"A CEO, whose tenure will be ended tomorrow, is screwing his office up. Confusing, his secretary asks, 'What's up, sir?''Just leave it, let the one who will come into this room tomorrow, fix it,' says the company leader.'But sir, what would be happened if it turns out that your son will be the one who comes here?' says the secretary.'Good idea,' replied the boss briefly, 'I'll be more free to mess it up!""Why do people cheat? What I mean by cheating, are breaking the rules to get ahead academically, professionally, or financially. Some of this cheating involves violating the law; some does not. Either way, most of it is by people who, on the whole, view themselves as upstanding members of society," said Sansevieria while her hands holding a loupe and examining a blurry portrait. "Probably, as an Indonesian, you would say, 'Cheating? Wait, it's an advice that has been told in wayang puppet. About Pandawa lost the game of dice because Patih Sengkuni cheated. Sengkuni was a master at gambling and owned a pair of dice which magically did the crooked nose's bidding. This event shows us some kind of dishonesty and we are often at our most comfortable when we can cast it as a moral issue. It's not our culture. The wider culture exhibits contempt and a professed discomfort with dishonesty. So, whoever cheated, they are not us, but Duryudana's colleagues, who were ambitiously to control the kingdom of Hastina. And even though the Pandawas won the Kurukshetra war, their children and grandchildren and relatives had disappeared, they also ended up with moksha. Dishonesty makes a true nation, disappeared.'However, according to Mark Moore, our culture’s ambivalence about lying and dishonesty is evidenced by our grudging acceptance that politics involves some form of dissemblance. In popular culture, says Moore, we see admiration of Hollywood antiheroes such as Paul Newman’s and Robert Redford’s con-artist characters in The Sting, Leonardo DiCaprio’s check-forging character in Catch Me If You Can, and George Clooney’s master of deceit in Ocean’s Eleven. Even our greatest heroes often lead a duplicitous life, including such iconic American heroes as Superman, Spiderman, and Batman, spies such as Jason Bourne in the Bourne trilogy, and Casablanca’s Rick. And great evil must often be countered by clever deceit as exemplified by the central hero of Schindler’s List.Yet nowhere is popular admiration for the art of deception more evident than in the recent upsurge of national interest in poker. In 2003, amateur poker player Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker against seasoned professional Sammy Farha. What made Moneymaker’s win so aweinspiring was not his tight playing style or his ability to read other players (indeed it could be argued that he was too impulsive a player); rather it was his willingness to pull off stone-cold bluffs against the best of them.However, according to Mark Moore, our culture’s ambivalence about lying and dishonesty is evidenced by our grudging acceptance that politics involves some form of dissemblance. In popular culture, says Moore, we see admiration of Hollywood antiheroes such as Paul Newman’s and Robert Redford’s con-artist characters in The Sting, Leonardo DiCaprio’s check-forging character in Catch Me If You Can, and George Clooney’s master of deceit in Ocean’s Eleven. Even our greatest heroes often lead a duplicitous life, including such iconic American heroes as Superman, Spiderman, and Batman, spies such as Jason Bourne in the Bourne trilogy, and Casablanca’s Rick. And great evil must often be countered by clever deceit as exemplified by the central hero of Schindler’s List.Yet nowhere is popular admiration for the art of deception more evident than in the recent upsurge of national interest in online-gambling. Moore gives example in 2003, amateur poker player Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker against seasoned professional Sammy Farha. What made Moneymaker’s win so aweinspiring was not his tight playing style or his ability to read other players (indeed it could be argued that he was too impulsive a player); rather it was his willingness to pull off stone cold bluffs against the best of them.Cheating is always up. Cheating is everywhere, says David Callahan. Cheating is not a new problem in the whole world. It has existed in nearly every human society. In ancient China, there was frequent cheating to get admission to the civil service. Test takers sewed pockets into their garments for smuggling crib notes and resorted to other creative deceptions. The persistence of cheating on civil service tests was especially impressive given the penalty imposed on those caught: death.In Ancient Greece, the Olympic games were rife with cheating. Athletes lied about their amateur status, competitions were rigged, judges were bribed. Those caught were forced to pay fines to a special fund used to erect statues of Zeus. Greece ended up with a lot of statues of Zeus.You've known that the Ancient Greece has an almost complete and orderly account of Democracy. In Athens, the democracy existed in roughly from the middle of the fifth century, says Kurt A. Raaflaub, was a remarkable system, unprecedented, unparalleled in world history, exhilarating, capable of mobilizing extraordinary citizen involvement, enthusiasm, and achievement, enormously productive and at the same time potentially greatly destructive. We know this democracy best in the shape it took in the fourth century, after a comprehensive revision of laws between 410 and 399. By then it could be understood as a system of rather clearly defined institutions that operated according to legally determined rules, which to some extent