Article

Character

Culture

Film & TV

9 September 2025

5 min read

Deceit is integral to success in Destination X

Travel and trickery make for a miserable journey

Cameron Wiltshire-Plant

Cameron is training to be a vicar in the city of Leicester.

A composite images show a map of Europe with Destination X contestants pictures above.

BBC.

Like me, you may have recently been watching Destination X, where 13 contestants compete to win £100,000 by guessing where the coach they are travelling on has stopped. Blocked from seeing out of the windows and given just a few clues to their locations, the contestants have to work out where they are. Similar to Traitors, it tries to give reality TV a respectability while also providing the gossipy drama that underpins the format.

Opportunities for extra clues are possible, with contestants competing against each other to receive them. Only some of the competitors are allowed to view the extra clues. This secret knowledge quickly causes thirteen pretty nice contestants to mistrust, lie, suspect, accuse, and keep secrets. After three new players are added in, there is a clear divide between the ‘OGs’ and the rest. It reminded me of Lord of the Flies, with alliances, rivalries, and judgements of player’s usefulness taking scarily little time to flourish.

The breaking of societal expectations to be truthful, reliable, and work for the common good is perhaps the appeal of these shows. The Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments still underpin the Western world, and lying, greed, and selfishness are all still denounced as wrong by mainstream ethics. There is an enormous amount of talk in Destination X, as there is in the Traitors, about ‘playing the game;’ legitimising breaking normal behaviour in order to win the competition. We watch on, enjoying the chance to wonder how we would manage in a world where lying, cheating, and manipulating is expected and encouraged by the rules of the game.

The thing is, breaking these rules seems to make everybody so miserable. In the first episode, Deborah won a big clue, chose only to share it with one teammate, and was so burdened by the guilty secret that she lost the first location test and left the game immediately. In another episode, some OGs win a challenge and choose to deliberately misinform the others, including the rest of their gang. When the disinformation is revealed, and directly causes the exit of another OG, the sense of guilt as others realise the deception is plain to the viewer. Time after time, players begrudge ‘the game’ for the lies they are telling- but it is their own decision to keep the secrets to themselves.

Perhaps the most striking thing is how quickly people lose track of the artifice of the game, and how integral to their reality their deceit has become. Towards the end of the series, as the money gets closer, the contestants harden further towards each other, and deception seems to come more easily. Perhaps this is why the guilt makes them miserable- with a little encouragement, their sense of right or wrong has disintegrated into instinct for survival.

The people that seem to be having the best time on Destination X are Daren and Claire, perhaps the two players who are happy to trust their colleagues the most, and lie to them the least. Both of them do better in the competition than other contestants who embrace a selfish and cynical approach.

Obviously these shows are games, and the contestants exit to their normal lives and resume being nice people. But they reveal a deeper truth that living cynically does not make a person happy. Although lying, cheating, and making the most of advantages might bring wealth, success, power, fame, and so on, living selfishly only makes a person miserable.

People who lie or cheat may seem to get ahead, but it only poisons their heart.

This reveals our design as humans to be communal, selfless beings. Describing the state of humanity before evil entered the world, the first verses of the book of Genesis describe a generous care between the first humans and their world. The very first books of the law in the Old Testament continually exhort God’s people to show love to their neighbour and compassion upon foreigners and the poor.

Jesus used to have this great phrase for those who would follow his teaching for a selfless life. He said that they would inherit ‘life to the full,’ or ‘life that is truly living.’ It was his conviction that simple acts like telling the truth, desiring others to prosper, and being generous were the way to a content and satisfied life.

But the kicker in Jesus’ teaching was not just that the person would receive a more satisfied life, but that each act would make the person more Godly. These acts stack together- to make a life of generosity rather than selfishness that nourishes our humanity- but also to form us towards being a better human. It creates a virtuous circle. A good act leads to a purer heart which leads to another good act. St Paul terms this ‘going from glory to glory’ in one of his letters encouraging a congregation to do just so. This circle deepens the contentment in the ‘life that is truly living’ that Jesus promises- living as God created humans to do reaps the relational, communal satisfaction that God intended the human experience to contain.

