How the Con Game Begins

In the movie The Prestige, the introductory scene has Michael Caine explaining how a good magic act works. The states that every magic act has three parts;

1. The Pledge (where the magician shows you something ordinary and allows you to inspect it)
2. The Turn (where the magician makes something ordinary do something extraordinary)
3. The Prestige (..making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part called “The Prestige.”)

The major problem with stopping abuse is the “people are generally good hypothesis,” and the fact that as with magic,

“You aren’t really looking because you don’t really want to know.”

If you look on Amazon.com for books with a negative theme on human nature you will find very little. The closest we could come in the title was “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” There are also a few books on con men, or confidence games, and recently books on financial fraud. However, the number of books dealing with the positive side of our species is proliferate. Books with positive self flattering titles bound off the shelves at your local Borders. My experience with finding book references to the underside of human nature mirrors that of James F Welles, Ph.D. in his book the Understanding Stupidity. While he could find volumes of material written on intelligence, but almost nothing on stupidity save Praise of Folly by and author named Erasmus. Similarly, the study of the unethical and disturbing around us is clearly not publishing gold.

Negative Human Traits as a Medical Condition

One area that has taken a hard look at our negative side is abnormal psychology. According to the Columbia Encyclopedia a psychopath is:

“A person who willfully does damage without remorse. “Such individuals are insensitive to other’s needs, and unable to anticipate the consequences of their behavior… characterized by absence of guilt and anxiety normally accompanying an antisocial act.”

How “normal” is this man? Does he not have sociopathic tendencies. Is this a role model?

While there is much to be learned from this field, I fear “abnormal” psychology is far more normal than we would lead ourselves to believe. We tend to identify a psychopath and medicalize their symptoms and then call it abnormal. Somewhat like the “bad apple” excuse use for greedy executives (is there any other kind?). Somewhat like retardation, no one is slow anymore, but they have ADD or a learning disability, that is their idiocy has been medicalized.

A Better Approach

We propose that a useful approach is to gain an understanding the underpinnings of the psychopathic personality and apply the same concepts, through in smaller doses, to unethical people. Abnormal psychologists do us a disservice when they divide people into black and white categories of being either a psychopath or not a psychopath. However, the difference between a psychopath vs. con man could be viewed as simply a matter of degree. That is a person could be rated on a continuum, rather than being strictly one or another. In that case a con man would sit to the right on the continuum and would share some of the characteristics, through to a lesser degree, than a full-blown psychopath.

We all know what a bad man this guy was. He was pathological, pure evil, unlike us….

Our government, based upon freedom, democracy and the rule of law exterminated as a policy 12 million American Indians. Never forget…

“we are the greatest democracy on the fact of the earth.” – John Kerry

Thus, according to Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, the reduction of the North American Indian population from an estimated 12 million in 1500 to barely 237,000 in 1900 represents a “vast genocide . . . , the most sustained on record.”

In addition to Indians, Americans killed off the buffalo, a description of this is from PBS’s special “Buffalo Nation”

“The commercial killers, however, weren’t the only ones shooting bison. Train companies offered tourists the chance to shoot buffalo from the windows of their coaches, pausing only when they ran out of ammunition or the gun’s barrel became too hot. There were even buffalo killing contests. In one, a Kansan set a record by killing 120 bison in just 40 minutes. “Buffalo” Bill Cody, hired to slaughter the animals, killed more than 4,000 buffalo in just two years.”

Still that Hitler as a very bad man, nothing good honest Americans ever did approached the Nazi barbarism. Good thing Americans only did their bad things in the distant past. We would never do that again because we are just more civilized now. Except for the whole Iraq thing.

The Real Story

Humans in general are not very nice. The reason we think they are is that our real history is carefully edited. Abuse has always been a part of human experience and without a system of checks and balances, always will be. The mistake is thinking, and teaching the young and innocent that people are by nature good. By attempting to spin history we make people vulnerable and ensure that the cycle of abuse continues.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080108051056AAq24tO

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