What is the most dangerous behavior? Stealing, raping, bullying, abusing, killing? They are dangerous behaviors. But I believe that the most dangerous behavior is Cheating. Cheating allows dangerous behaviors to continue without being noticed. Dangerous behaviors are mistakes that we make, but cheating makes them unstoppable and unmanagable. Cheating hides and protect those mistakes from being corrected.
We can cheat ourselves and cheat others. We cheat ourselves by ignorance or denial. An ignorant simply does not know and believes what is seen as true. A denier is trying to avoid traumatic feelings.
"Cheaters hate honesty and honest persons hate lies"
Self-cheating is the basis of all mental health problems and disorders. It has been mentioned in spirituality as source of suffering. Adam hid himself from God after eating the forbidden fruit. Jesus prayed to forgive his enemies for "they know not what they do", Buddha said that we are asleep.
Cheating others is the basis of relationship problems. We are not only talking about hiding affairs or other negative behaviors. We sometimes pretend to be someone we are not and people find out about who we really are after the fact. Cheating destroy trust, the main ingredient in relationship.
Cheating also occur in professional setting, in government and private sectors. This is a dangerous form of cheating because a person can hide behind his profession to do his cheating. For example, the priests who crucify Jesus, the priests who abuse children or government official who corrupt. They all use a mask of their "Profession" to do their personal act. At the same time, where a person have emotion to keep him honest (It's called guilt), a profession does not have emotion to keep him honest. A person by himself maybe unable to kill another human being, but he can use his profession to kill "because it's a job." or hire a professional killer to do the killing.
Corruption is a common cheating practice in professional setting where a person takes more than he earns or sell something that was not his to sell, like law or permit. What makes corruption dangerous is other than robbing the money is that a person deny the corruption. Now the cheater cheat about the cheating. It makes the behavior unstoppable and unmanagable. The persons hide behind the mask of his profession and deny the corruption.
Profession is more dangerous than a person. Profession has the authority, power, wealth that can be abused. The person and profession by itself is not dangerous, the person plus the profession makes a dangerous combination. Hitler by himself is pretty harmless. But Hitler as the leader of Nazi is a dangerous person.
Truth always have evidence and lies has no evidence and has to be created.
Cheating is subtle and secretive.It is contagious and spreads like wild fire. Nothing destroy a group faster than cheating. It is difficult to confront without evidence. Even with evidence, they will bargain or use excuses to justify their behaviors. We all makes mistakes, but cheating turn our mistakes dangerous.
There is a school in England called Summerhill where students can do whatever they want as long as they don't hurt others and they don't cheat. If only, we can apply those two rules in this world, how wonderful our world will be.
The best way to deal with cheating behaviors is to lay it up in the open. To make public what is private. It is better to feel pain but true rather than pleasure in lies. They will say that "we destroy their good names and accuse them". They will ask for evidence and it's true that we often can't come up with evidence of their cheating because they keep the evidence secret. Ask them for evidence that they don't lie and most of the time, they can't prove that they don't lie either because they have no evidence of their not-lying.
A liar usually keep the truth hidden and spread the lies. An honest person keep the lies hidden and spread the truth.
"If you stop telling lies about me, I will stop telling lies about you" - Gordon Gecko in Wallstreet II.
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