Your Integrity Is Worthless Here

How to Steal Your Grandma’s Pension Because Integrity Doesn’t Pay Rent

Clown Wisdom

A woman on TikTok stares dead into the camera and spits it out like scripture: “Only losers follow the rules. Winners exploit. Winners cheat with integrity. That’s how you get ahead.”

It’s dressed up like wisdom, but it reeks of hustle porn. Algorithm chum and the kind of cheap provocation that gets clipped, stitched / fed back into your For You page until you start mistaking cynicism for clarity. She even drags out the Spanx origin myth, as if slipping your product onto Nordstrom racks without a contract is brilliance instead of corporate shoplifting with a blowout.

I don’t buy it. Not because it doesn’t work > exploitation works. It always works, but because it’s rot masquerading as ambition. The same western mantra: drain the system before it drains you. Cheat, but do it with a photogenic grin and call it “entrepreneurship.” If you don’t, you’re the schmuck. The mark. The loser.

And yet, here’s the rub; I can’t just roll my eyes and walk away. Because when she says it, part of me flinches. It makes me wonder what I’ve skimmed, what I’ve short-cutted, what scraps of someone else’s time, labor, or faith I’ve pocketed without calling it by its real name.

That’s the thing no TikTok guru will admit: exploitation isn’t a life hack. It’s the bloodstream of the culture. And like it or not, it runs through us too.

Fraud with Good PR: The Cult of Exploitation

*Disclaimer: I love Training Day.

In Training Day, Denzel Washington plays Alonzo; a decorated narcotics cop who bends the badge into his personal racket. Ethan Hawke plays Jake, the rookie assigned to him. At first, Jake thinks he’s being mentored, shown the ropes of street policing, but what’s really happening is exploitation in real time. Alonzo manipulates him, uses him as cover, makes him complicit in crimes Jake doesn’t fully understand until it’s almost too late. Alonzo’s mantra says it all: “I’m surgical with this bitch, Jake.”

That’s capitalism. Capitalism = Alonzo. Smooth, charming, brutal. It’ll show you the ropes while it empties your pockets. And most of us? We’re Jake > eager, wide eyed, thinking we’re learning how to play the game when really we’re the ones being played. Some of us wise up and resist. Most just turn into smaller Alonzos.

That’s the hierarchy of exploitation.

At the ground floor, it looks almost harmless: Spanx slipping onto Nordstrom racks without permission. A trespass recast as hustle. Cute enough for a morning news circuit.

Climb a step, and you get Daquan > one of the biggest meme pages on Instagram. Millions of followers, a digital voice that felt like Black Twitter distilled: jokes, slang, cultural references, all speaking in the cadence of a community. For years people assumed it was run by the very culture it was profiting from. Then the curtain got yanked.

Turns out Daquan wasn’t Black owned at all, but It was run by IMGN Media: a company founded by two Israeli entrepreneurs, later acquired by WarnerMedia for tens of millions. A brand built off Black culture, stripped of its authors, converted into ad revenue for outsiders.

That wasn’t curation, extraction and exploitation with a blue checkmark.

Go higher and you hit the college scandal. Rich parents bribing their kids into USC through side doors, faking test scores, photoshopping their kids into stock sports images to make them look like athletes. Lori Loughlin and her husband cut $500,000 checks to slip their daughters past the gatekeepers. Not grit nor innovation, just privilege laundering itself. Exploitation framed as “love.”

At the summit: Bernie Madoff. The architect of the largest Ponzi scheme in history. For decades he posed as a financial genius, taking in billions in investments from pension funds, charities, and retirees > all while secretly shuffling new money to pay off old promises. By the time it collapsed, entire life savings were gone. People who thought they’d worked forty years for stability ended up with nothing.

Madoff was surgical with it, just like Alonzo bragged. He didn’t just exploit trust, he obliterated it. Whole futures erased. That’s the final form of the TikTok gospel: drain everyone beneath you, call it brilliance, and smile while the cameras roll.

And hanging over it all: gentrification. Not one grifter, but an entire machine. Cities flipped into backdrops, families displaced in the name of “revitalization.” Exploitation scaled to geography. Whole cultures priced out of their own blocks, replaced by Edison bulbs and pour-over coffee.

