Marion Jones had to give up her five Olympic medals and is set to serve six months in jail for perjury. Roger Clemens may be indicted, and if the U.S. Attorney decides to send the case before a grand jury, who knows where he’ll end up? Barry Bonds’ home run record is in doubt and even Lance Armstrong’s seven victories in the Tour de France remain under suspicion in some circles. It’s not limited to steroids; the legitimacy of the New England Patriots’ nearly perfect season is being questioned due to head coach Bill Belichick’s videotaping of the opposite teams’ sidelines in an attempt to learn their signals. We watch our heroes cheat just as excitedly as we watch them succeed. Why is that?
Is it just human nature to love a scandal? Or do we become so attached to these people, build them up so much, that we begin to feel an attachment more intimate than pure idolatry? Do we feel so genuine a bond with these people that we begin to imagine that if we pushed our bodies to the limit, we could become them? We idolize them for their superior genetics; if we were only a couple of feet taller, a little more athletic…
Finding out just how true it is that our heroes really are no better than us shatters that illusion. We come to realize that if we injected ourselves with mysterious vials everyday, we too could come home with Olympic medals. We feel lied to, betrayed. We feel like fools for holding them on such pedestals.
Our disappointment is so great that we can’t just let them get off with an apology; we have to strip them of their past and future glory. Never mind that we were always there, cheering for them to be better, better, best, or that when they set that record or won that game, we gloried as if it had been our own triumph. That we pushed them farther, expected them to exceed expectations, to transcend the limits of possibility. We wanted them to tell us that, indeed, “impossible is nothing,” that there’s nothing a lot of hard work can’t make happen. We want to believe that mere mortals can achieve incredible things, and finding out that we can’t disappoints us. It’s like reliving that horrible moment when we found at that there was no Santa Claus.
Turns out, impossible is a lot of things. We Princeton students, like professional athletes, were brought up to believe that we should not only reach for the stars, but that we should actually get there, do better than our very best. We long ago internalized the expectation of accomplishing the impossible, and unintentionally, we created a pressure cooker of a culture that encourages cheating.
Cheating: It’s something most everybody has at least contemplated. We reach and we reach and then we hit the ceiling, so to stave off the realization of our own inadequacy, we think of “creative” ways of pulling off the impossible task. At Princeton, where, as the facebook.com group says, “your best hasn’t been good enough since 1746,” that impossible task is being the best: maintaining a 4.0 GPA and playing two varsity sports, all while training to sing a cappella and solving world hunger. So we think, maybe if I just got a little “help” on that English paper, or maybe if I could look at the take-home and then study, or maybe just get my friend who has class a couple hours before me to tell me what’s on the exam ... It’s the intellectual equivalent of steroids.
Professional sports are combating this by more strictly enforcing drug testing. The Tour of California is taking blood samples of cyclists before the race that will remain on file for the rest of the season. Princeton takes the opposite tack. Professors hand out a test and then leave the room, relying on the Honor Code to keep students from cheating. But if steroid usage is any indication, moral codes aren’t enough of a deterrent to cheating. So why do some people choose not to cheat? Is it an internalized moral code? Integrity? Or is it just that they’ve settled? Is the only antidote to cheating coming to terms with your own limits? Settling for your best, even if that means you’re not the best? Maybe the only way to prevent cheating is to face our own inadequacy. Who knows? We might even discover that sometimes, our best is good enough.
Alexis Levinson is a sophomore from Los Angeles, Calif. She can be reached at arlevins@princeton.edu.
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