What Do Con Artists and Religious Leaders Have in Common? With Maria Konnikova | Big Think

I think humans really have a deep desire for meaning, and it's something that is really hardwired into us. So if you look at an infant who's just learning about the world, that infant needs to learn rules of cause and effect. You know what happens? You start sometimes see babies and they keep dropping objects, and you think it's so incredibly annoying. You say, "Stop dropping that! You know I just picked it up for you!" They're learning about physics. They're actually really curious to see that every time they drop it, it falls. That is a totally amazing and mesmerizing new concept, if you think about it.

So we start looking for cause and effect right away. That's how we make sense of the world. As you grow older, you're still looking for that cause and effect. That's saying, you know, if I cry, mommy comes back. Cause leads directly to effect, an event leads directly to what that event causes. We are really uncomfortable when that's not the case, and the world is really, really messy. You know, it's not all about the dropping a ball and it falls. The world really is all about uncertainty. It's ambiguous. Causes don't lead to effect; things just happen without any action on your part. Sometimes you take an action, and nothing happens, even though you want it to happen.

So there are lots of gaps in meaning because that meaning that we want to be there is not there, and we still search for it. We still want that meaning to be there. We want certainty. We want to resolve that ambiguity. And con artists, that's what they do. They resolve it for us. They give us meaning. That's why I think the same principles that underlie cons are the principles that organized religion follows, because you have spontaneous organized religion in societies throughout the world. You see it throughout history, over and over. Religion just keeps popping up because, once again, it also gives meaning and explains things and gives people a purpose.

And that's what con artists do; they sell meaning, they sell purpose. There's a saying that's kind of out in the ether, and there are lots of varieties of it, but it goes something like this: religion emerged when the first scoundrel met the first fool. This has been attributed to Voltaire, to Mark Twain, to Carl Sagan. I mean, it's been attributed to just anyone who had a problem with organized religion, and it seems to make a lot of sense. Because here you have someone who wants meaning, who wants some sort of depth to life, and then you have someone who sees that and says, "Uh-huh, that's an opportunity for me. I'm smart. I know that life is meaningless. I know that all this stuff doesn't mean anything. I know that, you know, there's no afterlife, there's no this, there's no that. Let me see what would make this person feel better."

And if that person feels better, you know what's gonna happen? That person's gonna give me money because he's going to be so grateful for feeling better that I'll be able to elicit donations. I'll be respected. I will be a person of great esteem in society. And there you have an opening, and there you have the first priest. And I say "priest" in a very broad way: priest of any religion or any spiritual movement or a cult leader. By the way, cults are the most profound and terrifying cons there are, because that's your spiritual con. That's someone who tricks you into joining something that's going to take over your life, even though you have no idea that that's what you're joining.

It's very clear what the intentionality behind that original quote is because if there's an opening, someone is going to take that opening. Most people are not scoundrels, but there are plenty of scoundrels out there. And it certainly doesn't help us that we are all basically hardwired to trust other people. We're really bad at spotting deception. And you actually see over the course of history that societies with greater levels of trust end up being societies that develop more, that are economically sounder, that have better social institutions.

And on an individual level, you see people with higher levels of trust; you see them usually being smarter, getting ahead more in terms of their professional careers, being happier, being healthier. It makes a lot of sense because for society to get ahead, you need to build that society. How does society get formed? Through human connections, through bonds, through people trusting one another, working together, actually building institutions. How do people get ahead? Once again, through social connections. You don't get ahead on your own.

And so we end up trusting, and that plays into our wanting to believe even more. And so, con artists just have a field day.