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I'm not superstitious, but I'm a little stitious. I've become more and more of a believer in some kind of fate/serendipitous force that ought to be respected, if I can't place it rationally that doesn't mean it isn't functionally useful to respect it in concept.
But, leaving aside the infidelity scandals, consider another much larger cheating scandal in the COVID era: academic cheating. West Point scandal, NPR, Academic study.
Why did students become more dishonest during Covid? Because a lot more opportunities appeared in a social world denuded of human contact and ordinary regulation. It's tough to feel guilty for "cheating" others when those others are just images on your screen. And while schools have done their best, it is near impossible to prevent cheating in a take home test. To be honest, I blame professors using old closed-book test methods for classes learned and tested entirely at distance for cheating scandals: you just can't ask people to be closed book in their own homes, it's stupid. Trust, but verify; and if you can't verify, don't trust at all. All of the mechanisms that lead people to choose not to cheat, the mechanisms that prevent them from cheating, the mechanisms that would catch them after they cheat, and the will to punish cheaters after they cheat have been weakened or eliminated. I won't feel bad for getting a "fake A" if nobody "real" knows I got an A anyway, it's just a resume line. They can't stop me, they can't catch me. And when they do catch me, odds are the Deans (see earlier argument about colleges getting soft) who would normally come down on me like a ton of bricks will make excuses for me because they don't want the scandal of failing a bunch of freshmen during these "traumatic times."
So if I were trying to draw a broad societal "Why" for why we're seeing so many minor sports/games face cheating scandals right now, it would be looking for common elements there. Maybe the sense of honor in these games degraded as a result of less time spent in person, together, with other players. Maybe procedures put in place to align with dumbass lockdown rules during Covid made it easier to cheat. Maybe competition stakes changed in such a way to attract cheating in greater volume, with cash opportunities as influencers making cheating in say Chess more lucrative than it once was. Especially at lower, qualifying levels, where Covid restrictions were probably stricter making oversight laxer; and where once being a low ranked (but ranked!) chess player meant nothing, now you can get a social media following and monetize it.
Our institution did this -- when everyone closed up shop in March 2020 we flat-out refused to administer any final exams for the spring since we knew we'd be doing them online and we knew we wouldn't be able to trust the data. Granted, I work for a military academy and we have some flexibility there that most institutions probably don't.
I don't think schools did their best, though. My view on the ground with lots of friends across lots of institutions is that teachers / professors were struggling to carry out their class in a difficult environment with little to no support from administration. If you have to pivot online, there are ways to take some advantage of that media, and lots of ways to do it catastrophically poorly. I haven't see any evidence that administration made any effort to help their professors transition smoothly and teach a good class as opposed to just throwing them to the wolves.
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I am the kind of guy who would not cheat in a class or on a test, but I can definitely imagine all my ethics getting cooked away to nothingness being in an environment of "this is an exceptional situation, just this once, actually they expect you to do it" that were present during covid.
The situation combined with paying identical tuition for 1/10 the experience would lead to pretty lax morals on my part, for sure.
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I think the biggest thing to me would be not wanting to be a chump. I have a pretty strong aversion to cheating, but if my class were grading on a curve, and I knew most of the others were cheating, and the administration knew and weren't doing anything, I would feel the honest people shouldn't be punished.
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