approached a 'constitution.' Parts of this system are described in the second half of the Aristotelian. To mention only the most obvious elements, the assembly (ekklesia) met at least forty times a year. For some of these meetings, items on the agenda were prescribed. The presidents of the assembly and council were selected by lot and essentially could not serve for more than one day. The democratic 'council of 500' (boule)—to be distinguished from the Areopagus council composed of former magistrates (archons) who were life-long members—was selected by lot; its five hundred members, limited to two (nonsuccessive) years of service, represented, according to a sophisticated formula, the population of numerous districts in Attica (demoi, demes, consisting of villages and sections of towns and of the city of Athens). This council broadly supervised the administrative apparatus, dealt with foreign policy issues, heard reports of officials, and deliberated the agenda and prepared motions for the assembly. The latter was free to accept such motions, with or without amendment, to refer them back to the council for further deliberation, or to reject and replace them with different ones altogether. The assembly passed decrees (psephismata) on speciWc policy issues, while laws with general validity (nomoi) were formulated by a board of 'lawgivers' (nomothetai), passed in a trial-like procedure, and, if challenged, scrutinized in the people’s court.The assembly, assisted by the boule and the law courts (dikasteria), decided upon policies, supervised every step of their execution, and held a tight control over the officials who were in charge of realizing them. Professional personnel (whether in administration, religion, or the maintenance of public order) was minimal, mostly consisting of a few hundred state-owned slaves who served in specific functions at the disposal of various officials or as a rudimentary police force. Virtually all administrative business was in the hands of numerous committees of various sizes (totalling about seven hundred members), who assisted, and in turn were supervised by, the boule and various officials. (In the fifth century, hundreds of other officials served in various functions throughout the empire). A small minority of these officials, primarily those holding major financial and military responsibility, were elected; all others were selected by lot, as were the chief magistrates, and the thousands of citizen judges (in modern scholarship usually called jurors), who on every court day staffed variously large juries (or, more precisely, assemblies of judges) that tried several cases simultaneously in various locations. These jurors were chosen in a sophisticated mechanical procedure (by an allotment machine, kleroterion) that eliminated tampering and made bribery virtually impossible. The law courts themselves were an important part of democratic life and procedures: much political business was conducted there, one might say, in a continuation of politics by different means.Several thousand citizens thus were politically active every year and many of them quite regularly for years on end—out of a population of adult male citizens that in the fourth century comprised hardly more than 30,000. Most impressively, 'over a third of all citizens over eighteen, and about two thirds of all citizens over forty' served at some point in their lives at least one year-long term in the council of 500, a very time-consuming office. It is thus clear that this democracy was not only 'direct' in the sense that decisions were made by the assembled people, but the 'directest' imaginable in the sense that the people through assembly, council, and law courts controlled the entire political process and that a fantastically large proportion of citizens was involved constantly in public business. Moreover, the system of rotation of offices made sure that those who were not involved at a given time would be at another (if they wished to) and that the citizens through their engagement in various offices and functions achieved a high level of familiarity with the administration of their community and its policies. On top of all this, these same citizens also regularly served in their polis’s infantry army or helped row its fleet, even if mercenaries played a more significant role in fourth-century warfare than they did earlier.So, in Greece at that time, the entire community played an active role, not only in selecting leaders, but in all areas of life. Not just dancing around, free money and free lunches—and actually there is no free lunch—then surrender to the politicians. Indeed, Democracy is constituted through institutions, practices, mentalities, and, eventually, ideologies. In Greece these different components of democracy reached their fullest development in the fifth and fourth centuries. If democracy means that all citizens, the entire demos, determine policies and exercise control through assembly, council, and courts, and that political leaders, attempting to shape public opinion, are subordinate to the demos, the first democracy that we can identify with certainty was that of Athens from the 460s, emerging as a result of historically specic and even contingent factors.Democracy succeeds when government, in some broad sense, represents the will of the people. Democratic representation can be assured if informed citizens freely elect their leaders, and those leaders stand for reelection at some regular interval. Thus citizens, voting for leaders who best represent their views, and holding those leaders (or their political parties) accountable for their performance in office at the next election, make democracy work. At