“Everybody takes the shortcuts, everybody plays tricks, everybody has in himself an element of duplicity, deception.” – Alan Watts

The trickster character is everywhere. It is in others and in yourself. To be duplicitous is to be human. It is best to learn from deception, than to be a victim of it.

Bertrand Russell reminds us that there is no better teacher of success than the wicked. Let us then learn from the wicked, so that we may use their insights for better ends, and so that we may avoid being victims to their schemes.

 ‘Success’ means the achievement of your purpose, whatever it may be. If there is a science of success, it can be studied just as well in the successes of the wicked as in those of the good—indeed better, since the examples of successful sinners are more numerous than those of successful saints. But the science, once established, will be just as useful to the saint as to the sinner

Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy