On Cooling America Out

We've been the marks of our own long cons, all the way up

I’ve been closely re-reading Erwing Goffman’s classic 1952 paper, On Cooling the Mark Out, after more than a decade, and this re-read feels very different, driven by the vague intuition that it sheds some important light on the status of the very idea of America today, as in the United States, at a time when it is busy renegotiating its identity with itself, and doing a piss-poor job of it.

If you’re not familiar with it, go read it right now. It explores a delicious idea — how perpetrators of long cons make arrangements to essentially console the victim and help them deal with the humiliation and identity assault they’ve just experienced so they don’t create a costly fuss. It’s an essential piece of follow through to ensure that the con doesn’t end up as a costly score because the victim isn’t willing to just take the loss quietly. The goal of the con itself is to ensure the mark loses. The goal of the cooling is to ensure they accept their new status as a loser.

We’re poised at a historical moment where it feels like the United States, as a country, is about to realize it is the mark of a long con it set up for itself over a century ago, and its self-cooling-out mechanisms are failing.

But let me not get ahead of myself. First, let me introduce the original idea.

The key insight of the paper is that more than the material loss, however large, the cost of the con to the mark is the loss of a certain image they had of themselves, which is now falsified by social facts. It is a kind of social death.

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.

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 de-fenses 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 an-other 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 won-der 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.

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.

The first time I read the paper, I think I paid attention mainly to the early part of the paper where he talks about the idea of cooling the mark out in the specific context of long cons. I think I kinda skimmed over the rest of the paper, which on this re-read now strikes me as far more interesting. In the latter part, Goffman goes on a wild, speculative ride, proposing that cooling the mark out is not a narrow sociological pattern restricted to the world of long cons, but a fundamental pattern explaining all of society. The conceit is similar to the one in Huizenga’s Home Ludens, which proposes that all human culture is ludic in nature.

Naturally I love such conceits, since I harbor many of them myself. The true value of an idea is not that it explains what it sets out to explain (finding and developing such ideas is the essence of intellectual grinding) but that it explains vastly more at least at a mildly plausible level. Like orders of magnitude more phenomenology. It’s the intellectual equivalent of winning the lottery. The opposite of grinding.

Let’s call these jackpot ideas. Cooling the mark out is a jackpot idea. So is “all culture is play.” In my own resume, I’d count the Gervais Principle, manufactured normalcy, escaped reality, premium mediocre, domestic cozy/cozyweb, Internet of Beefs, and more recently, superhistory, oozification, and camera-not-engine, as modest little jackpot ideas. I’m lazy. I’m pretty much only interested in jackpot ideas. I don’t like grinding, and am not particularly good at it, and I like getting lucky.

Back to cooling the mark out. Goffman’s essential thesis is that all of society is set up around a particular formula:

1. Sell people various aspirational scripts that by definition only a small minority will actually be able to realize, as a function of aptitude and luck

2. Cool out those who fail to continue being productive or at least not harmful members of society, accepting various sorts of consolation prizes

Careers of any sort, consumption behaviors, dating and marriage, competitive activities like sports, face-saving norms, cultures of shame and guilt, military misadventures. Everything fits the cooling-the-mark-out pattern. Because not cooling marks out is incredibly expensive to society.

Sustained personal disorganization is one way in which a mark can refuse to cool out. Another standard way is for the individual to raise a squawk, that is, to make a formal complaint to higher authorities obliged to take notice of such matters. The con mob worries lest the mark appeal to the police. The plant manager must make sure that the disgruntled department head does not carry a formal complaint to the general manager or, worse still, to the Board of Directors. The teacher worries lest the child’s parent complain to the principal. Similarly, a woman who communicates her evaluation of self by accepting a proposal of marriage can sometimes protect her exposed position‑should the necessity of doing so arise‑by threatening her disaffected fiancé with a breach‑of‑promise suit. So, also, a woman who is de‑courting her hus-band must fear lest he contest the divorce or sue her lover for alienation of affection. In much the same way, a customer who is angered by a salesperson can refuse to be mollified by the floorwalker and demand to see the manager. It is interesting to note that associations dedicated to the rights and the honor of minority groups may sometimes encourage a mark to reg-ister a formal squawk; politically it may be more advantageous to provide a test case than to allow the mark to be cooled out.

Curiously, the paper does not get into the behavior of collectives that have been played, and must now be cooled out as collectives, nor does it comment on the peculiar features of the most interesting society when it comes to cooling marks out — America. Many of the peculiarities have to do with collective cooling-out behaviors.

The US is something of a clueless striver culture of idealistic innocents who believe themselves to be worldly and cunning, based on a bewildering stack of ludicrous mythologies ranging from the personal-scale “American Dream” to the various eras of American Exceptionalism. This is true even of the macho idealism of the right.

