On Outsmarting Other Men

There is another side to this subject of someone to trust, someone to be safe with, and that is this: The person who is foolish enough to suppose that he can outsmart other men, that he can outsmart a law, or a lock, or an audit, or a safety system is simply outsmarting himself.

It is true that a person might conceal something for a while. The swindler, the deceiver, the plotter always has the first advantage because he knows beforehand what he is plotting. A person, for example, who is planning embezzlement, has some advantage in timing, because no one else knows what he has done until after he has done it.

But even though the defrauder, or thief, has a head start, no one, in any act of life, can, for very long, count on concealment. And for a man to suppose that he can outsmart other men would seem to require a peculiar kind of conceit (or stupidity), for what he says, in substance, is this: that he has thought of something that others haven’t thought of, or couldn’t think of, and he is therefore going to get away with something. But anyone who is contemplating some act outside the law, some fraud, some deception, some evil or unworthy act had just as well rule out of his calculations the possibility of secrecy or concealment, because the same kind of mind that can outsmart other men can also catch the kind of mind that can outsmart other men. Thus the cycle completes itself as the outsmarter is outsmarted.

Emerson had some striking things to say on this subject. He used this very phrase: “There is no such thing as concealment. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole. You cannot…wipe out the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clue. Always some damning circumstance transpires.”

As young people enter upon their life’s careers and face their own future, we would burn this into their hearts as one of the greatest lessons of life: play it straight and clean, with honor and honesty, with no deception, no concealment, no taking of anything that isn’t yours, no compromising of any principle. Otherwise there is always the long arm of the law and something longer than the law something that faces us with the fact of whether or not we are fit to live with ourselves, whether or not we can sleep, whether or not we can feel safe. This kind of peace, this kind of confidence, comes only as it is earned for a person cannot count on concealment.