The Ways People Cheat

You know cheating when you see it. What you may not yet be able to do is name the method. The contractor who vanishes with the deposit, the partner who pads the expense account, the official who steers a public contract to his brother-in-law, the supplier whose delivery never matches the sample he showed you, all of them cheat. None of them cheats in the same way. And if the only words you hold are "someone cheated," then the only remedy you can demand is the equally useless "stop cheating."

This lesson gives you the names. It sorts every method of cheating into a small set of categories, the way a physician sorts symptoms into diseases, so that you move from complaint to diagnosis to the correct repair without guessing.

Afterward you will look at any betrayal, in a household or a government, and say precisely what was done, how the cost was shifted, and why a single act so often conceals several wrongs at once. How many methods there are, and what divides one from another, is the work of the course.