Donald Trump, Con Artist?

Underlying most any con is the desire for power—for control over other people’s lives. That power can take the form of reputation, adulation, or the thrill of knowing oneself to be the orchestrator of others’ fates—of being a sort of mini-god. The path to that end is entirely secondary. Ferdinand Waldo Demara, one of the greatest con men in history, was known as the Great Imposter. He never finished high school but impersonated everyone from a professor to a surgeon to a prison warden. Demara was often penniless, despite his scams—but he found ways to enjoy the admiration of multitudes and to exert power over the lives of others (very concretely, in the case of surgery). The racket itself mattered less than those ultimate goals.

If Trump were a con artist, he would be interested in politics only as a means to some other end. He wouldn’t believe in his political opinions; instead, he would see those opinions as convenient tools for gaining what he actually desires. Insofar as he believed in any of the policies he espoused, that belief would be purely incidental. Con artists aren’t true believers; they are opportunists. Trump, as a con artist, would give up on politics the moment that it stopped serving his purposes, moving on to the next thing that gave him the same level of attention and adulation.

.. Another thing that differentiates con artists from ordinary liars is their nuanced and targeted use of flattery. Confidence men know that the best way to achieve their desires is to tell people what they want to hear rather than what is true. The quickest way to gain a mark’s trust is to sell him a vision of the world as he wants, or believes, it to be.

.. Inasmuch as con artists are peddlers of hope who tell us what we want to hear, many politicians have taken a page from the grifter’s playbook.

.. It’s not a case of misrepresenting one’s policies, but of not actually having a policy.

.. “As the recent Ponzi-scheme scandals involving onetime financial luminaries like Bernard Madoff and Allen Stanford demonstrate, victims of con artists often sing the praises of their victimizers until the moment they realize they have been fleeced,” she wrote.

.. If Trump is indeed a con artist, and if he is, in the end, elected, we may end up not wanting to admit that we were scammed.

Divergent thinking

Parallels have been drawn between playfulness in kindergarten-aged children and divergent thinking. In a study documented by Lieberman (1965), the relationship between these two traits was examined, with playfulness being “conceptualized and operationally defined in terms of five traits:

  1. physical,
  2. social and
  3. cognitive spontaneity;
  4. manifest joy; and
  5. sense of humour” (Lieberman, 1965)

.. Results showed natural positive mood to facilitate significantly task performance and negative mood to inhibit it… The results suggest that persons in elevated moods may prefer satisficing strategies, which would lead to a higher number of proposed solutions. Persons in a negative mood may choose optimizing strategies and be more concerned with the quality of their ideas, which is detrimental to performance on this kind of task.

— (Vosburg, 1998)
.. This study showed that even “one night of sleep loss can affect divergent thinking”, which “contrasts with the outcome for convergent thinking tasks, which are more resilient to short-term sleep loss” (Horne, 1988).

Neurodiversity

With so much going on in a brain, the argument goes, the occasional bug is inevitable: hence autism and other departures from the neurological norm. ISNT suggests another way of looking at this. Neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general. Who can say what form of wiring will prove best at any given moment?