The Confidence Man
Onboard the Fidele, a steamboat floating down the Mississippi to New Orleans, a confidence man sets out to defraud his fellow passengers. In quick succession he assumes numerous guises - from a legless beggar and a worldly businessman to a collector for charitable causes and a 'cosmopolitan' gentleman, who simply swindles a barber out of the price of a shave. Making very little from his hoaxes, the pleasure of trickery seems an end in itself for this slippery conman. Is he the Devil? Is his chicanery merely intended to expose the mercenary concerns of those around him? Set on April Fool's Day, The Confidence-Man (1857) is an engaging comedy of masquerades, digressions and shifting identity, and a devastating satire on the American dream.
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- This is a great opportunity to remind people to read the first post-modern American novel: The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, by Herman Melville. First published on April 1st and set on the same day.
- For a remarkable fictional exposition of this, read The Confidence Man by Herman Melville one of the truly great American novels. Many of the examples described in this article are brought to life, and used to generate a very funny, strange and interesting kind of literary and intellectual experience.
The book doesn't have one main character -- instead, it describes a riverboat trip where various avatars of the confidence man appear one after the other, although at one point two avatars appear at the same time and try to con each other. It was written in the mid-19th century but so advanced that Melville couldn't get it published -- it finally got into print about 50 years after he died.
Plus, if you want to understand the historical roots of Donald Trump, try the chapter in this book called "Some account of a man of questionable morality, but who, nevertheless, would seem entitled to the esteem of that eminent English moralist who said he liked a good hater."
- Wow, further evidence that the most important tech book I ever read was Maurer's The Big Con:
http://www.amazon.com/Big-Con-Story-Confidence-Man/dp/038549...
I keep waiting for an enterprising Nigerian journalist to write the 419-scammer version of this book.
- Grifting is about as American as apple pie honestly. Melville is of course know for Moby Dick where he delves into the psyche of the Great American Man but he also wrote The Confidence Man. Mark Twain’s work is full of con men and grifters. Ponzi laid the groundwork for more complex schemes in the 20s. Pyramid schemes were all the rage in the 40/50s, Tupperware parties as an example, and of course still are huge today.
It seems like whenever American society is changing very rapidly or has changed very rapidly con men become the powerful ones of the time. Maybe this is true everywhere but as an American I don’t know the history of cons in other countries.
- Yes, and rely highly on anonymity whether through large populations (cities) or distance (telecommunications and/or transportation).
The term "confidence man" came into general usage following publication of a novel by that title by Herman Melville (of Moby Dick fame). It is set on the first great interstate highway of the United States: the steamboat-plied Mississippi River. Harking back to Roman (and Greek) times, I find it quite telling that Mercury (or Hermes) is the god of messages, travel, roads, merchants, thieves, and cunning, amongst others. There's something inherent in travel that gives rise to trickery.
(It's difficult to be fooled by those one lives closely with in small communities for long periods of time. Those may be scoundrels or be known to be untrustworthy but rarely gain confidence in Melville's sense.)
Another curious relationship I suspect about telecommunications is that they effectively reduce reliance on social factors of trust. Mind that this may increase overall societal trustworthiness in many cases, but it's through the replacement of, well, just plain raw trust (unevidenced belief) through monitoring, assessments, and independent validation. In an age before telegraph and jet airlines (or even steamships and railroads), once someone was out of eyesight and earshot, they were lost to direct control or monitoring until either they returned or an emissary could reach them, whether for hours, days, weeks, months, or years. Merchants, diplomats, ships' captains, colonial governors, and the like all operated autonomously for periods of time which would strike us as utterly alien today. Many of the practices, and much of the language used in communications, seems to me to have arisen to express, reinforce, or establish trust in such circumstances. Post-telegraphic language became, well, telegraphic (short, abbreviated, costing or paid by the word) not only due to the expense of the medium, but, carrying over to even non-telegraphic correspondence, because long sustained absences or periods of incommunicado no longer occurred.
(This is one topic touched on in The Control Revolution by James Beniger (1986): <https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2549490M/The_control_revolut...> Not to be confused with another excellent book of the same title by Andrew Shapiro, addressing the nascent Internet and World Wide Web. Which, come to think of it, also addresses the themes of trust and communications.)
- Grift is nothing new, it's existed throughout human history. See for example Herman Melville, "The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade" (1857), which is a catalogue of various kinds of grift common in that era.
If anything has changed much recently, it's that grifters have taken control of the entire system of government and economic activity - they're no longer just a pack of con artists preying on riverboat travellers, but have infiltrated all the branches of government and business and academia in the USA.
Today's most successful grifters are not isolated criminals like SBF, but rather the leading politicians and media talking heads and government bureaucrats and corporate executives who sit at the top of the American Empire - it's a nice example of the systemic institutional corruption seen at the ends of previous Empires, from the Roman to the Byzantine to the French, British and Soviet collapses, and appears to be heading towards the same conclusion.
