We all know, I am sure, that people act according to their self-interest, regardless of what they say. Anyone hep to economical ways of behaving can construct a model of how a person becomes a dissembler or even a liar - an intellectual chore which left Ayn Rand (or her protagonist Dagny Taggart) stymied.

It goes like this: a person decides that there is a competitive advantage in either dissembling or lying. He or she looks at the gains which they would have gotten through honesty and see little profit in that stream. Then, he or she spots the prevalence of “style” in the worthies of the world – a style that is earned through years of practice. He or she wants to join these worthies, despite him or her sizing up the chances of earning it the “hard way” to be minimal.

In terms of physical activity, this faking is possible, though easier to detect. Physical sport is the level is where the gains from faking, net of the risk of being caught out, are lowest. If there’s a wrestling competition, the sight of Flabbo in the ring with one of the champions will produce instant laughter. Similarly, a guy with less than twenty-inch arms would have their weightlifting achievements at the national championships looked at very skeptically.

In competitive sports, the possible gains from faking are in fact greater if the would-be champion concentrates on perfecting the “ten standard moves” and then adding one that seems to be unique. To take a somewhat unusual example, a would-be swordsman dives right into the slice exercises without taking the time to build up their arm-and-thorax strength first. They nail down those moves in the guidebook and then add a “killer move,” such as the one which is featured in the climax of the movie Rob Roy. Since Roy the amateur bests an English lord who seems to be the national champion at the sport, the short-cutting ‘bladesman’ would take this as a tip which can’t be beat.

There are killer moves in physical fighting, too: the jab at the solar plexus; the swipe at the glass jaw; the punch in the stomach; the pop to the nose; and other moves less known that make the shortcutter feel like Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark offing another champion of the blade with one bullet. I should add that a kick to the testicles is another one of these “killer moves.”

This kind of “rote competitiveness” can fool the public for a long time, especially if such a person does not climb into the arena against someone who has learned their own moves through years of practice and pain. I should note that the above unsportsmanlike attitude has its business equivalent in the monopolist.

Hence Adam Smith’s recommendation that free competition prevail in the marketplace. Like free competition in sports, subject to the specific rules of that specific game, a competitive marketplace exposes hidden shortcutting among people that present an image of being “on top of things.” The Ten Standard Business Models do tend to fold when facing an entrepreneur that is genuinely hard-bitten.

This primal fact has led the market to be criticized by the Left from time to time as “the rule of old men.” Since it’s almost impossible to accumulate the necessary knocks and bruises which are a preface to becoming an effective entrepreneur by the time you hit thirty unless you began as a serious entrepreneur as a child, like Bill Gates and his Traf-O-Data, there is some truth to this, as a criticism. Old heads don’t grow on young shoulders, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis; nor do the skills that the mature share emerge until the brain begins to slough off the thin, if relatively plentiful, neuronal connections characteristic to youth and replace them with thicker, if fewer, connections which enable the mature to think in terms of analogy much more effectively than the young. (This above biological fact suggests that the “creative Left” is making capitalism a synecdoche of any social organization.)

The normal process of maturation tends to make the normal person a specialist. For the person that has strayed far from the fold during youth, however, what gets hardened are lessons from their own personal adventures and learnings. This gives such a mature man or woman an air of being “forever young” sometimes, because what’s hardened in them is sufficiently exotic, relative to the norm among his or her peer group, that there’s always the strangeness associated with creative youth around him or her. This could be posited as an example of accumulating of intellectual capital: risks, loneliness and pain bested when young paying off in a recognizable cachet when old. Rand had this in spades, as did Ludwig von Mises.

But such a cachet is easily borrowed through repetition of buzz-words and mannerisms. This might very well be when the “fake it ‘til you make it” model offers the highest returns for others more lazy. Sadly, one of the most natural new entrants might be the pioneer’s own son or daughter – hence the continual ribbing of “Junior” in a market society.

Because people test each other for inflexibility, this pattern of clothes-borrowing should be limited to flashes in the pan. But often, it isn’t.

Here’s the appropriate competitive response for a rote thinker, holding him- or herself up as something more, that’s afraid of being found out: cunning.

There are lots of varieties of this, and they tend to involve the use of fear and suspicion covered up by false friendliness. But the kind that most frequently, and durably, springs up in a democratic republic is: acquiring a badge of authority through acting loutishly.

Loutishness is, essentially, false deference. What it enables the person skilled in it to do is to project an image of subordination while passing around, sincerely, that they’re the one that’s “really in charge” because they’re not subordinate in fact. Dissembling is a necessary attribute of the loutish person, and so is skill in flattery: effective flattering of the boss makes the outside-of-school claim by a subordinate that they’re the “real” top dog more credible, as people associate “easily flattered” with “weak.” Since the lout finds the returns greatest where the claims of “co-leader” are least demanding in terms of responsibility- taking, they tend to affiliate with ladies and gentlemen that are also somewhat effete.

But what happens if the lout succeeds at his or her goal and achieves prominence? What happens when the old mentor is either gone or is elbowed aside? This is the point where they should fall on their face.

Or, to be more realistic, this is when their skill in cunning is tested. They usually need a stamp of authority to attract thinkers or doers of the same caliber as their old mentor, to keep up their image as the “natural successor” of the earlier lady or gentleman. Once this hunting is done, they tend to claim credit for their juniors’ work, with the truthful riposte: “That’s what my old boss did to me.” [Note that the new boss is a type who is not creative.]

A badge also serves another purpose. Most people have some belief in the justice or efficacy of hierarchy; they’re loath to see an authority figure as a mere blame evader or non- entity – and tend to disbelieve their eyes when a figure in a high-class slot shows behavior characteristic to a lower-class mentality, such as dragging everyone down to their level. So, once a stamp of authority is acquired by the mediocre, he or she can live off that, very successfully, for a long time. This is why the mediocre lust after awards.

If you ever wondered why there is a tendency in a capitalistic republic towards inverted hierarchy, the above dissection of the success strategy of the mediocre explains it.

In terms simpler, if less comprehensive, than Rand’s.