The Inner Monologue

An Op-Ed on How Entire Careers Can Be Built on an Unethical Simplicity

There is a kind of genius in evil simplicity. Few strategies are as elegantly ruthless as this one: take credit for others’ success and blame others for your failure. It requires no vision, no invention, and no particular skill — except audacity. Yet history, business, and politics are littered with examples of people who rose astonishingly high on precisely this moral sleight-of-hand.

The Anatomy of the Parasite

Every organization, from a family business to a multinational conglomerate, runs on asymmetries — asymmetries of information, perception, and power. The unethical opportunist thrives in those gaps.

When something goes right, they rush to the microphone. When something goes wrong, they melt into the crowd. They cultivate a plausible story: that they were “driving the effort,” “mentoring the team,” or “providing strategic direction.” In other words, they position themselves so that any outcome reinforces their narrative.

Success? Proof of leadership.

Failure? Proof that they were right but ignored.

It is the political equivalent of a magician’s misdirection — keep everyone watching your gestures while the trick happens elsewhere.

Why It Works — For a While

We reward visibility, not veracity. The modern workplace prizes presentation over provenance, perception over precision. Quarterly metrics, performance dashboards, and executive briefings all depend on stories that fit on a slide. The unethical strategist learns this early: truth is complicated, but a confident lie is concise.

Many hierarchies also incentivize short-term results. Promotions are based on the appearance of momentum, not the sustainability of outcomes. A person who can narrate a string of “wins” — however dubiously obtained — fits the performance model perfectly.

And so the parasite thrives where verification is expensive and attention is scarce: in large bureaucracies, in sales organizations, in politics, and increasingly, in the influencer economy. In those ecosystems, charisma substitutes for competence and attribution becomes a commodity.

The Psychology Behind It

At its core, this strategy exploits three human weaknesses:

1. Our craving for heroes. Teams love to rally behind a single visible champion, even when the work was communal.
2. Our aversion to conflict. Calling out a manipulator risks backlash, so most people simply withdraw.
3. Our faith in success. We assume that anyone repeatedly “winning” must be competent, because we cannot easily verify the mechanics of each victory.

The unethical actor manipulates these instincts with instinctive precision. They understand that people are more likely to remember who said something than who did it. They rely on time and turnover to erase the evidence.

The Slow Corrosion

But a career built this way is a house of mirrors. Over time, the reflection cracks.

The first sign is talent flight. Those whose efforts are stolen stop trying — or they leave. The team becomes populated with sycophants and survivors rather than innovators. Productivity drops, though metrics may remain artificially inflated for a while.

Next comes reputational entropy. People begin to whisper. Colleagues quietly avoid collaboration. Invitations stop coming. The manipulator remains in meetings but loses trust in the informal networks where real power lives.

Finally, exposure or obsolescence. When a true crisis arrives — something that requires competence rather than confidence — the fraud is revealed. Or, more often, they are quietly sidelined, reassigned to “special projects,” or left behind in the next reorganization. They rarely see the fall coming, because they have spent years insulating themselves from reality.

The Broader Consequences

This strategy doesn’t just harm individuals; it poisons institutions. It teaches everyone watching that virtue is for the naïve and that deception is rewarded. Morale collapses. Innovation dies in the shadow of performative leadership. Organizations infected with this pattern begin to replicate it — like a virus that rewrites the moral DNA of the host.

In the public sector, it leads to cynicism and policy failure. In business, it produces short-term profit and long-term decay. In academia, it erodes the pursuit of truth. And in politics, it breeds demagogues who campaign on the accomplishments of others while scapegoating entire populations for their own failures.

Why It Persists

Because it works just long enough to seem worth trying.
Because our systems are built to reward narrative coherence more than moral coherence.
Because those who rise by such means often promote others like themselves — people fluent in flattery, blame, and plausible deniability.

It is a self-sustaining ecology of mediocrity masquerading as excellence.

The Counterstrategy: Radical Attribution

The only antidote is transparency — not the performative kind, but structural transparency.

Document contribution histories.

Publicly credit teams and individuals by name.

Tie rewards to measurable input, not simply visible outcomes.

And perhaps most importantly, celebrate humility — the rarest virtue in modern institutions.

When leaders model vulnerability — “that success was my team’s,” “that mistake was mine” — they invert the power dynamic. They make integrity fashionable again.

The Personal Choice

Every career contains moments when this temptation appears. You present a project and could easily exaggerate your role. You could quietly let someone else take the fall for a failure. Most people tell themselves it’s just once — just this time. But each small moral compromise is a brick in a hollow tower.

You may climb it, but it cannot bear your weight forever.

The Final Irony

Those who build careers on taking credit and assigning blame are ultimately forgotten. Their names appear in memos and footnotes, but not in the memories of those who mattered. The people whose work they stole move on to build something lasting. The manipulator, having spent a life rearranging reflections, discovers at the end that there was nothing real in the mirror.

In a world obsessed with winning, integrity remains the one victory that cannot be stolen.