No Trust

 The progress of our civilization seems to be inseparable from the parallel growth in the arts of deception. Each new increase in economic efficiency and the speed of communications in our history has brought with it new opportunities for criminals to scam and gull the unwary. We still use the term "wire fraud" to describe the galaxy of interrelated crimes made possible by the growth of new forms of communication in the twentieth century, for instance. 

And even before that, the archetype of the con artist, the grifter, seemed inseparable from the American ideal of social and geographic mobility. I wrote glowingly on this blog, in a recent post, about how in America—compared to my recent two-week stint in England—I feel free to "define myself how I choose. Here, my future and destiny are my own to make." But the dark corollary of that same freedom may be an instability of self—an increased capacity for disguise. If people can be whoever they want to be; does that risk turning us into a nation of imposters? 

The recent growth of generative AI is no exception to the rule of fakery following technology in American life. Like every other advance in information and communications technology before it, it has enabled people to practice ever-more sophisticated varieties of deception. 

We all remember the recent scandal of the fake robocall targeting New Hampshire voters, which falsely claimed to be coming from Joe Biden, and which used deepfake audio recordings to convincingly mimic his voice. And the New Yorker ran a story this week about an even more chilling example: cybercriminals are increasingly targeting ordinary families by using deepfake impersonations of their loved ones. The perfectly-lifelike digital clones of their relatives' voices claim to be kidnapped over the phone, then beg and plead for their relatives to wire "ransom" payments to the scammer.

The U.S. is still the world's leader, then, in producing new forms of con artist. The same forces that make us the bleeding edge of every innovation in capitalist development and the growth of technological civilization—our social mobility, our belief in the capacity for self-definition and self-reinvention—have also made us a hotbed for scammers. This is the dark underbelly of the American promise. For every genuine advance in the world's technological and productive capacity that we have helped bring about, we mint an even greater number of counterfeits. 

Is this not evident even in our pop culture and media? Our favorite stories from politics and business are those involving con artists. Elizabeth Holmes and George Santos are the trickster deities of our current pantheon. And maybe part of the reason we like these tales of scammers being unmasked is that they speak to our deepest fears as a culture. We know that we are especially vulnerable as a society to falling victim to con artists and fakes; but we can feel momentarily safer against this omnipresent threat if we can identify one or two examples of them as scapegoats, and gather the community together to denounce and cast them out.

But then, even after we have pronounced the ritual anathema against the unmasked fraud and deceiver—how much of our politics and business remains dominated by even bigger frauds? Elizabeth Holmes was small potatoes compared to Elon Musk. Yet the latter has been permitted to perform a similar masquerade—promising pie-in-the-sky technological leaps to gullible investors—with perhaps the only difference between them being that Musk is able to hire more and better engineers. And what is Donald Trump but a George Santos that can't be so easily expelled? 

We may feel momentarily safer casting out the scapegoat, then—but the bigger cons are still among us, and pose far more of a threat. 

It's no coincidence, then, that America is both the home to technological innovation—and endlessly proliferating varieties of deception; both social mobility and the concept of the protean self—and the imposter, the social chameleon, who is able to be all things to all people in an effort to steal their money or win their votes. Indeed, there is a reason the United States was home to the first "confidence-man"; for the term was invented here in the mid-nineteenth century. 

I was thinking about all of this because I was reading Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man this week—his deeply strange final novel, often seen as a forerunner of the literary experiments of the twentieth century. The novel was apparently inspired by contemporary newspaper accounts of the original "confidence-man"—a scam artist whose unsophisticated gambit was to approach people, ask them if they had sufficient confidence in him to let him take their watch or wallet for safekeeping, then stroll off. From this one central premise, the novel becomes a complete exploration of the theme of deception and imposture in American life. 

Melville's book—set on a river boat on the Mississippi—is preoccupied throughout with the increased capacity for fraud and chicanery made possible by the social mobility of American life. As westward expansion brought an ever-widening circle of complete strangers into sudden contact with one another, people had to confront the fact that there was no obvious way to tell the difference anymore between the real and the fake. Much like the counterfeit bank notes that serve as a symbol in the novel, it was becoming ever more difficult to discern whether the people one encountered in American life were telling the truth about themselves. When everyone was a stranger, everyone could reinvent themselves with each new encounter; they could inhabit any social role they pleased. 

