Cooling Out: Part 1

One of the main reasons why criminals and stories about criminals command public interest and imagination is that they understand human nature better than ourselves. You can look at a con man or pimp and write him off as a low-life, a nobody. But these people have their shit together. A prime example is Pimp, by Iceberg Slim, which I assume many of you have come across. Read between the lines, as they say, and overcome your disgust with the misogyny and you will learn a wealth of knowledge about human nature. This article by Erving Goffman, also, is a bombshell. Incredibly insightful into human nature, although less applicable to Game.

Consider con men (or "grifters")

The confidence game‑the con, as its practitioners call it‑is a way of obtaining money under false pretenses by the exercise of fraud and deceit. The con differs from politer forms of financial deceit in important ways. The con is practiced on private persons by talented actors who methodically and regularly build up informal social relationships just for the purpose of abusing them; white‑collar crime is practiced on organizations by persons who learn to abuse positions of trust which they once filled faithfully. The one exploits, poise; the other, position.

Con men know how to "separate the mark from his money" through their understanding of human nature. Perhaps you have seen The Sting or the Ocean's Eleven movies.

The con is said to be a good racket in the United States only because most Americans are willing, nay eager, to make easy money, and will engage in action that is less than legal in order to do so The typical play has typical phases. The potential sucker is first spotted and one member of the working team (called the outside man, steerer, or roper) arranges to make social contact with him. The confidence of the mark is won, and he is given an opportunity to invest his money in a gambling venture which he understands to have been fixed in his favor The venture, of course, is fixed, but not in his favor. The mark is permitted to win some money and then persuaded to invest more. There is an "accident" or "mistake," and the mark loses his total investment. The operators then depart in a ceremony that is called the blowoff or sting. They leave the mark but take his money.

But they also follow Law # 29 Plan All the Way to End, which is where "Cooling Out" comes in

Sometimes, however, a mark is not quite prepared to accept his loss as a gain in experience and to say and do nothing about his venture. He may feel moved to [p. 452] complain to the police or to chase after the operators. In the terminology of the trade, the mark may squawk, beef, or come through. From the operators' point of view, this kind of behavior is bad for business. It gives the members of the mob a bad reputation with such police as have not. yet been fixed and with marks who have not yet been taken. In order to avoid this adverse publicity, an additional phase is sometimes added at the end of the play. It is called cooling the mark out. After the blowoff has occurred, one of the operators stays with the mark and makes an effort to keep the anger of the mark within manageable and sensible proportions. The operator stays behind his team‑mates in the capacity of what might be called a cooler and exercises upon the mark the art of consolation. An attempt is made to define the situation for the mark in a way that makes it easy for him to accept the inevitable and quietly go home. The mark is given instruction in the philosophy of taking a loss.

Con men are not stupid, they know that a mark, even without his money, can disrupt their business. But to diffuse the fallout of your con, you have to understand why con games work. Most importantly, you cannot con someone who does not want to be conned. Every con starts by allowing the mark's greed to lead him into a trap. For example, if you receive an email from a Nigerian prince asking for help selling his ancestral jewelry collection, you only get involved because his offers you a healthy cut of the sale.

Why are we consistently conned? Greed is a small part

In many cases, especially in America, the mark's image of himself is built up on the belief that he is a pretty shrewd person when it comes to making deals and that he is not the sort of person who is taken in by any­ thing. The mark’s readiness to participate in a sure thing is based on more than avarice; it is based on a feeling that he will now be able to prove to himself that he is the sort of person who can "turn a‑fast buck." For many, this capacity for high finance comes near to being a sign of masculinity and a test of fulfilling the male role.

It all comes down to identity and self-image, which are funny things

It is well known that persons protect themselves with all kinds of rationalizations when they have a buried image of themselves which the facts of their status do not support. A person may tell himself many things: that he has not been given a fair chance; that he is not really interested in becoming something else; that the time for showing his mettle has not yet come; that the usual means of realizing his desires are personally or morally distasteful, or require too much dull effort. By means of such defenses, a person saves himself from committing a cardinal social sin‑the sin of defining oneself in terms of a status while lacking the qualifications which an incumbent of that status is supposed to possess.

Here enters the confidence man

A mark's participation in a play, and his investment in it, clearly commit him in his own eyes to the proposition that he is a smart man. The process by which he comes to believe that he cannot lose is also the process by which he drops the de­fenses and compensations that previously protected him from defeats. When the blowoff comes, the mark finds that he has no defense for not being a shrewd man. He has defined himself as a shrewd man and must face the fact that he is only an­other easy mark. He has defined himself as possessing a certain set of qualities and then proven to himself that he is miser­ ably lacking in them. This is a process of self‑destruction of the self. It is no won­der that the mark needs to be cooled out and that it is good business policy for one of the operators to stay with the mark in order to talk him into a point of view from which it is possible to accept a loss.

So, what exactly is the point of cooling out?

In essence, then, the cooler has the job of handling persons who have been caught out on a limb‑persons whose expectations and self‑conceptions have been built up and then shattered. The mark is a person who has compromised himself, in his own eyes if not in the eyes of others.

This description of cooling out is just the first, small part of Goffman's essay. In the rest, he goes through examples of how this one technique of grifters demonstrates truths of human nature at all levels of society. Read ahead if you want to, but in the next few posts I'll discuss the essay some more.