Liars, thieves, swindlers
We all root for the little guy fighting the establishment. I was surprised to read once on a clay tablet the story of prisoners (future slaves) who made a hole in the brick wall and escaped: it amused the whole town, over two thousand years ago. This basic need made a success of David against Goliath and of Robin Hood. This persistent feeling explains that handsome guys like Frank Sinatra, Gary Grant, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, George Clooney were chosen as congenial thieves in the following movies:
Ocean's 11 (1960) with Sinatra
To Catch a Thief (1955) with Grant
The Sting (1973) with Newman
The Hot Rock (1972) with Redford
Ocean's Trilogy with Clooney
In real life, of course, there is no such thing: thieves and swindlers are unscrupulous, insensitive, and often downright psychopaths. I know that: I visited a lot of them in jail.
Bad women are more rare, but very efficient: this month an FBI press release said "A federal jury convicted Nancy Jean Siegel, age 60, of Baltimore, today of second degree murder-witness tampering, theft of government benefits, identity theft and fraud offenses in connection with a scheme to use the identities of victims, including an elderly man which she was convicted of murdering, to obtain existing and new credit for personal gain, announced United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein." (March 16, 2009)
So thanks God for literature!
Serious literature
Confessions of Felix Krull by Thomas Mann (b.1875) This is the portrait of an egotist swindler, and it is very light and funny and fascinating: not at all as difficult as the usual Mann.
Thomas the Impostor by Jean Cocteau (b. 1889). The only literary book I know about self delusion and compulsive lying. At the end, the hero is shot and he falls, thinking that he is going to pretend to be dead, but he is dead already. It is powerful stuff. Other readers have viewed there a social criticism of the times of world war I, but social subjects were the last last thing on the mind of the Cocteau I know of.
The Confidence Man (Norton Critical Editions) by Melville. Like all Melville, this is hard to read and to understand, and probably very ambitious: it is a series of dialogues about trust, all happening on April's fool day aboard a ship in 1850. Do not try it if you are not interested in that kind of subject, because there is no story: just a series of happenings. Melville is not happy in this book, maybe with religion, maybe with the American way, maybe with the devil, maybe with himself. I do not know. Should have read the book with The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville,edited by Robert S. Levine.
On the exact same themes, you might like the very serious Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter which became a remarkable
movie***
Easy literature
Let me start with an humorist: Donald Westlake, describing a patsy in God Save the Mark: A Novel of Crime and Confusion. Westlake is the author of the book The Hot Rock which gave the perfect movie with Redford quoted on top of this page.
On the dark side of sociopathy, we find The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. This is a creepy great book which inspired many movies, specially The Talented Mr. Ripley starring: Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ripley's Game starring: John Malkovich.
What makes us victims?
As Melville shows, you got to trust somebody. People who are just a bit too greedy are more likely to be victims: that is what happened to the victims of the Ponzi scheme of Bernard Madoff. They put all their money in the hands of somebody promising a regular 10 percent that nobody else achieved on the market. If you are going to trust a financial advisor or an investor, don't let him play with every cent you have (this is an important part of diversifying), even if it is a sure thing, even if it is your husband.
People who are in great need are also in great danger. I got a friend who gave her house to a lover thirty years younger than her. She says he loves her. Well, maybe, but my grandmother used to say: "When you are young, men look at your butt, when you are old, they look at your purse." If you cannot live alone, you might forget this basic fact of life.
Finally, the biggest danger is to underestimate who you are and what you got. A plain secretary may think that she has nothing, except that she has access to her boss secrets, or her boss bank account, or she is going to travel on an Israeli plane where somebody wants to plant a bomb (all bad things really happened to modest girls like this). Never forget that we are all important, every one of us.
You can find a good description of bad people in Without Conscience The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, by Robert D. Hare.
But many faults lie with our own brain: it does not work as smartly as it should. For instance, we are not very good at statistics. If we were, nobody would play the lottery (my father called the lottery a hidden tax on the poor). A good read on this is Predictably Irrational***, The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, by Dan Ariely.
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