Even when cheaters don't get caught outright, seemingly get what they think they want, and these competitors beat others and receive accolades for their competition, consequences to the self still happen. They still exist. They still matter. Alienation happens.
When we search for the self through our practice as a becoming self, what we intend affects us as well as what we do. Intentionality counts. When we choose to cheat because we intend to gain something we want but don't wish to experience and gain to actual achievement, we have done something powerful to that becoming self. It becomes a form of self-alienation. We have made ourselves into a conformist identity. We become a means to an end, to a supposedly higher purpose, that might do us some perceived good in the dominator, consumerist, having economy. But that thwarts us as a self.[61]
When we cheat, we know that we cheat. The dominator economy offers any one or another rationale for making this choice, "everyone does it" for one, but such rationalizations don't change the intention or the consequence. When we intend to cheat, we intend to deceive others about who we are in ourselves. In that action, we deny ourselves and our value to ourselves. Whatever we gain externally from such a choice and action, we give away an internal consistency toward our self. We throw out an essential sense of internal trust. When we will cheat in one context, we will cheat in another context. One day we cheat on an exam to gain what we want. The next day, we cheat at work to get what we want. The next day, we cheat a loved one to get what we want. Whatever doubts we may feel about such actions, the fabric of deception that we weave engulfs us until the meaning perspective that dominates our choices holds that the most expedient action, no matter how degrading or degraded, offers the only real value for our identity and ego driven lives.
Our working definition of the becoming self implies autonomy and individuation, perceiving and conceiving the world in the way best our becoming self can muster. We act on our own actual and clear perception of the world based on standards of our own attained through critically observation and reflection. The dominator model and economy motivate the decision to cheat, thereby denying us access to the independence needed for the self for which we search. To paraphrase Matthew 16:26: "For what shall it profit us, if we shall gain the whole world, and lose our own self?" That's an old and powerful question that serves as a directive against alienation from the becoming self for some other material and consumerist purpose.
The becoming self, for which we search, exists in relationship with ourselves and in relationship with others.[62] It will not come to us in alienation from such community whatever the wrinkles we find in that community. We become fully expressed as individuals in community with others. When we search for the self, we search for the relationships in that community and how they work with our becoming self. Competition removes us from community. It removes us from other people and makes of these people Other, our competition, the enemy who must be beaten at all costs.[63] The central cost in that struggle comes with a diminution or loss of our becoming self. We turn ourselves into what Martin Buber calls an It in the I/It relationship we establish with others and the world.
We can and do strive for excellence as part of our natural desire to become as full an expression of ourselves as possible. That's all to the good. When that turns into competition, we often, if not always, lose our sense of personal achievement and turn to the more degraded desire to beat someone else. In that way, we make ourselves and the other competitor, our immediate enemy, a means to another end, a higher purpose: victory, winning at all costs. These victories can come at very high costs including cheating discussed before. The true cost comes in treating ourselves and others as means to an end. When we see others as a means, we see them as Other, and when we see them as Other, it separates us from them and thus from community. When we separate ourselves from community in that way, we also separate ourselves from the search for self, the becoming self which flourishes best in community if not in conformity. When we compete on a team, we might find a semblance of limited and exclusive community there, but that community still exists for the higher purpose of winning at all costs, and the teammate in community remains judged by that person's relationship to winning. If that person fails in that regard, the competitive community throws them out.[64]
When relationship exists solely through our being judged through our successful conformist attitudes and action, unconditional positive regard finds no place in that community. Everything is conditional. This feels like a very unhappy, if terribly familiar, form of community for the becoming self which wishes to offer and receive unconditional positive regard. The meaning perspective of competition, of winning at all costs, may become the defining motivation in other, seemingly non-competitive areas of our lives, which makes our intention in these others areas confused. Friends compete with friends, lovers with lovers, and trust in shared effort disappears and with it another sense of community.[65] Loss of community links with a loss of connectedness to the becoming self. As a result, we further substantiate, feed, and feel we need a strong, clear, conformist identity and an ego to act for it and defend it from other identities and egos. We construct this kind of meaning perspective in our alienation from the self through needing to beat others in whatever game we create and make out of life.