hotel (I say allegedly because legally we have to keep saying that until he is convicted, not because I believe any which way), and the ridiculousness that emerged from the whole Congressman Weiner Tweeting scandal. As a result of a lot of these kinds of stories, we’re now falling into the inevitable lazy news stories where reporters make arguments that “men are naturally cheaters” and “there’s a lot more cheating happening these days”. I’m going to go out on a limb and say nothing’s really changed, and that the latest news is really a lot about nothing.
What I do think we’re seeing is a trend that has normally been kept under wraps, mainly that celebrities and politicians are not very trustworthy, and they rarely have ever been. My friend Melanie and I once put forth a political theory that never saw the light of day (because of how ridiculous it sounded), and it was simply stated that politicians don’t do what they do in order to get reelected (as a final goal), but they do what they do to get reelected as a process towards their ultimate goal, and that’s to make progress with members of the opposite sex (if they’re naturally inclined that way…I’m sure a gay offshoot of the theory would make just as much sense).
We were laughed at whenever we presented this idea to others, but if you think about it, it goes back to simple human behavior, and I guess that’s why most political scientists never wanted to deal with it. If you take the basic supposition that the natural tendency of mankind is to procreate, and that’s often seen as the biological imperative of any species, then it shouldn’t be that hard to make the argument that all goals and processes that individuals work towards all involve some basic, innate desire to procreate. Therefore, a politician whose sole goal is to procreate is really not that difficult to understand. Continued service in office actually serves as an offshoot of this theory because the more power that a politician achieves, well, the more options he or she is going to have in order to procreate.
But try selling that idea to a group of social scientists and you’ll be laughed out of academia. I’ve often wondered why. I mean, the basic premise is extremely sound, and the general idea makes serious sense. But what doesn’t fit into academic theory is the basic idea that people are so basic in needs that their main incentive to do anything can be so easily boiled down to that one social need. In other words, scientists don’t like the idea that human beings can be seen as having such basic wants and desires as any other biological creature. We like to think that we’re so far advanced that we’ve somehow transcended natural tendencies to a point that our needs have to be analyzed through higher level functions of analysis. But honestly, are we that much far evolved than we often end up observing?
Think about it from a sense of our technology. Has our technology allowed us to orchestrate war in a more social, advanced evolutionary basis? I would argue no. I mean, we’re still bombing human beings in Libya in hopes of getting its leaders to do things we want them to do. We’re still sending troops around the globe in order to kill people who we disagree with. We’d like to say that we’re now fielding a 21st century army, but how far removed is that army from what we used to do when going to war several hundred years ago? If we look at some of the most recent encounters, we’re still hearing charges of troops using rape as a tool for conquest, atrocities that need to be investigated because soldiers did things that their commanders claim could never have happened in an enlightened army, and we’re still threatening people with simple concepts as force as an instrument to convince people to do “the right thing.” Sadly, our behaviors haven’t changed much over the last thousand years. Our technology has, but that doesn’t always translate to progress.
But taking it away from war, we look at social conditioning and social behaviors, and we see that we still don’t care any more about our fellow man than we did centuries ago. Oh, we’re good at talking about caring and making all sorts of political posturing, but in the end, people are still starving to death while people eat glutonously several miles away, with little care as to what is happening down the street. We’re really good at talking about doing the right thing, but in the end we’re not really willing to sacrifice our own wants and desires in order to make sure everyone else rises to the same level of prosperity. As a matter of fact, we’re quite often happy that others aren’t as prosperous as we our, often ridiculing them for not doing as well (the infamous argument of “if they were like us, they wouldn’t suffer so”).
The concern we should note is that we have a tendency to look at statistics and then try to make it significant to our current situation. Right now, many people are suffering because of a horrible economy. Yet, the news doesn’t go into private homes and show us the suffering individuals are living through, and then telling us how to help others rise back up. Instead, the news focuses on the stock market, or on economists who tell us how a tick here or there on a chart makes the difference between progress and despair, almost as if the numbers make a difference. The president and his council go out of their way to argue that things are getting better, cooking books as politicians always do, trying to convince the average person who might be out of a job that things are actually prosperous right now. They’ll point to ticks on a chart again and say that things are better today than they were a year ago, but they aren’t paying attention to the people who are suffering. To be honest, I don’t think they care.
And it’s not just a particular party or leader or politician who acts this way. It’s anyone who tries to interpret the data for the rest of us to understand. Rather than just show us people who are back to work and showing what they did to do it, they focus on statistics and somehow make that be the news, and make it our resposibility to somehow read into the false data as relevance.
That’s the sort of thing that leads us back to cheating. We hear the numbers, we see the evidence of particular political actors, and then reporters try to convince us that these Neanderthals actually are relevant to each one of us. But I’m sorry that Arnold decided to have a child out of wedlock, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to be doing the same thing, or that I’m more apt to do so because some rich, priviledged individual did so. There are a lot of us out here who once we’re in a relationship are overjoyed at the fact that we’re in a relationship, and that becomes the sole incentive for the rest of things we do. We don’t start looking for other “conquests” because some actor or politician feels the need to go out and have a good time beyond one’s current relationship. Instead, we mourn those types of people for being the Neanderthals they are, and we condemn anyone else who can’t seem to be happy with whatever circumstances they manage to achieve.
Not all of us fall into a cesspool because they’re so easy to find.
