A good conversation will take you to places you never intended to
visit. So will an inebriated bus driver, but a conversation is much
more likely to improve your life. The presence of a second mind adds
the indispensable element of surprise, the moment of unexpected
revelation that even the noblest soliloquies rarely produce.
Case in point: I was telling my brother Greg about the failure of
my weekly "syndicated" column, Some Cynical Guy, to
find an audience in the wide world of print. I had been cranking out
my solitary observations for two years, I told him, and my publisher
still declared that she could find no takers. My only outlet to date
had been a wireless service that sputtered into oblivion shortly
after the infamous dotcom bubble-burst of 2000. (Remember wireless?
It was supposed to be the next Big Thing in geekdom.) I never did
understand why anyone would want to read cynical columns, or any
other form of English prose, on a screen the size of a commemorative
stamp.
No takers, no pay; that was the bottom line. I told Greg that I
was writing my column for free, and that every word I wrote
automatically became the property of my publisher. So far I had
handed her seventy-eight original columns and about two dozen
abridged versions of my monthly tirades. At zero dollars a pop I
wasn’t earning enough to buy bubble wrap, let alone a quaint
summer house on Martha’s Vineyard. Now and again I’d threaten to
quit, and each time my publisher would cajole me into staying with
her for just a few more months. Her other columnists were hanging in
there, she said. Think of the potential for exposure, she said. She
was about to sign a new syndication deal, she said. There always
seemed to be new deals on the horizon, I told Greg. The problem was
that they seemed to stay there, perpetually out of reach.
My brother and I joked that I was probably being syndicated to a
hundred newspapers by now, but that my publisher was withholding the
good news and pocketing the proceeds. For all I knew, I might be
locally famous in Akron or Wichita. I laughed. Greg laughed.
"How can you ever know if she’s telling the truth?," he
asked. Then he said something that startled me: "Everyone is
either scamming or being scammed."
In other words, the human population is neatly divided into
tricksters and suckers, just as nature splits the animal kingdom
into carnivores and those that provide the meat. Every last one of
us is a scammer or a scammee. There’s no middle ground.
Greg’s thesis struck me as a simplification, but I thought it
stood up well under scrutiny. Scammers might be a predatory
minority, like muggers or werewolves, but all of us who weren’t
actively on the prowl could count ourselves as victims. Doubt it? We’ve
all been scammed by corporate America during the past year -- except
for those of us who were doing the scamming. (If you have more than
$100 million in your account after the latest stock market meltdown,
chances are you were one of the latter.)
I should note that Greg is even more of a cynic than his brother,
especially when he contemplates the shaggy underbelly of human
nature. Though I rail against cosmic injustices like death and
baldness, I tend to trust the individual humans who populate my
landscape. Sometimes I trust them to the point of imbecility. The
awful truth is that I’ve been scammed, conned, swindled, bilked
and duped numberless times; I’ve even been hoodwinked,
hornswoggled, bamboozled, snookered, fleeced and flim-flammed. I’m
ashamed to admit how often I’ve surrendered thousands of dollars
to total strangers who phoned me with can’t-miss stock
opportunities. (By now I’m probably at the top of everyone’s
sucker list, with my name in bold upper-case letters.) I’ve played
the clueless stooge to employers, telemarketers, lovers and
insurance agents. Just call me Curly.
"Fool me once, shame on you," goes the old bromide.
"Fool me twice, shame on me." Why don’t we poor chumps
ever learn from our mistakes? Why do we repeatedly listen to the guy
who tells us to look down at his finger, then thwacks the underside
of our nose? Because we don’t think like scammers; we think like
scammees. It’s that simple. We tend to take people at their word,
and that weakness makes us prime patsies for the world’s more
devious operators.
I have to confess that I can’t even fathom the convolutions of
the conniving mind. I’m constitutionally incapable of following
the plot of an old film like "The Sting," with its
elaborate machinations and con-artist vocabulary. I’m even more
helpless when it comes to explaining the insider mentality of
corporations like Enron, or of Wall Street investment houses or the
halls of Congress; you might as well ask me to assemble a working
cuckoo-clock out of matchsticks. Such thinking is as alien and
incomprehensible to me as Swahili. It might be that I’m just a
congenital dunce, but I suspect there are other operative factors
here.
The scammers know that most of their fellow-humans are terminally
gullible. We’re suckers for a good story, and the average scammer
is more prolific than Joyce Carol Oates in that department. We gasp
audibly when a well-dressed huckster tells us that his multi-level
marketing business has been netting him an average of $60,000 a
month. Why, just last week he opened his mailbox and found a check
for $28,631. More gasps. The huckster smiles and conveys easy
prosperity with every gesture. We’ve bought the story.
The scammers also know that most of us are looking for maximum
gains with a minimum outlay. To put a less charitable spin on it, we’re
greedy little fish. Combine gullibility and greed, and you’re
looking at the recipe for deep-fried dupe. We unworldly ones are so
easily impressed, so desperate to grab opportunities and so nakedly
honest in proclaiming our interest, that we swim right up to our
captors and grab the bait. No wonder the scammers continue to reel
us in like so many small-mouthed bass. Chicanery can’t succeed
without our complicity.