It works the other way too. People who lie or cheat may seem to get ahead, but it only poisons their heart. Becoming de-sensitised to their acts, further selfishness follows. Each act separates them further from the human experience they were designed to enjoy, and dissatisfaction follows. Often this is exacerbated by more attempts to cover the feeling with selfish ambition.

People who treat the real world like competitors treat Destination X, as a game to be won, with prizes that come at the cost of disinheriting others, may find wealth or power. But they will not find the contentment of life to the full that the way of Jesus offers and their humanity craves.

Whilst we sit at home enjoying players’ ability to break cultural taboos and suffer the emotional consequences, we might reflect that it is better to be content than victorious- and miserable.

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Article

Culture

Economics

Ethics

1 May 2025

6 min read

The rights and wrongs of making money with meme coins

When does investing become speculating, or even addictive gambling?

Laurence Fletcher

Laurence is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A montage shows Trump with a raised fist against other images of him and the phrase 'fight fight fight'.

$Trump coin marketing image.

gettrumpmemes.com,

Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs may have driven sharp swings in global financial markets, but his actions in markets a few months earlier were in some ways even more peculiar.

On the Friday before his inauguration as the 47th US President in January, the Republican surprised many with the launch of the $TRUMP memecoin, described by its website as “the only official Trump meme”. The cryptocurrency token, in which Trump’s family business owned a stake, initially soared in value to more than $14bn over that following weekend.

Then, on the Sunday, Trump’s wife Melania launched her own memecoin, $MELANIA, which reached a value of $8.5bn. Even the pastor who spoke at the president’s inauguration subsequently launched his own memecoin.

For those wondering what exactly a memecoin is, you are not alone. In short, they are a form of cryptocurrency - an asset class that itself has attracted plenty of questions about its substance and purpose - representing online viral moments. They have no fundamental value or business model and, according to the US securities regulator, “typically have limited or no use or functionality”.

Donald and Melania Trump’s coins subsequently plunged in price, but still have a value of around $2.5bn and $214mn respectively, according to website CoinMarketCap.

There are plenty of others in existence. PEPE, based on a comic frog, has a value of around $3.6bn; BONK, a cartoon dog, has a market cap of $1.5bn; and PNUT, a reference to a squirrel euthanised by authorities in New York and about which Trump was allegedly “fired up” (although doubt has since been cast on the president’s involvement in the matter), is still valued at around $174mn, despite having fallen sharply in price.

Dogecoin, seen as the world’s first memecoin and originally created as a joke, boasts a market value of around $25bn. (There are other memecoins which may not be suitable for these pages).

Some people’s willingness to buy an “asset” with no use or fundamental value may seem strange to more traditional investors. But it can be viewed as just one manifestation of the speculative investor behaviour evident since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and, indeed, at times throughout history.

The price of Bitcoin recently rose above $100,000, despite many investors still viewing it as having little or no value (in 2023 the UK’s Treasury select committee described cryptocurrencies as having “no intrinsic value, huge price volatility and no discernible social good”). In early 2021, shares in GameStop - a loss-making US video games retailer that some hedge funds were betting against - rocketed as much as 2,400 per cent, as retail investors piled in, many with the aim of inflicting pain on the hedge fund short sellers (in that respect at least, a highly successful strategy that became the subject of the film Dumb Money). The huge rise in AI and other tech stocks in recent years - until the recent tariff-driven volatility - has also been described as a bubble by some commentators.

Whether or not such episodes can be compared to infamous bouts of speculative mania in history depends on your point of view (and often can only be judged with the benefit of hindsight) - be it the 17th century Dutch tulip bulb mania, shares in the South Sea Company in the 18th century or the dotcom boom and bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

But it does give rise to the question of when investment should start to be described as speculation or even as gambling? And what are the rights and wrongs of any of those activities?

