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Anonymous asked: why do people cheat?
Let’s step wayyyyy back and look at nature. In social animals (like humans), survival depends on a balance between competition and cooperation. To get ahead, one had to find that balance - if they didn’t, they died.
Perhaps life in the modern world isn’t quite so “nasty, brutish, and short,” as Thomas Hobbes would say, but a similar principle applies.
The modern world is still pretty competitive, albeit in different ways. People naturally try to get ahead; maybe this is a vague remnant of that evolutionary instinct.
I’ll admit that cheating is a little different from evolutionary competition. In particular, cheating is a punishable offense; in the natural world, there obviously is no justice. However, I think the point still stands. Cheating is a selfish way to get ahead, often at the cost of others’ success.
People cheat when they’re desperate to get ahead and don’t want to do the hard work it would normally take. I think it’s actually a quite natural thing to do, if all that evolution stuff I was spewing has even a grain of truth in it.
So keep cheating, guys. It’s what nature intended.
