Don't Be a Sucker

A guest post by the wonderful Michael Huemer, author of many books that you should immediately buy. He also has a very good blog.

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A sucker, in American slang, is a person who is easily taken advantage of. We have too many suckers lately. Let me help you to be less of a sucker.

1. The Con

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.

The con may be based on universal or near-universal human drives, such as the desire for money or the fear of death. Or it may be tailored to a particular group, say, progressives or incels. The con artist will have observed your type and identified your biases and psychological needs.

The Action is typically something that serves the con artist’s interests, like sending him your credit card number, or joining his cult, or voting for him.

The Connection should divert you from the actual reason the con artist wants you to do the Action with some alternative excuse. If you like the Story enough, you’re meant to relax your critical faculties so that only some vague, perfunctory explanation is needed for why you need to do the Action.

2. Example 1: The Nigerian Prince

Classic example: you get an email allegedly from a Nigerian prince.

Story: There is a rich Nigerian prince who needs to transfer 30 million dollars to the U.S. For some reason, he needs your help to do it, and he wants to pay you $3 million for your help.

Desire: This appeals to the near-universal human desire to get rich for doing nothing.

Action: Give him your bank account details. Or transfer some money to him.

Connection: He needs your bank account details in order to send you the money. Or he needs you to send him some money for bank fees or taxes.

If you like the Story enough, you’re meant to overlook the question of which is more likely: (a) a super-rich person needs you to give him some money so that he can then give you a ton of money, or (b) a scammer wants you to give him some money so he can keep your money. Or maybe it’s sort of like Pascal’s Mugging: you know (b) is vastly more likely, but the dollar amount being offered is so large that you think the expected value calculation goes in favor of sending the Prince the money.

What’s wrong with this:

1. No one wants to give you a ton of money for doing nothing.

2. The larger the dollar amount, the less likely it is that the story is true. (That’s also the problem with Pascal’s Mugging.)

(There are other implausibilities, but they are less important because less generalizable. Like that a rich person needs your money in order to give you money. Or that a Prince with a ton of money would pick a random person on the internet whose name he doesn’t even know to entrust with $30 million.)

Point (1) is so obvious that one wonders how anyone could fall for the scam. I think the answer is that people let their desire interfere with their judgment. They want (1) to be false, and that stops them from realistically estimating its probability.

3. 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.

Connection: Unfortunately, God just won’t be able to give you this infinite goodness unless you join this one religion. He decided that a long time ago, so His hands are tied. Or he just gets really mad when you don’t believe the right set of propositions about him.

You’re meant to like the Story so much that you don’t ask too many questions about this and just join the religion. In this case, I don’t think the con is driven by the self-interest of the con artists; I think the con artists have mostly conned themselves first. The belief system is self-propagating, like an intellectual virus.

Aside: There are a fair number of legit scammers (like, people who are purely in it for the money) who attach themselves to religion. Look up “prosperity gospel”. Perhaps people who are susceptible to religious belief are also susceptible to being scammed for money. Perhaps there is a general trait of liability to wishful thinking.

The lesson of the Nigerian Prince applies equally to religion: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

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.

Foreign enemy scams

Foreign enemies can see what has happened to America’s elites, and they’re happy to use it to manipulate us. If the U.S. criticizes China’s human rights abuses, the CCP will just start accusing us of racism. The CCP doesn’t think the U.S. is racist, nor do they give a single crap about that; they just know that they can shut us up by playing on our self-hatred.

Islamic extremists, similarly, are happy to co-opt the language of the American left to manipulate us. E.g., they’ll claim to be “colonized” and oppressed; they’ll claim to be victims of racism and “Islamophobia”; they’ll pretend to care about civilian casualties. In reality, they don’t give a crap about colonization, except in the sense that they would like to colonize/conquer the rest of the world; they don’t care about civilian casualties either, except in the sense that they would like to see as many as possible. But they know that Western elites are rubes who can be easily manipulated to turn against their own society and values.

5. Right-Wing Scams

To scam a leftist, claim to be a victim of prejudice. To scam a rightist, claim to be a patriot, a victim of immigrants, or a victim of leftists. There’s one standout example: Donald J. Trump.

Some uncomfortable truths that rightists might not want to admit:

a. There are many good people who disagree with you. They are why you lost the 2020 election.

b. There are no simple, cheap solutions to America’s problems.

c. Any solutions that might work require effort and sacrifice by us.

(Notice how similar these are to the truths that leftists don’t want to admit.)

Here’s a Story that plays to the desire to evade those truths: there’s a brilliant, ultra-competent, patriotic, and honest man who just wants to serve your interests and that of the country as a whole. You just have to give him power so he can help you. Then he will make the country “great”, and this won’t cost us anything, because all the cost will be borne by foreigners; he’ll just make “better deals” with foreigners. Most of the country agrees with you about all this, and your side really won the last election. All the bad things about him are lies.

Sometimes, I am shocked by just how obvious a lie can be and people on one side just swallow it (or pretend to) because it supports “their side.”

6. Lessons

How to avoid being scammed?

1. Know your own biases. If you don’t, scammers will use them to manipulate you. People in general have a bias toward stories about how they can get huge benefits (wealth, sex, eternal life, etc.) for little or no cost. When it comes to politics, here are some hints:

a. If you’re on the left, you’re biased toward stories about oppression and prejudice.

b. If you’re on the right, you’re biased toward stories about dangerous foreigners.

c. If you’re libertarian, you’re biased toward stories about evil or incompetent governments.

d. In any case, you’re biased toward anything that makes your political opponents look bad.

2. There really aren’t very many pure altruists who just want to give you stuff, or just want to give the country stuff.

a. Corollary: People lie a lot, especially when it serves their interests.

b. Corollary: If there is both a self-interested explanation for why someone might be saying P and an altruistic explanation, the self-interested explanation is usually correct. Particularly if they are trying to convince you to do something that obviously benefits them.

3. Reality is not designed for your convenience. If a story that you’re being told plays really well into your desires or biases, it’s probably bullshit.