learn from Poyais.

The year was 1823 when the first settlers arrived to Poyais.

Poyais, they had been told, was a fertile land filled with plentiful water and rich soil. The capital was St. Joseph, home to 1500 people, and built with stunning European design of opera houses, banks, and more. It had been a long journey, crossing the Atlantic Ocean and they had given up everything to get to Poyais, because, after all, who wouldn’t want to go and live in Paradise, especially with some kind of leadership position?

Long story, short, most of the “settlers” died from disease, shipwrecks, and overall depression at being deceived in a giant con. Poyais didn’t exist and never had. One would be tempted to say it was the greatest con in history but there are lots more.

Gregor MacGregor ran the con. He convinced hundreds of smart people to sell everything they had, quit their jobs, and give him money for the chance to live in Poyais. He developed a brilliant marketing campaign (propaganda) with pamphlets, fake money, great stories, amazing pictures, and books to prove how great a place Poyais was and that you should hurry to get your place on a boat that was going there to help settle it.

You can google the story or go read the amazing book Truth: A Brief History of Total Bullsh•t by Tom Phillips, from which I pretty much stole all of the above. You should read the book.

Later Phillips references another book The Ponzi Scheme Puzzle (from the reviews it looks pretty bad) in which the author studied the profile of con artists and came to this conclusion:

Some of the traits she identifies are unsurprising: con artists are lacking in empathy, narcissistic, greedy and self-justifying. When caught, they will deny and deflect, blaming just about anybody else rather than taking responsibility. They often justify their actions with the belief that they’re simply reflecting the behavior of others: everyone else is crooked, too, and the victims deserved it because they were equally greedy and corrupt.

But that’s not all. In addition, con artists often have what Frankel calls an “addiction to unrealistic dreams and overwhelming ambitions”; comparing the skills of the con artist to that of an actor, she suggests, “It may well be that con artists act the character they have long been dreaming of.”

And then this:

“Their belief can make them believable.”

All that to say I spend a lot of time wondering how the hell people can actually support and believe Donald Trump, after all this time and all these lies. But, it’s not that hard, really, we’re desperate to believe fantasy, especially fantasies that promise some kind of utopian life that can be ours. We want to believe it so badly that we will believe any kind of lunatic who offers us the opportunity to get it.

Of course, the same could be said of Biden and every leader and every visionary and every religious figure. Which is probably smart to spend a few cycles thinking on.

For now, beware of anyone promising Poyais, especially narcissistic, greedy ones that never take responsibly for anything and think everyone around them is as greedy and corrupt as they are. You might end up broke with malaria in the jungles of Honduras and not much else.