Even when we smell a potential scam, as in the numerous
penny-stock frauds I’ve fallen for during the past dozen years,
our naive hope perpetually outweighs our skepticism. We continue to
trust the storytellers. Worse yet, something in our nature won’t
permit us to slam the door in a scammer’s face. We don’t feel
entitled to be rude. Our elders have too successfully trained us to
trust and obey. We listen and we succumb, once again proving our
status as suckers.
Scammers make a living by exploiting trust. They lure us with
candy and promises; they compel us with the intimidation of
authority. A televangelist dangles the celestial carrot of
everlasting life (and the threat of the less appealing option) as he
collects donations from his destitute flock. Evil imams promise a
green and orgiastic paradise to youthful suicide bombers. (Word of
advice: Never fall for any deal that requires your death as a
prerequisite to benefits. That includes life insurance.) New Age
mountebanks entice their clients back to the therapy table for
weekly "energy alignments" at $100 a session. A respected
stock analyst issues a "buy" recommendation for a company
he trashes in private, and once again we take the bait.
("Suckers!," he gloats. "Now they’ll boost the
share price so I can bail my best clients out of this dog before it
collapses.") Corporate chieftains counsel their underlings to
go the extra mile for the team, then abscond with half a zillion
after they drive the company into its death-spiral. Assorted
hucksters know that fear and greed are the world’s biggest
motivators, and they play them to the hilt. And politicians will
always be politicians.
The scammers are in the business of selling us hope, and the hope
they sell us turns out to be a sham. They’ve lied to us; that’s
their crime. We’ve bought the lie; that’s our folly. We trusted
them, and we were hoodwinked.
I just finished reading Animal Farm, Orwell’s
now-classic tale of creeping totalitarianism. The story is a perfect
allegory: Having overthrown their human exploiters, the critters
(most of them free-spirited socialists like Orwell) are beginning to
enjoy the fruits of their labor -- until they fall under the malign
authority of a clever pig named Napoleon. This swinish leader (a
hard-line Communist, no doubt) exhorts them to work harder and make
more sacrifices; he and his top henchpig keep the less clever beasts
subsisting on hope and lies, year after grueling year,
surreptitiously changing the rules and rewriting the past until the
pigs transform themselves into an even more oppressive elite than
the humans. The poor worker-animals never suspect that they’re
being hornswoggled into subservience, and their unwavering faith is
heartbreaking.
It galls me that scammers like Orwell’s Napoleon -- or the
folks at Enron, for that matter -- are popularly branded as
"cynics." Our pundits and politicians love to heap infamy
upon our ancient tribe. In fact, the scammers are anything but
cynics. They’re shifty-eyed opportunists, relentlessly
enterprising activists -- soulless souls who bully and finagle their
way into power. The true cynics are their victims, the innocent ones
who give their trust and their time -- only to have the welcome mat
yanked out from under them. We never really glimpse the cynics in Animal
Farm, though we know who they will be; they’re the downtrodden
worker-beasts who, on the last page of the story, silently discover
that they’ve been hoodwinked. We never see them respond to the
outrage perpetrated by the ruling pigs; Orwell spares us their
inevitable descent into lifelong cynicism -- as perhaps he should.
Though I’ve earned my cynic’s credentials and preside over my
own cynical fiefdom on the Web, it still pains me to watch idealists
lose their ideals. Not that the best specimens ever lose them
entirely. No, the more humane cynics among us cling wistfully to the
old virtues in the face of cultural fraudulence and decay. We still
want to believe that goodness will prevail, though we’ve already
had our noses tweaked too often to believe in a positive outcome. We’re
unafraid to live in perpetual disappointment as we thumb our wounded
noses at the prevailing potentates. So what if our leaders let us
down, if the companies we invest in let us down, if even God himself
fails us in the end? What if there’s no heaven, as John Lennon
wanted us to believe? Is life itself the biggest scam of all?
No, I refuse to take defeatism to that unhappy extreme. (I
recommend defeatism in moderation, like alcohol and saturated fats.)
If we keep an eye open for the foxes and flim-flam artists, we can
snatch our fair share of comfort and happiness in this infinitely
diverting world. We can enjoy our appetites with unapologetic gusto.
We can cultivate our gardens and our talents. We can accumulate
heady experiences and recycle them as memories, though they’ll
ultimately vanish along with our mortal bodies and the people who
knew us. And the next time a scammer approaches us with another can’t-miss
scheme, we can decide if we want to nibble at the bait.
If you find yourself scammed once again, accept your misfortune
cheerfully and don’t reproach yourself for being gullible. Because
in my heart of hearts, I believe it’s better to believe than to
live in perpetual suspicion. Do I suspect that my publisher has been
withholding news of my syndication... that she’s been pocketing my
proceeds on the sly as my brother and I playfully speculated? Of
course not. I honestly believe that my column has been going
nowhere, and that belief reassures me that all is well.