There can be negative effects, for instance if the actions of speculators force businesses in the real economy to change their plans or divert time and resources...

Gambling can be thought of as risking a stake on, for instance, the result of a game of chance or sport in the hope of a bigger payout. While often the result is purely down to chance, in some cases a strategy or an element of research (for instance of a horse or football team’s form) can be used. Investment, in contrast, tends to involve purported economic utility and assets believed to have some sort of underlying value, and holds the hope of future profit (although there are also plenty of bad investments or those that have gone to zero). While an investor must be prepared to lose their entire stake, in some cases such an event is relatively unlikely (for instance, if they buy a fund tracking the performance of a major stock exchange). Speculation is harder to define, but is generally seen as shorter term than investment, with more chance of a bigger gain or loss, and dependent on price fluctuations. Rightly or wrongly, the term has a more negative connotation than investment.

One writer who explored the ethics of these activities was Oswald von Nell-Breuning, a Jesuit theologian and economist who served as an adviser to the Pope and who was banned from publishing under the Nazis.

While he found that “one general definition cannot capture all the nuances” of speculation, he identified two different types of speculative activity - one that was purely trying to make a profit from financial market trading, and one based on trying to create a viable business. (See this article in the Catholic Social Science Review for a fuller explanation of Nell-Breuning’s views on speculation).

As the CSSR article shows, Nell-Breuning found that there can be positive effects from speculation - one might think of better liquidity and price discovery in a market, while, in commodity futures markets, speculators allow producers to hedge risk.

But he also argued that there can be negative effects, for instance if the actions of speculators force businesses in the real economy to change their plans or divert time and resources away from production.

And whereas gambling typically takes place within a circle of players who have chosen to take part, speculation, he wrote, can affect a greater portion of society - for instance, if it affects the price of shares or bonds they hold.

The Bible - on which Nell-Breuning’s faith and analysis was based - does not take a prescriptive approach to such activities. But it does provide some interesting guidance.

An entrepreneurial approach to business and investment is applauded, for instance when the writer of the book of Proverbs (traditionally believed to be King Solomon) praises the virtues of “an excellent wife”. These include investing in a field and using her earnings from business to plant a vineyard, and feeding her family from her gains.

Jesus tells a story of a master who, before going on a journey, gives his property to his servants, each according to their ability. To one he gives five “talents” (a large unit of money), to a second two and to a third servant he gives one.

The first servant trades with his talents and makes five more talents - a 100 per cent profit - and is applauded by the master on his return. The second servant also trades and similarly makes two more talents and is again applauded.

But the third servant, being afraid and believing the master to be “a hard man”, hides the money in a hole in the ground. He is condemned as “wicked and slothful”, and told that he should at least have put the money in the bank.

While Jesus’s story may primarily be about how we view God’s nature, how we use our God-given abilities and whether or not we can take risks in faith for Him, it is also hard not to see investment and indeed wise speculation as being virtuous activities here. Putting the money into a bank account is, in this story anyway, more of a fallback option.

But the Bible also warns us against putting money above all else in our lives. The love of money is, famously, a root of all sorts of evil, while we are also told to be content with what we have, and that “wealth gained hastily will dwindle”.

Nell-Breuning similarly warns that a “get-rich-quick” mindset, when this is placed above all else, can be harmful, and advises caution in situations where the lure of big profits can lead the speculator into market manipulation or fraud.

After all, both gambling and crypto trading have the potential to become dangerous and damaging addictions needing treatment.

Ultimately, Nell-Breuning struggled to come to a simple conclusion on the question of whether speculation, in and of itself, is morally wrong. It is, he wrote, a judgment call for those involved.

When making such decisions ourselves, his - and the Bible’s - warnings may be worth bearing in mind.