Originally published at: https://peakprosperity.com/when-cheating-becomes-a-way-of-life-a-survival-guide/
Welcome to The Fourth Turning and Trump’s Revolution.
The Fourth Turning, or the “crisis” stage is underway. Everything is at stake. If global war is the unavoidable outcome, then literally everything you love about your life is at stake, including your life itself.
Our path through this MUST involve a clear-eyed view of how we’re wired up. What truly drives human behavior and what can we do to alter it (in time) so we can avoid truly awful outcomes?
The answer to this begins with noting a few things about ourselves that, frankly aren’t all that flattering. All problem solving MUST go to the root itself. Here I am going to connect current events to our evolutionary past.
Those who cannot, or won’t face these truths are destined to angrily lash out, impotently throwing their cucumbers in fits of rage (see below for explanation)
When Cheating Becomes a Way of Life: How Systems Breed Corruption
What happens when humans gain access to a system—say, one tied to money or electoral power—and realize they can game it without consequences? My theory is simple: they’ll cheat.
Give it enough time, and that cheating doesn’t just persist—it becomes a way of life, passed down through convention and custom until those within the system barely recognize their actions as immoral.
The 19th-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat nailed this idea in Economic Sophisms when he wrote:
History, science, and human nature back this up. Let’s explore how cheating starts, spreads, and sticks.
The Spark: Opportunity Meets Impunity
Humans are opportunists—it’s baked into our biology. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, in The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, shows how people cheat just a little when they think they won’t get caught. He calls it the “fudge factor”—padding an expense report, tweaking a vote count, or skimming a profit. It’s not outright villainy; it’s a nudge over the line when the risk feels low. Ariely says that, “The first dishonest act is most important one to prevent.”
Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers takes this deeper in The Folly of Fools, arguing that deceit is a survival strategy. We’re wired to exploit advantages, especially in systems like markets or elections where rewards (wealth, power) are tangible and oversight is lax.
Trivers posed the existential question on page 2 of The Folly of Fools:
How and why did evolution decide to give humans such a deeply wired ability for self-deception? It’s a good question which I’ll leave for later. For now let’s hold it as a well-documented observation about human behavior and wiring.
In the 19th century, America’s Robber Barons—industrialists like Jay Gould—gamed the stock market with impunity. Gould’s manipulation of Erie Railroad shares wasn’t a one-off; it was a masterclass in exploiting weak regulation. No jail time, no real pushback, just profit. A system open to rigging, and with no one to stop it, eventually becomes a fertile ground sprouting entire ecosystems supporting and glorifying the activities.
At its core, I think it boils down to humans being just like any other organism. We want an easy life. We want this:
The Spread: From Individuals to Institutions
Cheating doesn’t stay small.
Look at electoral fraud. A 2012 study by Daniela Donno and Nasos Roussias, Does Cheating Pay?, found that when misconduct goes unpunished, it warps democracy itself. Parties that cheat win more, competition shrinks, and soon the whole system tilts toward the cheating.
If you don’t cheat, you lose, so you cheat. Eventually that becomes a moral code. After all, your side is the ‘good guys,’ right? What starts as a single act, fudging a vote tally, spreads into a playbook, and eventually become machines so fraudulent that entire lists of documented ‘vulnerabilities get entered into the GA court system…
… and the GA Secretary of State then does absolutely nothing about it because it’s “not practical” or maybe because all that IT mumbo-jumbo is “conspiracy theories.”
The Stick: When Wrong Feels Right
Here’s the kicker: over time, cheating stops feeling like cheating. Bastiat saw this coming. When plunder—whether it’s monopolies gouging consumers or cronies siphoning public funds—gets legalized, it’s no longer theft; it’s “business” or “politics.”
The moral code shifts to match. Trivers adds a psychological twist: we deceive ourselves to justify it. The railroad tycoon calls his price-fixing “industry leadership.” The vote-rigger calls it “securing the will of the people.” After a while, they believe it.
Think of Wall Street’s 2008 meltdown. Risky bets were “financial innovation” until the house of cards fell—yet few faced real consequences, and the game rolls on.
This leads to Martenson’s Law: If people are given a chance to cheat, with a low possibility of getting caught, a significant number of people will cheat. As the possibility of getting caught drops to zero, the probability of cheating goes to 100%.
Why It Matters Now
This isn’t just a theory—it’s a lens for today’s world. Money systems, from crypto pumps to central bank policies, thrive on opacity. Especially as we sail under full power into the Fourth Turning; an era defined by crisis and loss of faith in our governing, economic, health, and educational institutions.
Elon revealed the existence of what he called “magic money machines” potentially undermining the very concept of money and fairness.
If cheating pays and no one’s punished, why wouldn’t it spread? And once it’s custom, taught in boardrooms and CIA boot camps, and coded into law, can it be stopped in time and repaired before catastrophe strikes?
Anthropology hints at the root. Brian Hare’s primate research suggests cheating emerges in any social system with weak enforcement. Chimps will routinely make choices based solely on personal gain with “no regard for the outcomes” for one of their fellow chimps.
We humans are no different, but we take it further building entire systems around our selfishness.
We’ve Entered The Violent Part of The Cycle
I think a lot of what we’re up against right now comes down to very typical human cycles of expansion and contraction. Breathe in and breathe out. Empires swell and empires crumble.
The Fourth Turning eventually becomes The First Turning again.
But knowing the underpinning biology is like a superpower. It allows me to spot things others struggle to fit into some rational frame. Remember, humans are not rational, we are rationalizers.
We can learn a lot about ourselves from Monkeys; when we perceive unfairness, we get angry, throw our cucumbers at the object of our rage, and impotently shake the bars of our cages.
Video: https://youtu.be/meiU6TxysCg?si=80cCpxQWjU0kykMe
We see people attacking Tesla cars and trucks because they rather violently believe they are Nazi creations!
Politicians are stoking this behavior, apparently not caring about the lives they are certain to upend, if not end.
But the actual root of all this cucumber throwing and bar rattling? Elon is taking away their Free lunch made up of Grapes and they find this to be enormously upsetting.
“It’s unfair!!”
This is what’s actually happening.
Conclusion
The bottom line is this: Trump and Elon, et al., are rapidly undoing decades of institutionalized plunder. It’s been glorified and sanctified within innumerable paychecks deposited and DOJ, SEC, EPA, etc. etc. etc., rule books.
The amount of graft and plunder cannot even be estimated at this point. I’m 99.9999% sure that trillions of dollars have been secretly created out of thin air, hidden and secreted in offshore accounts. My worry is that those millions of offshore account holders will all wake up one day and think to themselves, “Hey, I better get rid of these dollars while I can!” and the next thing you know everything suddenly ‘costs’ 100x as much as the day before.
This is how empires end; when people lose faith in the most basic, important, and primal system of distributed trust there is. Money.
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