If
it hasn’t yet happened on your watch, you can be sure
it will, and very likely on multiple occasions; and depending
on the thinness or thickness of your one and only epidermis,
you’ll never be quite the same.
It’s
more likely to occur when circumstance finds you outside your
comfort zone, while travelling for example, on a business
trip, or in any environment that puts you in contact with
people you don’t or hardly know. You are particularly
vulnerable if you are alone and lonely, and looking to satisfy
the basic human need of connecting with another human being.
The
modus operandi is almost embarrassingly predictable. A polite
stranger finds a pretext to offer assistance or requires it
himself, which leads to a casual exchange of nothing of importance
before the smooth operator (code for ingratiating interloper,
usually male) begins to inquire about your situation, what
brings you to his neck of the woods, what you do in life;
and over the course of perhaps several hours the seeds of
a relationship begin to grow roots, as you happily preside
over the gradual satisfying of your hunger to bond with another
human being. During the initial getting–to-know-you
period, you are alert and sensitive to the multitude of signs
and signals that are being sent out and received, wanting
to be sure that before you commit emotionally, the bonding
process is two-way, that you are both on the same page.
When
you rudely discover that the preternaturally considerate and
obliging stranger is not and was never interested in entering
into any kind of personal relationship, but was exploiting
your vulnerability to bond in order to extract a favour (usually
sexual or business related), you are hurt and disappointed
in both the outcome and yourself for not identifying the correct
signals. If this is already a repeat of past experience, it
might be the back breaker that makes you decide that enough
is enough, that in order to guard against future unwanted
manipulation-exploitation of your highly valued feelings,
from this day on you will command yourself, against your better
nature, to be reflexively suspicious of any encounter with
seemingly well-intended strangers, doubting your ability to
distinguish between the actor and the authentic person –
a sad state of affairs that forces you to suppress the most
basic of human emotions – the DNA-driven desire/need
to bond.
Existential
philosophy begins with the pre-supposition that being is being-in-the-world
with-others.
The
singer/poet Leonard Cohen writes, “there are children
in the morning, they are leaning out for love, they will lean
that way forever.” For our entire lives we are those
children leaning out for love and affection, and when we discover
we have been tricked and sold again, it’s as if the
most precious part of us has been ripped out and left for
dead.
In
the existential after-math of the meltdown, we become equal
opportunity prosecutors. We accuse ourselves for failing to
properly assess the true nature of the encounter, of failing
to sniff out the deliberate dissimulation, and we are quick
to lock up for life the conniving perpetrator in the Despicable
Human Being category for having exploited our goodness, our
adult innocence for selfish ends.
Oscar
Wilde, for whom the ends – beauty and pleasure -- justify
the means in his most famous creation, Dorian Gray, dryly
notes: “What people call insincerity is simply a method
by which we can multiply our personalities,” We at once
chuckle and cringe at the witticism because it forces us to
concede that the truth that inheres in the general category
of these one-sided, life-altering encounters, upon closer
inspection, are more nuanced than the straight forward good
and evil, right and wrong binaries in especially the daily
conduct of our lives in a mostly unjust, iniquitous world,
but for the privileged few.
If
we are to lay bare the truth of the encounter in all its facets,
the first among the concessions we begrudgingly make to the
person who has taken advantage of our naiveté is to
allow for his highly probably material want. In the many economically
disadvantaged regions of the world, the offending party is
merely one of among the faceless multitudes unable to provide
the basic necessities of life for either himself or his family.
How should we judge the man whose well has dried up and an
arbitrary contract (a border on a map) prevents him from accessing
a nearby source of water? The man who carries in his thoughts
the suffering of his family for lack of food and shelter will
of necessity shrink to a vanishing point the sum of his moral
convictions and the laws of the land into one clear objective:
to get from one day to the next. He will be judged by those
in his care and will judge himself on his performance. And
it’s all one and the same whether he finds temporary
work, becomes a thief or a confidence man to make the frazzled
ends of his life meet not at the end of the rainbow but in
the deep of the hole where the circumstance of his birth --
climate and politics -- has deposited him. Meanwhile, on the
other side of the Dow Industrial, where our halcyon days over
the course of a lifetime are exponentially easier than his,
we will surely grant that if the shoe were on the other foot
we would walk the same path.
.
Experience also teaches us that not every confidence man is
cut from the same coarse cloth, and our reaction will vary
accordingly. We should not be expected to look past the snake
charmer whose narrow purpose is to entice us to visit his
carpet shop, jewelry outlet, or 5-star resto, who is already
rich and wants to get richer, who enjoys exploiting the emotional
vulnerability of others to satisfy an incontinent lust for
power and control? Of these types, there is only one proper
response: to know them by their category in order to sidestep
them before they attempt to step down on us.
The
more difficult challenge is to identify those persons in whom
poorly understood, vague promptings are operating, such that
the offender, after the fact, is at once baffled and shamed
by his own uncharacteristically opprobrious conduct. A man,
heir to a colonial past, may unwittingly prey on another’s
emotional vulnerability to right perceived historical wrongs
as part of an obscure healing process. An adult serial abuser
may be unaware of being abused as a child and the vicious
circle in which he is ensnared – often for life. In
these cases, the child is indeed the “father of the
man” but whose childhood has been stolen.
There
comes a time in life when most of us learn that life isn’t
fair, and that far too many people are hurting in the world.
An arguably significant percentage of us are subconsciously
driven to hurt back, which is why, suffering from the cummulative
effects of negative encounters, we find ourselves reflexively
refusing our predisposition to bond.
It
is only very recent in human history that we find ourselves
in the conduct of our daily lives embedded in the midst of
strangers, whose pasts and predilections are completely unknown.
When we were living in tribes, and later hamlets and small
villages, everyone was known to everyone else. The notion
of preying on someone’s bonding instincts for personal
gain didn’t exist as we know it in our time. If today,
bonding with strangers is an occupational hazard, it is because
the risks of a negative outcome are more likely than the rewards.
The frigid demeanor we project to the world, the carapace
the history of our negative experiences makes us grow is a
cynical reminder that the heart is too fragile a thing to
subject to the roll of the dice.
What
all emotionally exploitive relationships share are the gains
and losses to be accounted for and the hard lessons to be
learned. The fraudster or confidence man who is caught in
the act rudely learns that he must improve his performance
if he wishes to procure the advantage he seeks, while the
victim will be more circumspect and judicious in all future
encounters with strangers.
The
big loser is the bonding process itself that is left dangling
over an existential void, while the legions of the disabused
swell their ranks. How many of us count among the jaded-for-lifers,
of necessity having to restrict our circle of contacts to
only those we know and trust. How do we resolve the dichotomy
that obliges us to suppress the best and most beautiful part
of ourselves in order to be ourselves?
If
the iniquitous distribution of the world’s wealth is
to an uncertain extent responsible for producing the mindset
that says exploiting someone’s predisposition to bond
is fair game in an unfair world, we may one day decide that
a more equitable sharing of our material advantage is the
best way to save the world from the growing cynicism that
prevails in our encounters with “the other.”