Such a prospect must have been freeing for many—compared to the stifling fixed hierarchies of the Old World; but it also left open a vast field of play to the mountebanks. The novel follows a series of different con artists—who may in fact all be different guises of the same central "confidence-man"—as they try to trick and gull the other passengers on the boat. 

In so doing, the confidence-man runs through the whole playbook of methods that cybercriminals and con artists still deploy in "social engineering" today. The different personas and alter egos of the confidence-man all vouch for each other, for instance, creating the pretense of a chain of verification. The confidence-man generates a sense of scarcity and urgency as well; after baiting the hook with an apparently tempting offer, he then threatens to withdraw it, so his victims are forced to act before they have time to second-guess his veracity. He also practices the ancient art of "cold reading"—throwing out vague guesses about the personal histories of his interlocutors, until he is able to find one that lands, and which he can then use to convince them he knows them intimately. 

But above all else, the confidence-man is able to succeed in winning the trust of his victims through sheer audacity. In ordinary life, after all, few of the people we meet have the chutzpah to simply come out and ask us for money; few would demand that we show "confidence" in them enough to trust them with our wallets on a first meeting. So, when a stranger does so, we are thrown off balance. 

Not only this, but the confidence-man has the audacity to seem entitled to such implicit trust. He is righteously aggrieved and wounded, when people doubt his sincerity. He invokes the tenets of religion, whenever people ask too many questions about his claims. Is not charity a fundamental precept of Christianity, he asks? And is not trust essential to charity? How can they be so cruel as to doubt him? Is not trust another name for faith—and is it not faith alone that saves? Is doubt in man—one of God's creatures—not a mere step away from doubt in the Creator? Is mistrust of the word of a stranger not a version in microcosm of distrust in divine providence and grace? 

With such honeyed words, Melville's confidence-man is typically able not only to convince his victims to play along—but actually to apologize and ask for forgiveness. The confidence-man then toys for a moment with whether or not they are worthy of his forbearance. He considers whether he should not revoke his original offer (generating scarcity and urgency again). "I know not whether I should accept this slack confidence," says the confidence-man at one point: "but an eleventh-hour confidence, a sick-bed confidence, a distempered, death-bed confidence, after all." To which, one of his victims cries out, in an effort to win him back: "I confide, I confide; help, friend, my distrust!"

The analogy to religious belief is obvious and intended; and on one level, then, the novel could perhaps be read as a sort of anti-religious polemic. Faith in the church and its promises is presented as the ultimate confidence-game: here, we are asked to have implicit trust in something that is belied by everyday experience. We are told that providence is watching over us, even as we see each day unjustifiable horror and suffering all around us. 

The confidence-man deliberately plays with such resemblances, insinuating doubts about God's justice and the equality of human law, even as he claims to disdain such doubts. When presented with one man's tale of injustice at the hands of the New York police—ultimately, he was imprisoned for a murder than another man committed, after the latter was released due to the influence of his "friends" in high places—the confidence-man slyly observes: 

"It might be injudicious there to lay too much polemic stress upon the doctrine of future retribution as the vindication of present impunity. For though, indeed, to the right-minded that doctrine was true, and of sufficient solace, yet with the perverse the polemic mention of it might but provoke the shallow, though mischievous conceit, that such a doctrine was but tantamount to the one which should affirm that Providence was not now, but was going to be."

It would be a one-sided reading of the novel, however, to merely equate the confidence-man to the overweening promises of religion and call it the key to Melville's intention. For the novel, despite its extended portrayal of deception and fraud, is not entirely on the side of distrust. 

The book's opening scene contrasts two signs, offering two radically opposing ways of navigating the country's new social world of uncertainty and protean social identity. One sign, in the barber's window, says: "no trust." In a world populated by scammers and con artists, the sign implies, everyone must pay cash. No credit will be given to people who may very well not be who they claim to be, or anything close to it. The other sign, however—held aloft by a "deaf-mute" (who may himself be the confidence-man in yet another disguise)—invokes "charity." And it reminds passers-by of the Gospel's definition of charity, which "believeth all things."

