Eliot Spitzer And My "Alternate Win Condition" Theory

I was thinking about the Spitzer incident, and what drives people to do what they do (right after I was admiring how hot the escort was). Before I get into all of that, I first want to say that I think that his personal life has nothing to do with his fitness for office, but that I feel bad for his family. As a public figure, he needed to understand beforehand that the chances of this coming back to burn him and his family were high, and it was a bad move. Also, as a crusader against this sort of thing, it puts him into a situation where he immediately looks like a huge hypocrite. Anyway, that has already all been said by others.

My own theory about this has some parallels with gaming. In life, people have all kinds of goals and interests. In the case of many people, varied sexual experiences with attractive members of the opposite sex are of course high on the list of goals. (Let's leave the marriage part out for this explanation. It's important to the story, but irrelevant for my theory.) There are many ways to accomplish that goal, and combinations within those methods. You can be very mentally adept and charming. That scores lots of points. You can be famous. This opens a lot of options, because people are naturally attracted to fame. You can be physically attractive. This one is a no-brainer. Pure physical attraction can make people overlook a lot of flaws. Some of these things feed into each other, and one can lead to having another, but sometimes you will fall short, no matter what. So what if you don't have the right combination of those things to attract the kind of woman that you want to have sex with? You need an "alternate win condition"! For Spitzer, it was money. For the price that these escorts were charging, you need to have a LOT of it, and most of these women, certainly his most famous one, were beautiful and could more or less name their price. This is the one way that he did not have to go through the normal "courtship" sort of system to get a girl of the quality that he wanted.

For an analogy, imagine a first-person shooter video game where it's all about killing these monsters to win the game. There are lots of them, and they're really tough to beat. If you're good at the game, you kill the monsters, you win, and you get something really great in the end. For some reason though, in this game, if you can just avoid being killed by the monsters for many hours, you can also win! It's considered sort of a "cheap" victory by the purists of the game, but if the goal is to win, and if to you the fun is simply to get the reward at the end, then that is when you go for the alternate win condition. That is what Spitzer did. Was it worth the embarrassment? Only he knows.