Original link to article from getpocket.com:
The motto “fake it till you make it” is taking a serious blow of late. As tales of con artists proliferate, the advice to feign greatness just doesn’t seem sustainable. Grifters in business, the arts, literature, real estate, and wellness are being exposed at alarming rates; they’re paying fines and facing prison time or already in custody, which really takes the shine off imitation awesome.
In June 2018, the New Yorker declared the summer the grifter season. ”The wind changed, the pressure dropped, and the scent of scamming was suddenly everywhere in the air,” writes Jia Tolentino. And it wasn’t a pleasant smell—not sweet like the smell of rain, but sour, like turned milk.
After all, the scammers are not only deluded themselves—they rely on the facile desires of victims. We’re prone to wishful thinking about magical individuals who can defy all the odds and somehow shoot to the top with no knowledge of the business they’re in, plus take their friends (read: their victims) with them.
These tales may be disheartening on some level. But cons reveal something sweet about people, too. We’re naive. We believe that people are who they say they are—because we have to in a functional society. Mostly, that’s okay. But we’d be better off if we also accepted that success doesn’t come fast and easy—not to us, and not to people who seem special and are actually just trying to cut all the corners.
Societally, we’re fascinated by lies and the lying liars who tell them, turning stories about their scams into a cottage industry unto itself. It seems we can’t get enough con content.
Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos is a prime example; explaining her massive billion-dollar blood testing swindle is its own business spawning numerous articles, books, and films. On Thursday, Aug. 2, Holmes has a hearing on criminal fraud charges in a San Jose federal courthouse—a bitter reality for the technologist, perhaps made more sweet by the knowledge that the scene will surely someday be fictionalized and played by a star. Jennifer Lawrence is already slated to take the role of Holmes in the upcoming film Bad Blood, and there will be more dramas to come as the saga unfolds.
In July, Vice recounted “the insane saga” of 47-year-old Anthony Gignac, born to a poor family in Bogota, Colombia, who has spent most of his adulthood pretending to be a Saudi prince in Florida. He’s repeatedly finding new prey among the rich and famous of Miami, the US’s “capital city of fraud.” Gignac has been in and out of custody on various fraud charges. In May, he pleaded guilty in Miami federal court to impersonating a foreign government official, identity theft and fraud. The charges arise from a scheme defrauding 26 investors of nearly $8 million.
Scams happen because we take people at face value—we don’t scrutinize every Elizabeth, Anna, or Nancy who swans by and tells us she’s amazing. Though we may fib and fudge, the vast majority of us aren’t audacious liars. Society relies on the idea that we can trust each other, more or less—and we can, more or less.
Trust is how we forge new relationships in life and work. It’s the secret element underlying every deal, including the greater social contract. Sure, a liability clause is useful in an agreement, but the goal is to never need the law’s protections. We make decisions premised on the assumption that people must be trusted, and that’s not bad, actually.
Trust is good for our health and makes us happier, more functional humans. It is “the more beneficial evolutionary path,” according to psychologist Konnikova. And cynicism isn’t a sign of smarts. Cynics foreclose genuine opportunities by doubting good things are possible.
Con artists rely on the optimism and good faith that fuels so many of our relationships. And we, in turn, are fascinated by their audacity, perhaps even jealous of their confidence until it gets them in trouble. But if we’re delighted when they fall, it’s not just schadenfreude, an ugly pleasure in their misery.
It’s also because this small justice reaffirms the less efficient and more difficult underlying system that determines most of our lives. We are stuck being ourselves—not geniuses or superstars, not nobility or heiresses, not glittery literati or miraculous healers—just regular people who go to school to learn professions, take small steps in our careers, and often struggle to get jobs, or book deals, or investors for our ideas.
Our culture loves to turn young technologists into gods, especially those who seem to get to skip ahead in life thanks to innate talent and vision. But while Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates show that it’s possible to achieve wild success after dropping out of school, it’s generally harder to hit upon a big idea—let alone execute it—without some grueling education and training, plus professional connections.
The whiz kid entrepreneur is a myth, as recent research shows. An analysis of the ages of entrepreneurs who started companies in the US from 2007 to 2014 revealed that the average age of a founder who went on to hire at least one employee was 42. The average age of founders of the most successful startups—those with growth in the top 1% of their industry—was 45. What that shows is that success relied on time, work, and experience, not wizardry.
I thought this really very relevant to the times we live in, when so many of us, the so-called "precariat", are making their scraps working for other much richer and more unscrupulous scammers and thieves in helping their unethical and/or right off criminal (even if lawfully so) enterprises (without contributing any/much actual value to anything). These people seem to have become role models to many - the short-lived fame of sociopath scammer Dan Larimer being one example, Justin Sun's Tron copycat project yet another, but the examples are countless and not limited to list one sector or sphere (not to mention same/similar attitudes and mindsets have also penetrated much of the academia as well).
The article also makes the VERY important point of crossing lines and barriers of societal norms and setting/triggering chain reactions with a few precedents (if Dan Larimer does it, then so could I, or - if somebody steals my jacket, then I have the right to steal the next persons', etc.) And of trust basically being the fundamental glue holding the fabric of society together. Now, as collapse ensues - as somebody whose name I can't recall right now - there are levels of collapse: financial (house of cards, already collapsed with 2008), economic (as in economic plan or in the sense of political economy of how to organize and allocate resources, production, etc.), political (where Russia's collapse was caught before regressing further down thanks to Putin and him being the right man in the right place with the obsessive fascination of Russia and Russian history, among other things and qualities of his), then comes the social/societal level/phase of how much we can trust each other in order to cooperate and collaborate as groups of people, communities and societies as a whole. And when that crumbles, what's left is the cultural level, which also has in many places been to a large extent destroyed and substituted with decades of systematic propaganda, revisionism, slow degradation of language itself, think-tank-manufactured ideologies (e.g., "neo-liberalism") and their media cronies and minions, penetrating education itself, etc.
This is why, no matter how much some have offered me as payment, I have refused to do what I have been asked to for such ethical reasons, principles and concerns. Not that I think this will make any difference, or that most people even see this attitude and thinking of mine as me being anything but a naive idiot, but if you have a closer look at the science behind what's ahead (cliodynamics research, or "history as science", combining qualitative and quantitative methods and long duree historical databases to feel out and capture the general trends and directions of where things are weighting towards) - one might reconsider perhaps for a moment the opportunity for making a quick easy buck on the back of somebody more gullible and less knowledgeable. Mutual trust also creates and reinforces reliability among people, that I can rely on you when I need to and vice versa - alas, I believe all of this has been by and large destroyed in my own home country of Bulgaria and I think it will cease to exist both as a country, state and nation within the next two decades at most.
We seem to be living at the/an end of times, the last cycle of the last phase of what Giambattista Vico described as the Universal Human History (which doesn't repeat itself, but does rhyme) - of what he called "the barbarism of reflection" and described precisely as times of self-interested profiteering and collapse of society and civilization, until necessity spins the wheel again and we start anew from another Age of the Gods (as he referred to it, borrowing from the Egyptians, and with the current age called the Age of Humans or People, defined by language evolved to the highest levels of abstract rationalism, which in turn constitutes ultimate individualism in place of more communal way of life or such ruled by wise leaders, be those shamans, prophets of the sort Mohammed was - who was extremely inventive in what he came up to, religion and Islam in some of its manifestations these days aside...)
And to conclude, I myself as an Orthodox Christian (without actually believing in a single absolute God, or taking much of it all literally and uncritically, of course) follow Solzhenitsyn's life principle of "live not by lies".