The trick is the same across levels: theft, recast as ambition. Ambition, recast as destiny. Capitalism is Alonzo with a badge. And most of us never get to Jake’s realization moment > that flash where the mask drops, and you see the con for what it is. We keep riding shotgun, convinced we’re learning the rules, when in reality, we’re just training to become the next Alonzo.

Pick Your Predator You F*cking Loser

Are you a winner or a loser? Don’t bother answering > society already circled the bubble.

Here’s a breakdown

Winners:

• Shameless + Exploit loopholes + brag about it.

• Call theft “innovation.” Call manipulation “strategy.”

• Show up on social feeds as wolves in Rolexes. Alonzo with a badge. Jordan Belfort in a yacht. Patrick Bateman rehearsing his morning routine. The diva founder melting down on stage.

• TikTok calls them hustlers. Instagram calls them disruptors. The algorithm calls them “content.”

Losers:

• Believe in rules & still think integrity counts.

• Wait their turn. Pay their bills. Keep promises.

• Invisible scaffolding — the ones who hold everything together so winners can skim the cream.

• Social media has no archetype for them except “average.” They don’t trend. They don’t glow. Integrity isn’t clickable.

And here’s the part I hate admitting: I’ve thought I was a loser and not because I lacked skill, but because I wasn’t exploiting like the rest. I was honest, showed my intentions head on, did the job the right way, even when it slowed me down. And in the culture we’ve built, that reads as weakness because integrity is just another word for “unsexy.”

Losers get humiliated. That’s the real punishment. Not being broke > being made to feel small. Watching wolves smile while they gut you, and still having to clap.

Additionally, power is situational and seasonal. You can be a wolf at 3 p.m. negotiating a vendor down to the bone and a sheep at 8 p.m. begging a client to finally pay the invoice. Winner on the dashboard and loser in court. Loser on paper, winner in ten years because you didn’t torch your name for a quick quarter. The same move reads as “innovation” or “exploitation” depending on who writes the press release, whose neighborhood gets displaced, whose body carries the cost. Networks flip the script, too: a mediocre wolf with connections outruns a brilliant sheep without them. And then there’s the quiet third rail ( rule makers ) who don’t “win” or “lose” so much as set the camera angle so winning looks inevitable. Most of us oscillate: part extraction, part restraint, part self exploitation when we trade sleep for one more deliverable.

The scoreboard isn’t universal; it’s local and rigged and ( sadly ) constantly changing what it counts.

Thanks for the Trauma

None of us are blank slates. Wolves and sheep aren’t natural states, on the contrary they’re scripts handed down.

I was raised by old school parents. Yes ma’am, no ma’am. You do right by people / you pay what you owe. I was clumsy, broke a lot of things as a kid, and the instinct was always to lie about it. The lie was never worth it. The punishment landed heavier than the broken glass and it seared something in me: the truth might sting, but dishonesty corrodes.

That made me careful. It also made me fragile. I didn’t have many friends. I got bullied and rarely in drama. When you’re on the outside of the spectacle, you don’t get many chances to rehearse dishonesty. But to be honest I wanted to … so bad. I wanted to be messy, to stir trouble, to feel that adrenaline. I wanted to be a wolf, if only to know what it felt like to bite back.

Instead I learned caution. Integrity became my armor, even when it slowed me down. And here’s the irony > the same culture that praises wolves humiliates people like that. Integrity is coded as weakness because losers are the ones who play it straight.

Maybe that’s what makes the wolf/sheep binary stick: nobody wants to be humiliated. The fear of humiliation is what pushes people to exploit first. Better to wound than to be laughed at. Better to betray than to be called naïve and capitalism knows this. ( That’s a totally deeper topic for another time). It breeds Alonzos out of that fear, turns Jakes into apprentices of exploitation.

So the question that lingers isn’t just “which side are you on?” It’s: who raised you to stomach what? Who taught you to fear humiliation more than guilt, or guilt more than humiliation? What do you carry when the lights go out — shame for being a loser, or shame for being a wolf?

I don’t know if there’s a clean answer. Maybe integrity is just a loser’s currency. Slow. Unsexy. Invisible. But maybe that’s also the point: it’s the one thing left you don’t have to launder.