Our society stimulates smart. Individual progress is measured by steadily increasing wealth and the symbols of success. The bright and successful are envied and admired.

Starting from kindergarten and throughout the education process intelligence tests select the gifted for special preferences. High School SAT tests sift out the smart, who go to college and then enter the job market through a relentless selection process that chooses only the brainiest and the best.

But, it is quickly evident that brains alone do not bring success; lots of high IQ people are not successful, at least in terms of being rich. To achieve financial success other characteristics come into play - diligence, drive and ambition.

We soon get used to the idea that smarts + drive = success: pay-raises, promotions, perks and prestige. It becomes a sort of fascism: the smarter you are, the more you push, the more you achieve, the higher you rise, the wealthier you become.

During economic growth periods many people, including the not so smart, get sucked into a growth mode, the "lure of the lifestyle". Risk-taking seems to pay off and is admired and rewarded. Exaggeration is acceptable - after all, TV advertising does it all the time. One doesn't really believe all those claims - or does one?

Few people are out and out cheats and liars—most drift into increasingly dubious behavior through insidious wealth addiction. Bluffing becomes the norm. Many drift into fiddling with results, expecting that they can explain away the discrepancy if and when their bluff is called. They fudge (stretch the truth), and then the fudging turns to lying, which extends to cheating and stealing. This is creeping criminality.

Interestingly, the smarter you are, the easier it is to fudge. Soon, and perhaps too late, the recognition comes that lying generates a large overhead; the lies must be consistent. No matter how smart the liar is, the Peter Principle of prevarication applies: getting caught when the lies exceed the liar's level of lying competence.

The way business is organized today, there is a lot of encouragement to fudge. Most companies pay senior management incentives and bonuses based on growth and profit performance. The diligence that starts out as ambition turns to plain old greed. After a few years of generating high income it becomes the norm. The lifestyle is addictive. It's easy to scale up, but not scale down. How do you explain to your family that they will need to move to a smaller home and give up their cars because you failed at work? This is when deception becomes a dependency. The overhead perpetuates the prevarication.

It is disingenuous to think that Enron is an isolated instance of creeping criminality. The disease is endemic in a market that measures the worth of companies by their ability to meet quarterly forecasts. The temptation is too great to fudge the numbers today and catch up in the next quarter. Just recently (April 02), several major financial institutions have been accused of lying to their customers to sell stocks that they knew had already been downgraded. Stockbrokers will soon be ranked with politicians and used-car salesmen as people who cannot be believed.

It is not just top executives who are subject to creeping criminality. It's an affliction at any level. Nobody notices occasional borrowing from petty cash, so it becomes a habit and the amounts grow. Pilfering the coffee cups and copier-paper with impunity for a while grows into more ambitious stealing. The waiter puts a few fresh beer bottles along with the empties outside with the trash for a buddy to pick up, and the habit soon extends to wine and steak. When caught, many plead innocence because they had not really intended to cheat—the occasional lapses had simply escalated.

Let's take taxes. If you have a lot of income, you pay a lot of taxes. It's interesting how people, who wouldn't dream of ever doing anything crooked, will happily fiddle their taxes. The same lifestyle junkies, who spend recklessly on cars and boats and trips to Bermuda, try hard to either not think about, or find ways to avoid paying taxes.

There are lots of people who worry about the tax deductions they may be losing by not following a "tax strategy". They spend a lot on tax advice that leads them to buy time-share condos in out of the way places and make complicated investments in offshore partnerships, all to save on their taxes. As I listen to friends outlining their complicated strategies, I start to wonder how much income they must be making to go through such trouble. And, I wonder too how much time and money they must be spending to save how much money. And how much fudging?

Most habitual criminals are subject to the patterns of creeping criminality. Robert Hanssen, the renegade FBI agent, probably started with small security leaks that became steadily more sinister. The friendly parish priest or scoutmaster may not have recognized his own latent pedophilia until it was too late. Political bribery often starts with harmless gifts and sponsored trips that drift into blatant bribery and boondoggles.

Creeping criminality is a human condition that can afflict anyone and everyone. Break the speed limit a bit and get away with it—and your speeding creeps up. Jump a couple of red lights, and it becomes a dangerous habit. Driving after a couple of drinks is harmless enough at first, but can escalate into deadly drunken driving.

So, how do we stop ourselves from this insidious onslaught? Don't even start!

Copyright © 2002 Jim Pinto. All Rights Reserved.

Jim Pinto is a technology entrepreneur, investor, futurist, writer and commentator.
You can email him at: jim@jimpinto.com. Or look at his poems, prognostications and predictions on his site: http://www.JimPinto.com