The cost of adopting the approach of "charity," in navigating American life—Melville implies—is inevitably to get duped. If one trusts and believes the imposters on the other end of the phone, with their AI-generated voices and audio clones—then one will be defrauded.  

But the book holds open the possibility that it is better nonetheless to be the sort of person who is capable of being defrauded than to be someone whom no one can ever fool. The confidence-man in the book, after all—just like the AI deepfake artists and imposters of today—is able to succeed in part through exploiting people's better natures. He obtains money for a benevolent society under false pretenses, because he is able to appeal to people's desire to help a stranger and do right by humanity. Likewise, today's AI imposters succeed because people love their relatives and family members and—when the situation is dire enough—will think nothing of wiring money to a stranger in order to make sure they are safe. 

If people did not have charity in their hearts, no con artist would ever succeed. If people did not care about their friends and loved ones, no one would ever extract cash from them with a fake "kidnapping" story. Is it not better, therefore, to be someone who can be duped, than to be someone who cannot? Is it not better to hold up the sign that reads "charity," rather than the worldly wisdom of the one that reads "no trust"—even if the consequence of obeying the former is to be out a few dollars? 

Well before I read Melville's novel and saw its immediate bearing on this theme, I was making this same point in a recent blog. I wrote about how I was hit up for cash by a panhandler in London. Even when he was giving me the set up for the ask, as I wrote, I knew he was lying. I knew it was a grift. But I gave him a few bills anyway, because I had bills to spare. And eventually, I decided that, instead of being ashamed of how easy it was to take advantage of me, I would take pride in that fact. 

I quoted on this score a line from Stefan Zweig, with which Melville's novel would appear to be in ultimate sympathy: "that was the kind of person one ought to be [...] a person who'd rather be betrayed than betray." (Blewitt trans.)

Charity is gullible, because charity is blind. In his beautiful poem about the "blinded bird," Thomas Hardy portrays the cruelly blinded song bird of the title as the embodiment of charity. Here, in the flesh, is the paragon of the gospels. Here is a creature, writes Hardy, that hopeth and endureth all things, just as Paul commanded. The bird is the victim of fraud—both the fraud of the cruel humanity that blinded it, so that it would sing for their amusement amid endless darkness—and the fraud of a divine providence that allowed this to happen ("all this [...] with God's consent, on thee!" as Hardy writes). 

Yet still, the poem suggests, it is better to be the blinded bird than the one who blinded it. It is better to "be betrayed than to betray," as Zweig writes. It is better to be duped than to be the duper; better to be gulled than to be the cunning "confidence-man." For what, after all, is truly divine, Hardy asks? Who is truly acting in the spirit of the Gospels? It is this bird himself. 

This, then, is the other side of our country's vulnerability to con artists: in some fundamental sense, it actually speaks well for us. We are a nation of con-artists because we are also a nation of the gullible. "Confidence-men" proliferate among us because there are so many ripe targets. And we fall victim to these charlatans most of all because of that which is best in us: we are an optimistic people; we are ready to believe that the future will be better than the past. We are willing to put our trust in human nature, no matter how many times that faith is disappointed. Even though we are surrounded by strangers, by people who have reinvented themselves, by people who have started new lives in this country and may claim to be whoever they want to be, our default is still to start by believing them. 

We have confidence, even if unwarranted. We have charity, though blind. We hopeth, endureth all things. What is divine? These Americans. 

The cost of this trust may indeed be that we often get ripped off. We are easy prey to the Musks and the Trumps of the world. But they succeed so well, only because they are able to exploit that which is best in us. And is it not better, at last, that we can be gulled? Is it not better to be the deceived that the deceiver? Is it not better to be the blinded bird, than the one who blinded him? Better to be betrayed than to betray?

Even after all the tricks of the confidence-man are displayed, Melville seems to suggest—even then, perhaps, we should still opt for the sign that reads "Charity" over that which reads "No Trust."