Cheating: The American Way of Life?

Ever since writer Barbara Ehrenreich donned a maid's outfit and second-shifted waiting tables, America has been exposed as the land of the "Nickel and Dimed." In her journey through blue-collar jobs, Barbara realized that it required at least two such backbreaking, knee-wobbling jobs to make ends meet in America. It put to end the ideal that a job, any job, is better than no job. Since many of these occupations can not even provide a reasonable subsistence for the workers, and often they risk health and injury while being uninsured, one has to realize that cheating may become a real nice option for those struggling to survive. Now, it seems, even the middle-class think cheating might be a good way of life. The mentality of corporate America that insists on cutting corners and cheating to maximize profits isn't just evident in the labor market, it has taken hold as one of the pillars of a capitalistic society where the strong prey on the weak.

Take for instance, the current consumer dilemma on the price of gasoline. Petroleum companies had hiked their prices so much that gasoline had gone up 300% in the last three years. What kind of repercussions did it have the companies? Record profits! There were no penalties for this type of behavior even though the price of gasoline could have easily come down any time, as we are now seeing. It will never go back to less than $1 a gallon, but there is still much leeway there.

This type of profit mongering is evident in cheating tactics embraced by all manner of companies. The evidence that this is a marketing and capitalistic behavior is evident on Mouseprint.org, a website devoted to exposing the fine print and underhanded practices of major corporations. Among some of the unregulated practices that cheat the consumer and drive up profits for the company are short-changing products while maintaining the price.

Is Cheating the Norm Now?

In academia, plagiarism is at an all time high as Internet makes copy-paste jobs easy to implement. People can pay someone to take courses and write research papers for them. A little tweak here, and who knows if those test scores are really the applicant's test scores?

A recent study by Duke University highlighted this new trend. After distributing 5300 surveys, they compiled the findings and found that 56% of MBA students admit to cheating in the program. As if that weren't scandalous enough, The Center for Academic Integrity at Duke also found that 54% of engineering students and 50% of science students also admitted to cheating. Cheating has not just become a corporate hallmark, but this behavior has now insinuated it's self in academia.

As election time moves forward, there is a lot of discussion on vote-tampering and ballot machines that don't quite work well. There is a general suspicion on the part of many of the voters that our political system is very susceptible to cheating strategies with not enough safeguards put in place against this behavior.

With illegal aliens, they have no choice but to cheat the system starting with obtaining Social Security Numbers that are not their own to not registering for driver's licenses while continuing to drive and own a car without filing for insurance. Cheating in America is at epidemic proportions.

On the heels of such studies, come the horrific stories of illegal aliens and their plight to be making a living in a country only too willing to cut corners and exploit workers. Daily there are reports in the news of workers who get injured and because of their status as illegal; they are denied worker's compensation. It's all right to hire them while they are here illegally, but once they are injured now it's no longer all right to keep them here. We simply try to have them shipped back and forget the whole messy affair to begin with. It's okay for them to cheat the system because the employers are free to cheat them when they get injured.

What Is This Leading To?

Is capitalism the driving force behind people's motivation to cheat? It would seem so. Where competition is upheld as a market force, then competition through any means becomes less of an ethical situation and more of a survival instinct. It's possible if we continue down this path that the integrity and honesty that our forefather's prized will no longer exist in America.

Funnily, it appears that competition at all costs is also not working. We are on a downward spiral of economic disillusionment where the strong prey on the weak; everyone cheats, and less and less are making a profit anyway. In the October issue of Fortune magazine, the article "Managing In Chaos" is a first glimpse of the collapse of the corporate ethos. Once large corporations were the anchors of economic stability, but now they are the bullhorns of encroaching chaos. What worked in the past, is no longer working. Money is being lost at a very fast pace and the job market itself is in turmoil. Management has come to realize that it is part of the problem, but either doesn't know how to change quickly enough or doesn't want to. Many companies have flattened their hierarchal structures of organization trying to keep pace with a market that is flying out of control.

Some people would call this Karma. It's Karma that big business should become a victim of the same ethics it put in place. If you cheat your workers, your customers, the company, it only seems fair that the marketplace should cheat you. Alas, we still think we can do what we want and never have it come back to haunt us until it's too late. We can cheat our way through life and it doesn't matter, and maybe it won't (to us), but someone ends up paying the cost. Whether it is our children, or us, it's time to put the ethics back in the workplace before we self-destruct completely. It's time to realize that this is not a world where one's actions don't affect another person. We are all part of a system, whether it is a market system or the eco-system. We all have a handle in how the system works or how it fails.