When I moved to Los Angeles in 1994 and pursued work in acting, I was taken for about $10,000 by various cons that appealed to my vanity. At the time I was handing over my money (and I was living out of my car so I could spend every spare dollar to follow my dreams), part of me knew this was a scam, but I paid out anyway to live out my fantasies.
The more strongly I want something, the more vulnerable I am to scams. On the other hand, the better I am able to step away from my desires and try to see things from a third party perspective, the more clearly I see reality.
Ties bind and blind, notes Jonathan Haidt.
A good life is with your in-group, but to see clearly, you have to step outside of your group and consider things briefly from the ten-thousand foot level. For example, when it comes to politics, I accept that different groups have different interests, and so I don’t primarily see the Muslim-Israeli Jewish conflict as bad guys vs good guys.
One of my favorite resets is to let go of everything I believe and to just live in awareness for a few seconds. When I do this practice, I notice my body tension decreases and my breath comes more easily.
I often start to meditate and then get some startling insights.
I heard this good advice from a veteran KFI programmer for talk show hosts — prepare for your show the day before and then allow insights to come to you as do other things.
Living in truth is not always recipe for happiness. If buying into a con doesn’t hurt you, if in fact it helps you, then I say believe away. If you are lucky enough to think that your wife is the most beautiful woman in the world and that your people are the most noble in the world, then believe away.
Philosopher Michael Huemer writes:
The typical con has four elements: (1) A background Desire that you have that is unsatisfied, (2) a Story that appeals to that desire, (3) an Action the scammer wants you to do, (4) some supposed Connection between the Story and the Action, such that if you believe the Story, you are supposed to do the Action…
Example 2: Religion
Apologies to my Believing readers, but doesn’t religion kind of fit the pattern?
Desire: The near-universal desire for life and happiness, for an end to pain and strife; the desire to be reunited with dead loved ones.
Story: There is a place where there is maximal happiness, love, and basically everything good, and nothing bad. There is an all-powerful entity who is literally the best conceivable thing, and he wants to give you a literally infinite amount of goodness.
Action: Join this religion.
4. Left-Wing Scams
In the last several years, political scamming has soared in popularity as people on both sides of the political spectrum have become ridiculous suckers. Think of how you feel about people who fall for the Nigerian Prince scam: that’s probably how I feel about a lot of your political beliefs.In this case, the Desire will be a desire to have your ideological beliefs confirmed, to “own” the other side, or to participate in striking a blow for the values of your side.
Let’s start with left-wing scams. Woke leftists have a standing desire to believe that racism is all over the place, to position themselves as crusaders against it, and to believe that the other side is evil.
Jussie
A scammer like Jussie Smollett knows how to take advantage of that: Tell a story about how you’re a victim of racism. Wokists will basically never be suspicious about any such story, no matter how odd the details are. In this case, I suppose Jussie just wanted more attention and sympathy. Other scammers would use stories in that genre to get jobs, to gain sympathy, or to excuse bad behavior on their part. (Compare: Claudine Gay.)
DEI training
Or consider DEI trainings at big corporations. These appeal to the progressive desire to position themselves as anti-racists and to assuage their white guilt. The Story is that these trainers are experts who know how to stop racism. Clearly, the Action called for is to give them a bunch of money to lecture your employees.
Scams usually involve something that is “too good to be true” – that is, they take advantage of the target’s desire to avoid accepting unpleasant realities. For left-wing scams, these unpleasant realities might include:
a. There are many good people who disagree with you.
b. There isn’t any simple, cheap way to get black Americans to succeed, e.g., to close the income gap. All plans that might actually help would be difficult and costly.
c. And they would probably require black people themselves to change; it can’t all be done by whitey.
The “too good to be true” claim would be that the problems of black America can be fixed by having white progressives sit around and talk about their ideology.
Trump scams
Progressives have a standing desire to see Trump discredited and/or humiliated. This makes them vulnerable to any story that makes Trump look bad. E.g., the “very fine people” meme (definitely bogus) or the story about the “pee tape” (likely bogus). Unfortunately, this makes it easier for Republicans to dismiss the damaging things that are actually true.