least that is the theory. Naturally enough, voting is a topic that has drawn quite a bit of attention in political science, and the classics of political behavior research have all focused, in one way or another, on the vote decision.Presidential campaigns are inherently dynamic events that occur over a certain period of time. They have a defined beginning, around the time candidates throw their hats into the ring, along with a clear ending–Election Day. Throughout the campaign season, citizens are inundated with information about the candidates, whether they wish to pay attention to politics or not. One would have to read no newspapers or magazines, watch no television and listen to no radio, and have no contact with other people in order to avoid acquiring at least a little information about the candidates running for president.The amount of information available during a campaign varies, however, depending on the campaign cycle itself. The classic texts of democratic theory assume that for a democracy to function properly, citizens should be interested in, pay attention to, discuss, and actively participate in politics. The attention and discussion provide information about political affairs, which allows citizens to make political decisions (e.g., a vote) based on carefully considered principles reflecting their own self-interest and the common good. All citizens may not be able to live up to these standards–some may be too disinterested, or lack sufficient information, or lack the skills to understand politics, and as a consequence vote by habit or narrow prejudices, or not vote at all—but as long as a clear majority of citizens do live up to these standards, the collective wisdom of the people will prevail.Differences among voters—their general political sophistication, their political predispositions, and their education, gender, and age—affect information processing and choice strategies. All these characteristics are things voters carry around with them, as they live through actual political campaigns.In election, the potential fraud overshadow election in all-election holding countries. Investigations by journalists, academics, lawyers, political parties, official nonpartisan observers and interest citizens, have drawn attention to cases of clear-cut voting fraud in many countries around the world.Scholars and practitioners use a variety of terms to normatively qualify elections, including free and fair, clean, fraudulent, corrupt, and manipulated, among others. Similarly, actions that render an election unacceptable have been described as election fraud, electoral corruption, electoral manipulation, electoral malfeasance,patronage, and clientelism.Schedler lays out a 'chain of democratic choice' based on Robert Dahl’s classic body of work on democratic theory, such that an election is considered acceptable ('democratic' is the language used by Schedler) if and only if all seven links in the chain remain 'whole and unbroken'. The links in the chain of democratic choice can be summarized as follows: Empowerment: offices filled via elections ought to wield real power; Free supply: a wide-enough range of candidates to choose from, other than the state-sponsored ones, must be available; Free demand: voters must be free to form their preferences, implying, among other things, that plural public sources of information about the candidates must be available; Inclusion: the franchise must be universal; Insulation: the vote must be free from bribery and coercion; Integrity: votes must be counted honestly and weighted according to the principle of 'one person, one vote.' Irreversibility: winners must be able to access office, exercise power, and complete their terms in office.Electoral fraud–stuffing of ballot boxes, tampering with the vote count, and multiple voting, for example–constitutes a violation of the sixth link in the chain, integrity. Vote buying and voter intimidation violate the fifth link, insulation. Schedler also argues that the fifth link entails ballot secrecy. Arbitrary obstacles to voter registration violate the fourth link, inclusion. Media restrictions favoring government sponsored candidates, as well as some campaign finance violations, contravene the third link, free demand. Bans on opposition parties or candidates, such as are in contemporary Iran or were present in Mubarak’s Egypt, violate the second link, free supply.Alberto Simpser suggests that electoral manipulation can influence the subsequent behavior of a wide variety of political actors–such as bureaucrats, voters, and party leaders–potentially yielding benefits to the perpetrator that could encompass not only the election, but also the post-electoral period, subsequent elections, and realms beyond the electoral. For example, blatant displays of electoral manipulation before an election, such as vote buying by the incumbent, can discourage opposition supporters from turning out to vote. To take another example, a large margin could also bolster the winner’s bargaining stance after the election with respect to labor unions, business organizations, and other actors by showing that no one actor is indispensable in a winning coalition.Simpler further argues that election fraud aimed are only winning matters and or more then winning.When authoritarian regimes lose elections, power is not automatically transferred. These regimes commit a form of manipulation after election day if they fail to accept the results and retain power through other means. Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos engaged in well-documented fraud in the 1986 presidential elections that involved both retail fraud (bribery and intimidation) and postelection wholesale fraud (manipulating the vote tallies). Similarly, Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe has systematically engaged in violence and intimidation to ensure that the opposition is weakened, and he continues to win elections. Of course, not all authoritarian governments resort to fraud in order to hold on to power; the party of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua handed over power to the opposition when they lost elections in 1990. Likewise, many nations with long histories of democratic government have held elections where irregularities and administrative problems raised questions about the integrity of elections where existing governments have tried to retain power, such as in the 2006 parliamentary elections in Italy.It becomes immediately clear that understandings of the Election Fraud are rooted in each country’s cultural and political milieu. Consider, for example, the allegations of fraud in Mexico’s 2006 presidential election. Some charges centered on the use of door-to-door canvassing by one of the political parties and whether such campaigning constituted undue partisan pressure on voters. Similarly, the decision by President Vicente Fox to endorse one of the candidates running to replace him was perceived within Mexico as illegitimate pressuring of voters and an unfair use of state funds to promote one candidate.Human beings are not simply creatures of their economic and legal environment. We don’t decide whether to cut corners based only on a rational calculus about potential gains and losses. We filter these decisions through our value systems. And while more of us will do wrong in a system where cheating is normalized or necessary for survival or hugely profitable, some of us will insist on acting with integrity even if doing so runs counter to our self-interest. This is one trait that distinguishes flesh-and-blood Homo sapiens from that consistently rational actor of academic theory, Homo economicus.Stephen Carter suggests that integrity requires three steps: discerning what is right and wrong, acting on what you have discerned, and saying openly that you are acting on your understanding of right and wrong. Of course, to show integrity you need to know the difference between right and wrong—which is easier said than done nowadays.Notions of right and wrong are not only shaped by our family and friends and by work or academic environments but also by the broader culture. As we go through life, the culture’s prevailing values, or social norms, shape our ideas about what constitutes the good life, how hard we should labor and to what end, how we should dress and groom ourselves, and much more. Some of us may emerge in early adulthood with a sophisticated ethical outlook picked up from religious education, or from those rare parents and teachers who clearly articulate ideas about character and ethics.The values of a culture are heavily shaped by the large forces transforming society: war or peace, booms and recessions, demographic shifts and technological change. Values can also be shaped by social movements, religious awakenings, intellectual activism, and celebrity-driven fads—by “influentials” with loud bullhorns who preach a particular way of life. Mass media has made it easier than ever for the values of a society to change quickly.And finally, many of the collectors want to know, on how to kill me. You need to know that my nation, have various forms: spears, samurai, fans, baseball bats, umbrellas, twisters, and many more, but all of them are known as only one nation, the Sansevieria nation. Our language is also one, to fight pollutants. So how do you kill me? You cannot kill me by uprooting my body from the earth, or cutting off my roots—my roots can grow again, or cutting off my leaves—my leaves can grow roots and produce some pups. Drowning myself in the water? Not really. Bury me alive? Remember the principle of roots and leaves: roots get food from the earth and leaves seek light intake from sunlight, in short, roots go down and leaves go up, then, I can suddenly appear on the surface of the earth.So, how can I die? I could die because of my own fault, greedy of water—and it can be faster if mixed with Russian NPK fertilizer. Yes, if I consume too much water, my leaves will swell, my roots will rot and I will slowly die. Like you o humans, if you consume too much sugar, your body will swell and rot, you'll get diabetes, right? Too much love will kill you, 'cause you love too much sugar to consume. So, we could die by our own gluttony. And Allah knows best."And in closing, Sansevieria sang the Beatles' song,Michelle, ma belle,[Michelle, my beauty,]sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble,[these are words that go very well together,]très bien ensemble[very well together]And I will say the only words I knowthat you'll understand, my Michelle *)
Citations & References:
- Salman Akhtar & Henri Parens (Ed.), Lying, Cheating, and Carrying On, 2009, Jason Aronson
- David Callahan, The Cheating Culture, 2004, Harcourt Inc.
- Kurt A. Raaflaub, Josiah Ober, and Robert W. Wallace, Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece, 2007, University of California Press
- Richard R. Lau and David P. Redlawsk, How Voters Decide: Information Processing during Election Campaigns, 2006, Cambridge University Press
- R. Michael Alvarez, Thad E. Hall, Susan D. Hyde, (Ed.), Election Fraud : Detecting and Deterring Electoral Manipulation, 2008, The Brooking Intitutions Press
- Alberto Simpser, Why Goverments and Parties Manipulate Elections: Theory, Practice, and Implications, 2013, Cambridge University Press
*) "Michelle" written by John Lennon & Paul McCartney
