Cheaters, Liars and Manipulators

Not so long ago, I used to play a lot of cards. A game where luck plays a crucial role. But, it is also a game where one can make his/her own luck.

Let’s engage in a thought problem:

You’re playing poker. But this isn’t just any poker game, it’s the most important poker game you’ll ever play. Besides playing for money, you’re also playing for your future. If you win, you get the girl you’ve been courting… or the promotion you deserve… or the happiness you’ve been searching for. But if you lose… you get none of it.

You’re an excellent poker player. You can recount the rules even if you are woken up in the middle of the night. You have done all the homework, studying your opponents for a long time now. You know who plays instinctively, who plays emotionally, and who plays according to the cards dealt.

But as you play… you realize that something is wrong. You start to realize that there is another type of player. One who constantly wins! At first, you start to attribute it to "pure luck", but quickly you realize that they are cheating. They’ve got cards up their sleeves, mirrors on the wall that enable them to see your hand, and other tricks designed to ensure their successes.

You want to leave the table, but you can’t. You aren’t permitted to leave. You want to make them stop cheating, but you can’t. There aren’t referees in this game. You’re stuck in the game… and your future depends on the outcome! If you quit now, you won't get the 'girl', or the 'promotion' or the 'happiness' that is eluding you for such a long time. And now you’re holding three aces and two queens, and knowing that even this great hand can’t compete with whatever your opponents have up their sleeves. You’re faced with a dilemma:

You can take the “high road”, lose the hand and the game and screw your future. Or you can recognize that the rules have changed, your life is at stake, and failing to cheat… would only be cheating yourself!

What do you do?

Many of us prefer to think of ourselves and our lives as straightforward. Sure, there are gamers who lie, cheat, or manipulate their way through life — but we aren’t like them. We play by the rules… and, we think, karma will eventually reward us for it.

These are nice thoughts… but unless we’re living in highlands of the Himalayas, they simply aren’t true. We all lie, cheat, and manipulate – to varying degrees and with varying levels of comfort – because it helps us live amicably, because everyone else is doing it, and because it can make the world a better place!

Here’s what I mean:

·When we begin dating someone, we engage in a seduction process that requires the same kind of duplicity our opponents showed at the poker table. If our house is typically in disarray, we clean it up. If we tend not to use mouthwash, we use it anyway... if only to see where the relationship might lead. Without such gaming (and instead quickly revealing our hard-to-live-with quarks and disgusting habits), seduction wouldn’t be fun and attraction would be harder to achieve.

· When we interview for a job – whether it’s for a clerk at Government Office or a VP position at Microsoft – we take the twos and threes out of our hands and replace them with the aces up our sleeves. We may prefer to wear shorts and a Hawaiian shirt to work, but during the interview we wear formals or even worse a suit. We may have been fired from our previous job for slacking… but we speak only of our glowing record there. We do this because, simply, we have no other choice. We know that every other applicant is doing the same thing, and we know that speaking candidly about ourselves would have us out on the streets and starving.

· When we comfort the friend who has just failed in a class, we empathize with him. We agree with him that the evaluators were assholes. We comfort him by telling that this is not the end of the world, that your career in no way will be hampered by this 'temporary' setback. We tell him that he deserved to get a rank. We may know that none of this is true... that he might be a dullard, probably didn't even deserve the marks he got... that he might be wasting his time in studies when he could have done something else which he is good at.

Our lives are filled with situations just like that poker game – situations in which we are forced to choose between playing it straight and losing out on what life has to offer …or lying, cheating, and manipulating because, simply, it’s better option for everyone involved.

Most of us choose to be gamers: to participate in the seduction process, to wear a suit to the job interview, to comfort our friends… but as we do it, we tell ourselves that it isn’t lying, cheating, or manipulating…. rather it’s “putting our best foot forward,” “being compassionate,” or “being diplomatic”.

And when the stakes are really high, like in the poker game, and we’re forced to examine ourselves for what we really are – liars, cheaters, and manipulators – we don’t need to grit our teeth and think something like, “Oh gosh… what does this say about my character?” We already know the answer!

Instead, we can smile, roll down our sleeves, slip a few aces into our hands, and do whatever else it takes to get the girl we’ve been courting… the promotion we deserve… the peace we’d all prefer… or the happiness we’ve been searching for.