The Conman’s Contempt

When I was younger, I played a lot of board games. While never exactly dominant at them, they allowed me to roleplay different personalities and approaches to problem-solving.

They also provided a healthy outlet to less than social behavior.

Many games, such as “Mafia”, relied on your ability to manipulate others and to avoid manipulation. In Mafia, you’re either the townspeople or you’re mafia. The townspeople are attempting to find the mafia and lynch them, while the mafia is attempting to assassinate enough townspeople to get a majority in the town.

While the role of townsperson was a natural one (after all, few people actively feel comfortable deceiving others), the role of mafia had its moments, especially when you were able to carry the deception to the end and win the game.

Duper’s Delight

This emotion – when a deception goes well, is often called “Duper’s Delight”. In games, it can be the pay off to a trick well played, however, for narcissists and sociopaths, “Duper’s Delight” can become a dominant source of dopamine.

For a con artist to get someone to buy into their scheme, the delight is palpable. It’s one of the few emotions they can really revel in. They often go on to deceive more and more, and find it hard not to lie, if only to see whether they can get another hit of delight.

Ultimately, under the polite veneer of a simple card game, there is the worry that when you lose at Mafia, it’s because the other team genuinely outsmarted you. That you got conned and trusted the wrong people. And ultimately, when you win at mafia, you believe that you may just be smarter than everyone else on the other team. With other games, you can always console yourself that, well, maybe you just didn’t know the rules as well as someone.

With mafia though, the game is just about tricking people. It’s just conversation. There are very few rules, and it’s about seeing who you can trick to do what. That’s why it feels so good to win.

There’s a flip side to this emotion though because it also stings really bad to lose.

Conman’s Contempt

This emotion is very different than Duper’s Delight, especially for a narcissist.

The emotion is not just the pain of losing, it’s the incredulity that anyone else could win. Recall that duper’s delight is, at its heart, a judgment of intellect – especially by those who benefit from it regularly. They believe they’re smarter than everyone, and the delight they get when tricking someone else reinforces that.

The Conman’s Contempt which they’re figured out, though, is not related to them believing that perhaps they aren’t as smart as they thought they were. I mean, perhaps in a Freudian way, it’s a defense mechanism to avoid that thought. But the main feelings of the conman’s contempt are:

“How could you have figured this out? You’re so dumb! I made no mistakes. No, no, no, you just got lucky. You just got lucky. This is unfair. This isn’t how it was supposed to happen, I am the smarter player. You’re supposed to lose, and you were supposed to fall for my trick, but now just because you got lucky, it makes me look bad, even though I know that I’m the winner. Unfair. Unfair.”

Sound like anyone?

Did you get the Memo?

I think why there is genuinely a huge gap between how most of America read the Nunes’ memo and how Trump and his family read it is that to them, it exposed what they wanted to be exposed. To them, showing that the one fateful mistake (Carter Page got caught by FISA) was due to bias on the part of Christopher Steele (and ultimately, bias from other sources too).

To Trump, issuing a memo that showed Steel was dreadfully afraid of Trump shows – in Trump’s mind, anyway – that Trump didn’t make any mistakes, that Trump isn’t the dumber player in all this. No, on the contrary, due to unfair bias from Steele and only that, Trump was found out.

Trump has complained about unfairness his entire life, but you have to look at what he considers to be fair and not – to a con artist, fair is you fell for it. After all, they’re very smart. They have the best brains. You’re dumb, and you’re supposed to fall for it. Unfair is when they get figured out. Because they can’t cope with the idea of them either being just morally bad people or, even worse, not the smartest people on the planet, they instead cope by telling themselves they got a bad break, due to unreasonable bias someone else got lucky.

They have a contempt of being found out – even when all the evidence is as plain as day, it’s not about the evidence. It’s not about the truth. It’s not about whether they colluded or not or were mafia or townspeople, it’s about how they were supposed to win. That’s how it was supposed to go. And they didn’t, so it must be because someone was playing unfairly. The memo, to them, exposes that. What little bias may have existed in the DOJ or the horrible misunderstanding that Trump’s disloyalty caused Steele to worry, not the other way around, that little bias is why Trump got caught. And now we have to root it out, because it’s unfair, and if we get rid of that bias, then everything should be fair again and the Mafia will win.