“Who says cheaters never win”? asks Professor Kirk Hanson, writing in the journal of the Stanford Business School.

Hanson, the executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, says it’s time our society faced up to a dirty little secret: “Players who use steriods in professional baseball, college coaches who have others take exams for their star athletes, high school students who cheat on the SATS, scientists who fake the results of their research, and CEO’s who cook the books in American corporations, may all be acting rationally.”

Acting rationally. What does that mean? Presumably, that these people are well aware of the risks they are taking; they understand full well that if the worst comes to the worst, their careers will be ruined or their reputations destroyed. Yet, they still go on doing what they’re doing. Why?

No big mystery, explains Hanson. It’s worth it!

“The answer is today there’s so much to be gained by being just a little better than others – by hitting a few more home runs than any other professional baseball player, by getting to and staying at the very top of the modern American corporation, or by the absolute best in any other field. ”

Pointing to the winner-take-all culture that pervades almost every area of American life, and becomes more pronounced every year, Hanson reminds us that salaries and other perks for those reaching the top of the ladder have gone crazy.” For example, CEOs got 40 times what the average employee in their company earned in 1980 – and 400 times more in 2000! Similarly, the highest-paid baseball player earned $2.3 million in the 1988 season, and more than $20 million last year!

It’s a mindset that has even seeped down into the schools. Parents of high school athletes are reported to be sometimes the most eager to try any drug that will give their child an edge. Tempted by the rewards waiting for them in the wings, some people climbing the ladder may do anything to get to the top, and some who have already made it will do anything to stay there.

So, in a society totally obsessed with the need to win at all costs, cheating has become mainstream. Even when a cheater transgresses the proverbial Eleventh Commandment by being caught in the act, we find less outrage and a more forgiving attitude on the part of the peer group.

What lies at the root of this superstar-or-bust mentality? It could have something to do, as Prof. Hanson suggests, with a kind of spiritual crisis in society, or lack of self-esteem on a mass scale. “Worshipping heroes and celebrities could be a substitute for finding fulfillment in our own relationships and service.” Again, the media’s penchant for placing celebrities on a pedestal may be an added factor. And on the face of it, the media love few people more than a celebrity who’s caught cheating!

So what can we do about it?

Of course, the emergence of the “superstar society”, and the “cheating society” that has resulted from it, has serious ramifications for the more “old-fashioned” among us who still insist on playing everything straight.

Where there’s cheating, there’s no such thing as a level playing field. In fact, if people believe everyone else is cheating and they can’t get a fair share, they’ll refuse to play at all. When employees suspect that fellow workers may be trying to cheat to get ahead of them, it makes extremely difficult for a company with the best of intentions to build a climate of trust. And so on.

As we well know, an individual’s success in resisting any temptation to act dishonestly as an adult, will largely depend on the moral foundations laid during his earliest years. That, in turn, mostly hinges on parental example. (We’ll be coming back to the theme of parental example, in a different context, in an upcoming post – stay tuned!)

Fine. But how do we counteract the factor we have identified as helping to trigger the itch to cheat in the first place: namely, the superstar syndrome?

I think Prof. Hanson expresses it well:

” We have to value ‘doing your best’, not just winning. Only a few high school basketball players will make it to the NBA. We can’t have the vast majority believing they are losers. Only a few business people will be CEO’s. The rest are not failures.

“Encouraging ‘doing your best’, will require all of us to compliment and celebrate the efforts by those we know and love. The spouse who works hard but doesn’t get the promotion deserves a dinner out. The child who studies diligently but gets a C grade should be praised.”

Some comments on how this is relevant to some disturbing trends in contemporary education follow in my next post.