Aphorisms, like any good cliché, hold a grain of truth, which is why they can’t be easily dismissed.
“You can’t cheat an honest man.”
That one has haunted us for ages and it’s an instance of something that points in the right direction but fails to be sufficiently inclusive. Of course honest people can be cheated, it happens all the time. Because honesty isn’t enough if fear undermines it. One doesn’t have to be dishonest to be vulnerable to fraud, which was the point of the original saying—that only people “looking for a deal” are liable to be cheated, because their blindness to false promises that offer them unwarranted advantage makes them so.…