I Choose to Accept Personal Responsibility
Posted by Bill @ 12:30 pm
I ran across MrBossMan’s blog the other day after he linked to my post on ZeeJustin’s response to getting caught cheating. First, I don’t think I agree with the overall premise of his response. His take is that there’s no such thing as ‘free will’ and that some set of cosmic forces brings us to decisions. I guess we could have a spirited debate over whether or not those cosmic forces could also bring you to a crossroads where you have exactly a 50/50 decision to make but this is a poker blog, not a philosophy blog so we’ll leave that debate for another day.
What I really wanted to address was MrBossMan’s contention that if ZeeJustin has said accepted full responsibility it would have made everything okay. That’s not what I said (though Felicia’s post – which he also linked to – could possibly be construed that way). What I attempted to do was show the faulty logic and emotional immaturity being demonstrated by ZeeJustin.
MrBossMan says that the rest of us don’t cheat at poker because we were told or taught not to cheat at some point earlier in our lives. He gives an example of getting caught cheating in 9th grade and extrapolates that into a classic; it was painful, humans are designed to avoid pain. Well . . . not so fast. There’s another factor that plays into how this animal called the human reacts to the world around him. That other factor is called pleasure.
Pain and pleasure, a classic battle fought out to control our actions. While pain is typically a stronger motivator, pleasure is no slouch. Now, I’m not attempting to say that ZeeJustin cheated because he got pleasure out of it. Hell, I don’t even know the guy other than his 2+2 postings so I’m not going to psychoanalyze the guy here on a blog. What I am saying though is that not every action is an attempt to avoid pain.
I’ve cheated at times during my life. Not at poker but I’ve cheated on tests. Hell, I’ve cheated on tests so blatantly that others are unable to believe my audacity (and cunningness). And, I’ve never been caught. However today if you offered me a 100% guarantee I wouldn’t get caught cheating, I would politely decline. I get more satisfaction (read: pleasure) out of the challenge of doing well than cheating. Cheating is easy in comparison so there’s no challenge.
Hell, if we were only motivated by avoiding pain . . . most of us would have given up poker a long time ago ïŠ
So, in the end, ZeeJustin’s actions aren’t excusable even if he takes personal responsibility. Taking personal responsibility is the first step though. MrBossMan’s 9th grade cheating incident did not prevent him from going on to future levels in our educational system, but had he not seen the error of his ways and reformed, continuous cheating certainly could have put a damper on his higher education plans. ZeeJustin’s problem, IMHO, is that he has refused to see the wrongness of his actions. Literally, he’s blaming Party Poker for making it too easy to cheat. He doesn’t realize that cheating is a decision one makes (contrary to MrBossMan’s claims). Even if we break it down into factors of pleasure and pain, for ZeeJustin the loss of reputation, income streams, and even cold hard cash are not painful enough for him to see the error in his actions. That is a character defect. And character defects like that tend to demonstrate themselves via repeating past mistakes.
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COMMENTS / 3 COMMENTS
StudioGlyphic added these pithy words on Mar 15 06 at 10:15 amYou cheat(ed) every Friday. I saw you signalling to Katkin whenever you had a strong hand so that he could enter into the pot and help sweeten it. You guys made out like bandits!
Dead added these pithy words on Mar 22 06 at 10:37 pmI hear you Bill- I do not know the incident of which you speak, but I assume ZeeJustin is of the younger generation. My wife, who works in higher education, recently had an experience which frames this whole issue:
The vending machines in the student lounge were constantly being broken into. No matter what admin tried they could not get it to stop, so ultimately they had to begin locking the doors to the lounge after 4pm, which of course, caused a stir. At a student council meeting the main gist of the students complaints was simply that the machines were too easy to break into. This was the argument presented by a large group of 20somethings.
We were floored, to say the least.
mr bossman added these pithy words on Mar 25 06 at 11:05 pmHey Bill. I just ran into this response. My personal example is a bit simplified and you’re right, you could easily alter the events and insert ‘pleasure’ and not changes things drastically. There’s a big fat area in the middle of the brains in mice all the way up to humans that causes the sensation of pleasure. In fact, if you set up a rat where it can self administer morphine into this brain area it does it so much that they don’t eat or drink and eventually die.
It sounds like we’ll have to disagree on the free will issue. I haven’t had alot of success convincing people that they have no choice in anything. This is especially difficult in western cultures which are obsessed with The Individual and often ignore the social environment. And for the record, I don’t think there are cosmic forces at work, it’s all very real and earthly. But saying that ZeeJustin has a character flaw isn’t very satisfying to my if I want to understand why he did what he did. Where did the ‘flaw’ come from? Was he born with it? Did he catch it?
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