It is also a culture of people who seem systematically disposed to the suspicion that they are being conned by someone in everything they do, and are primed to try and con others pre-emptively before they get conned. And do so while maintaining an image of their own righteousness. Trust, but verify, is the nice way of putting it. A more accurate way might be: I’m a good person, but everyone is out to get me, so I’d better try to get them first. I’m still a good person.

A book I reference often, Dan McAdams’ The Redemptive Self, dives deep into the peculiarities of American self-authorship. In light of Goffman’s theory, the redemption narrative that is the American default (at least in the white population), is a life-scale cooling-out operating system capable of accommodating both script success/guilt and failure.

Belief in the American Narrative Stack, as it were, is based on believing the rest of the world is some mix of childlike and/ effete and exhausted, and until recently, an American Burden to be taken care of, firmly but kindly.

As you might expect, the stack routinely fails at all levels, causing both domestic and international embarrassment. It also contains plenty of outright lies about both America and the rest of the world (as when Bill Clinton iirc, claimed credit for splitting the atom, which belongs to Rutherford (New Zealand), Fermi (Italian phase) and Cockroft/Walton (UK)).

Domestically, the US has pioneered perhaps the most unique solution to the problem of marks needing to be cooled out — litigiousness (the Indian solution is probably the doctrine of karma). Not only do Americans threaten to sue each other routinely, they invite others to sue them. The phrase so sue me could not have emerged anywhere else. And the litigiousness goes all the way up. Organizations, cities, and government agencies all sue each other, or threaten lawsuits, all the time. Relatedly, American governance is a vetocracy, where many actors at many levels can stop things from happening. This both raises the stakes for cooling marks out (persuading marks to not exercise veto rights), and offers a mechanism for doing so (threatening or inviting vetoes).

Actual lawsuits, of course, are rarer and more pragmatic than the culture of threatening and inviting lawsuits. And vetoes are exercised less often than they could be.

I read this as a self-serve, DIY social infrastructure for cooling yourself out. The thing about lawsuits is, you can always excuse failure to actually follow through by blaming the slowness of the courts, the power of money to pervert justice, the venality of laywers, and so forth. The threats and invitations to sue do much of the cooling-out work. Similarly, the theoretical possibility of veto actions offers a similar way to vent energies.

Internationally, it has historically been in the interest of other nations to humor American national conceits. Privately, other world leaders may attribute America’s success as a nation to the jackpot of a rich continent emptied out with disease and built out with slave labor, but for over 150 years, it has been an easy choice to suppress cynicism at American self-congratulation and validate the countries narrative stack in exchange for a share of the spoils of its history.

Important events in American history have revolved around large-scale mark-cooling-out chapters. The most important one was likely the cooling out of poor southern Whites, post Civil War, when they were fed the narrative, “at least we’re better off than blacks” in the new dispensation. The American response to 9/11 was tolerated around the world in part due to the coercive capabilities of the America’s underground empire, but also in part to allow America to cool itself out after the humiliation of being struck in the homeland.

Somewhere in the background, all Americans have always realized that the narratives they live by are sustained by neighbors all the way up being willing to humor them. At the international level, America has tended to use a mix of carrots and sticks to not just let us get what we want, but validate the narratives we spin about it all.

This means the American narrative identity has always rested on the ability to bully and bribe people into nodding along.

For immigrants like me, who were too old at the time of immigration to ever fully buy into the American narrative stack, the conscious act of choosing to immigrate here still involved us in the stakes.

We’re now in an era where America is no longer in the mood to be generous with its wealth and power, or shoulder planetary responsibilities in ways proportionate to its extractive tendencies. Which means planetary counterparties increasingly have fewer reasons to humor American conceits or validate American narratives. To the extent the US is still an enormously powerful country, it will increasingly need to rely on naked power to get what it wants, which in turn will put increasing stress on individual Americans’ identities as good people and prosocial members of humanity at large, rather than complicit in increasingly unconscionable behaviors at planetary scale.

Internally, this will put increasing stress on the cooling-out mechanisms for domestic and local identities as well. The last decade’s culture war is one sign of that. Threats and invitations to sue and veto each other are no longer sufficient to save face as our individual and collective identities start to crumble.

Overall, we’re headed for a deep reckoning with what I previously dubbed Chor-Pharn’s Law: If you know who you are, you get a civilizational war, if you don’t know who you are, you get a culture war.

As our cooling-out infrastructure fails throughout the narrative stack, we’re going to get both. What Goffman calls “personal disorganization” is going to start playing out at all scales of collectivity. In fact, it’s already started. That’s what all the derangement syndromes of the last decade have been about. The beginnings of identity disorganization at all levels.

Towards the end of the paper, Goffman notes that actually dealing with the pain of loss of identity is the work being avoided by cooling-out processes. But such pain cannot be deferred indefinitely, either by individuals or nations.