How desperate do you need to be?
Whenever there is an incentive, it encourages certain kinds of behaviour. However, that is really only part of the story, because while there can be incentives to behave in a particular way, there are also various disincentives to behave in that same way. For instance, there is an incentive to steal a banana from a shop, because getting a banana for free is better than paying for a banana. But there are also disincentives at the same time, like getting arrested, or the social stigma of being labelled a thief, or in soma places, having a hand cut off. The disincentives for stealing a banana are generally larger than the incentive to steal.
As said, that is only part of the story.
Most people around the world would swear they would never steal from a shop and I believe them, as long as they are in their current conditions. Under a different set of conditions though, the same people would likely feel justified to steal, where the risk of disincentive is less than the incentive gain. For instance, a person with no money and a child who has not eaten in days, might take the risk to steal food, even if normally they wouldn't. In many cases, even people who would not steal themselves, might be sympathetic to the situation, or take a softer line to punishment.
This is a pretty simple scenario, but we live in a world of a lot of competing incentives, and a lot of competing disincentives. And in a globalised internet, it means that people who are living daily in very different conditions are interacting together in environments that might have the same incentive, but not the same disincentive. For another example, gaining five dollars through doing something knowingly dishonest, likely doesn't attract too many people from first-world countries, as the incentive is too low for the risk or the effort. But the same five dollars might be enough for someone from a third-world or developing nation to put in the effort and be dishonest.
And then there are the conditions for the human themselves, where five dollars for a person from a first-world country doesn't help them, but in a third-world country it does. Not only that, the cultural environment is also different, so the social disincentives in one location can vary a lot from another location, as can the cultural acceptance.
For example, the other day I was writing a bit about the cat phishing and pig butchering scams, which are run pretty much exclusively out of poor countries. These scams are luring children into sending explicit images and then getting blackmailed, with many of the distressed children committing suicide from the shame. But the blackmailers don't care. Because in their area, life is cheap, even that of children. And the ones they are blackmailing are faceless children at that, from places they will never visit. The incentive of getting a few hundred or thousand dollars by blackmailing a child is worth more than the life of that child, as they know that some will commit suicide, or they are willing to release the images if they don't get the money, damaging the child's life in other ways.
But this is to be expected, because a lot of the "perpetrators" working in the farms, are victims of human trafficking themselves. This means that they are already paying a heavy price and had their own lives degraded, then are forced to do things that they might not agree with personally to keep their degraded life from degrading further. It is a spiral of shit conditions, driven by incentives, accepted by those willing to inflict pain on suffering on others for a price.
How desperate do you need to be?
So back to the question. How desperate do you have to be to get paid to inflict pain and suffering of some kind on other people? How desperate do you need to be to act dishonestly for a financial benefit? What is the dollar amount you are willing to reduce whatever moral position you have to the point you are willing to gain from dishonesty over regular people like yourself?
What is your price?
Over the years here on Hive, I have seen people sell their morality for very little, especially when they believe they can maintain anonymity, or believe they can't be caught - or punished. People doing all kinds of things to get a few extra HBD from dishonest behaviour, or outright stealing from people who themselves are struggling. And I have always wondered, how does that make the thief feel? When they look in the mirror after successfully stealing a few HBD from some poor person much like themselves, do they feel pride? Justification aside, because we can twist any behaviour to justify it, I wonder how their moral compass works. They look in the mirror at someone who is so desperate, that they will steal from other desperate people. They won, but they must still realise they are still a loser.
Unless a psychopath.
The internet that connects us globally is a pretty great thing in many respects, but it also amplifies the worst of our behaviours, because we lose the direct contact with others. People become faceless, and the risk of consequence goes down. Many times the behaviours that harms others the most as individuals, are being directed from places where there is very little chance of getting caught, high corruption, and little consequence for capture anyway. The incentive and disincentive matrices are imbalanced, asymmetrical. The gain for dishonesty in one location is greater than the cost of being dishonest, compared to another place. The playing field is not level.
Desperation can make us do all kinds of things, but I suspect that what we use to justify our bad behaviour is becoming less and less desperate. We see ourselves as victims of everything, so we can justify something like dishonesty for less, meaning that the cost to lower our moral barriers, comes down. This isn't only happening in scam areas either, I think it is the same for violence. In the past, it would be unheard of for person on person violence that we are seeing today, but now, getting cut off in traffic is trigger for shooting someone dead in the street.
Trigger conditions.
And it is these conditions that trigger our behaviours that we should question. How much stress do I need to feel before I breakdown? How much insult do I need to feel before I snap into a violent rage? How much desperation do I need to feel before I inflict economic pain onto another?
Those are the wrong questions though, aren't they?
Because they focus on the amount required to feel. Instead, we should be thinking about how much feeling is justified under the conditions faced. Should I be feeling this much stress? Should I be insulted to this degree? Is my situation that desperate? Are my feelings valid, are they justified, and are they worthy enough for me to break my own moral stance in life?
A lot of scammers are intelligent people who use sophisticated means to dupe people dishonestly. Yet, they are also either unable to apply their intelligence to do it honestly, or their moral barriers to harming others is so low that the difference between honest gain and dishonest gain, is enough to be dishonest.
Let's set 100 as the standard number for an average honest income. How much would that amount need to be to do it dishonestly in your location? 20% more, 50% more, 1000% more? What consequences are you willing to risk for that number? What kind of pain will you inflict on another? What would that number be if you knew your direct actions could cost someone unknown to you, their life?
What number will you sell your personal morality for?
For some, it is incredibly low.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
Be part of the Hive discussion.
And you may be rewarded.
