Pylimitics

I don’t know if it’s a uniquely American thing, or maybe a uniquely human thing, but damn, we fall for scams. All the time. Maybe it’s an off-the-charts ability that a few people have that make them able to come up with what they know is a lie, and get everybody within earshot to believe it.

Maybe it’s not just a few people, either. They’re well enough known that when The Music Man debuted in 1957, nobody was confused about who Harold Hill was or what he could do once he started talking. In The Wizard of Oz film, from 1939, the idea that Professor Marvel/The Wizard was scamming the whole emerald city was not a major reveal; it was just taken for granted. Of course a patent-medicine salesman would and could do that.

Nowadays we’ve got some scammers that have made it big, big, big. Maybe they’ve promised lower grocery and gas prices, no new wars, and rejuvenated manufacturing, or maybe it’s been 30-minute trips between Boston and New York, fully self-driving cars, colonies on Mars (by 2025), eliminating urban traffic by digging tunnels, chips in your brain, robotaxies, and robots. And what do we do? We make one of them President and let the other one warp financial rules so far he’s a trillionaire.

It’s not them, it’s us. I guess humans are just hopelessly naive, willing to believe any story as long as there’s something in it that makes us smile. It doesn’t take an actual success for us to start believing one of these snakes; they just have to appear to be successful at least once.

Now, these two snakes have been exceptionally adept at appearing to succeed in something, and they have something in common that has a lot to do with that. They started with a lot of money. The one we elected President started out with a huge fortune. If you look at the details, the fortune was enough to forestall any real consequences, but it’s only relatively recently led to significant payoffs. The other one started with less money, but was also involved in a couple of actual successes. Not entirely his doing, but he was, as they say, “in the room.”

That brings me to another characteristic they share: they claim credit far beyond their actual contributions. Again, it’s not them, it’s us. We just eat this stuff up. If anybody really does look into the details — which doesn’t even happen all that often — we collectively pay far less attention, and focus on the fun, smiley story we like better. Our lives are going to be better. This problem that’s been bothering us will go away. We’ll be able to have wonderful things; magical totems we’ve only dreamed of. This one little bottle of medicine will cure everything and make us live to be 300!

You may have recognized the two snakes I’ve described. They’re the most obvious and egregious, but they’re far from alone in their carnival patter. Or should I say carnivorous patter. There is something else in humans that leads many of us to strive to become like these snakes. Many of us want money and power. While we’re told that the way to amass those things is by honesty and hard work, that is also just a happy story. And a successful one, for many. But it seems like maybe it’s not as convincing as what the snakes serve up, because there are always more would-be snakes who see through that story and understand that the surest path to money and power is by learning to lie convincingly. That’s what they set out to learn.

And one more human characteristic: we have a talent for learning to lie convincingly. Like I said, it’s not them, it’s us. Maybe it’s snakes all the way down.