Aspiring To Be Good At Gaming The System (Ref Previous LIRR Blog)

Thinking about my previous blog about the LIRR fraud case, I've come up with at least three things that should be said about 'Gaming The System':

1. When 'the system' becomes too oppressive or cumbersome it invites, even demands (for thrill or survival sake) people find ways around whatever rules there are whether those ways are illegal or 'only' immoral.
2. There are too many people who accept doing this as a challenge and that to be victorious is a good thing. To them, there's honor in dishonerable actions.
3. There are too many people for whom the immoral aspect of it is irrelevant. This 'moral relevance' thinking based on one's own desires being more important than others' is destructive of civility in a society. If you haven't noticed, it's increasing dramatically in the USA and elsewhere.

An over-reaching and/or too bureaucratic and too 'nanny state' government always leads to this. It's a historical truth. As I've said in recent blogs, it is simple human nature to behave this way. Either the survival instinct kicks in or people find their motivation to do bad things in the thrill/challenge of finding ways to benefit from not following the rules ... to benefit from the pain (economic or otherwise) of others. Their pain is irrelevant. My gain whether deserved or earned is all that matters.

We're going too far down this road. We're becoming a something for nothing society and history is full of lessons why and how this is very, very bad for us. To those doing the gaming, both the historical truth where this leads and the impact on fellow citizens who pay a price to the successful gamer are completely(!) irrelevant. If you can get something from the system that you don't deserve and didn't earn, so what? If 'they' are stupid enough to allow me to do it and get away with it, shame on them. Unfortunately, it isn't 'the system' or government that pays the price, it's one's own fellow citizens, one's neighbors, one's relatives. Personal moral responsibility is irrelevant. In fact, it's a totally subjective thing, not something which has objective importance in absolute terms.

We humans resist objective restrictions on our behavior if they infringe on what we want. Human nature you know. The constitution is too restrictive? Then we must declare it a 'must be made relevant to the times' document and keep it relevant to current 'needs'. We must it change it to accommodate what we want, regardless of the document's historically derived 'healthy society' foundation. But it's justified to change it isn't it? After all, the Founders had no idea how we'd develop materially, scientifically or otherwise. No they didn't. They 'only' understood where human behavior would lead without cultural and government boundaries. They understood the inevitability of our decay if our behvior (wants versus basic needs) were not restrained.

Changing from a society substantially based on personal responsibility for one's life and for the well-being of one's family and community to one based on automatic equal outcomes for everyone is destructive. It gives perceived if not implied and even factual license to people to get whatever's fair by their own definition by any means and at whatever cost to others that are necessary. Wrongness becomes subjective which is destructive of a civil society. This has played out so many times in history that it's irrational to ignore it. It is arrogant and ignorant of us to think it won't or can't happen to us ... that we will manage it better than all those failed societies. Man's arrogance (in the societal and personal sense) knows no bounds. The Founders knew this to be true and did a remarkably creative job of establishing sensible boundaries. We ignore their intentions at great, great risk to our society.

History screams at us: beware what you wish for!