There is an incentive to “game the system” wherever there is a system that acts as a gatekeeper, evaluating claimants for some reward and screening out those that fail to make the grade. Wherever there is privilege, there is cheating; wherever there is identity, there is performativity.

Consider again the case of the would-be “pick-up artist” (PUA). The assumptions governing his behaviour are as follows. Females act as gatekeepers for sex; they are comparatively choosy about their sexual partners, and select on the basis of a largely unconscious evaluation of “biological fitness”. This “fitness” is in turn signalled by status markers, which indicate a positional value: “alpha” and “beta” refer to a male’s current standing in the continual struggle for dominance among his peers. “Game” is a name for the praxis of male status-projection, which has to contend with opposition in two dimensions: a) “horizontally” from other males, who may try to out-game you (but who can also be useful foils for establishing your own superiority), and b) “vertically” from females, who will attempt to validate the status signals they are receiving, and will employ various countermeasures to detect and discourage bogus signalling.

There are two further assumptions involved. The first is that some males are just “natural” alphas: simply being who they are is “game” enough. The second is that false signalling provides a means for “natural” betas to obtain the rewards of alpha status. But, as in the old showbiz joke about sincerity (“…if you can fake that, you’ve got it made”), the ultimate goal of the PUA is to acquire “inner game”, a self-confidence initially acquired through enjoying the rewards of fakery that will alchemically transform his natural beta-ness into natural (or natural-enough-seeming) alpha-ness. The “natural” turns out to be interchangeable with the naturalised, with acquired interiority.

The hallmark of “inner game” is its immunity to female countermeasures intended to detect fakery: it is incorrigible and unimpeachable; perfectly smooth, offering no hooks for a hermeneutic of suspicion to latch on to. Every trace of the egregious beta-self has been vanquished and erased. This is a kind of sainthood, albeit the kind that happily coincides with lots of schtupping. Few indeed are they that rise to such a pitch of accomplishment.

The PUA’s is an admirably frank project of self-advancement, which provides a particularly lucid template or schema for “personal performativity” under late capitalism. In our society, an uneven distribution of rewards is justified by reference to the natural deservingness of the winners who enjoy the spoils: they, the golden few, are the truly talented, enterprising and industrious. It’s understood that the system works in such a way as to evaluate personal merit (in terms of market value) and reward it appropriately. At the same time, the promise made to the less fortunate many is that by working to achieve the appearance of merit, it is possible to appropriate and interiorise it.

As with the PUA, the seeker after social betterment must contend both with competition from his peers, whom he must out-perform in order to maintain his positional distinction, and with social barriers - spam filters - established to uphold the proper separation between the deserving and the undeserving. In order to pass as deserving he must resort to systematic guile, a cunning matched to the cunning of the system to which it is opposed. It will always be trying to suss him out: he mustn’t slip, or they’ll have him. It’s in this sense that our intuition is correct that the dire warnings on posters threatening the perpetrators of “benefit fraud” with imminent discovery are addressed to all of us, as subjects-supposed-to-fake-it. The biggest fraud of all is the one who has learned how to stop feeling guilty about it.