CHAPTER 12
Honesty
It’s Absolutely the Best Policy (Sometimes)
IN 2010 A HARVARD SENIOR named Adam Wheeler applied for a Rhodes scholarship with amazing credentials. In addition to his perfect GPA, he’d won Harvard’s senior thesis prize as a junior, coauthored four academic books—with two of his own under way—lectured on seventeenth-century English poetry and Zoroastrian cosmology, and knew such improbable languages as Classical Armenian and Old Persian. Instead of spending the following year at Oxford, however, Wheeler spent it in prison. Nearly everything on his résumé had been invented, forged, or plagiarized, down to his admission to Harvard, which was based on doctored SAT scores and fake transcripts from schools he’d never attended.
Wheeler’s was not the first such case. In 2008 a similar run of forgery and imposture was discovered at Yale. In 2007 a woman spent nearly a year at Stanford masquerading as a student. In 2006 another woman borrowed the identity of a missing person to attend Columbia after having attended Harvard under a different false identity. Such incidents have occurred with predictable regularity since the darkest antiquity, which is to say, since at least the 1980s, shortly after competition for elite university spots became a national obsession.
Self-invention and imposture are, of course, hardly the discovery of Ivy League aspirants. In open societies, wherever credentials bestow honor and fame, someone will inevitably be prepared to fake them. Where there is no Ivy League, no Wall Street, no Silicon Valley, other channels for rapid upward mobility and repute will be found. In 1704, for example, there appeared in London the first native of Formosa (modern-day Taiwan) whom Londoners had ever met, a certain George Psalmanazar. The English, captivated by his bizarre manners and exotic tales, encouraged Psalmanazar to write a book explaining the grotesque customs of his native land. All this brought him considerable renown, but, as it happened, George Psalmanazar was actually a destitute Frenchman who’d never been in the vicinity of Formosa and knew no Asiatic languages. Everything about his persona was an elaborate fabrication, down to the ingenious claim—advanced to deflect questions about his distinctly European appearance—that his pallor was the result of the Formosan tradition of living underground. Remarkably, the discovery of Psalmanazar’s charade did him little damage; he went on to a moderately successful career as a writer and scholar, one that likely would not have been possible had he not caught London’s attention with his Formosan tales in the first place.
Should Psalmanazar have suffered for his self-misrepresentation? Putting aside what he was not, what Psalmanazar turned out to be was a gifted linguist and a respectable scholar in need of patronage and exposure. His deceit was, we might say, a victimless crime. True, readers who bought his book thinking it a true account of Formosa were duped out of their shillings, just as Harvard was bilked out of several thousand dollars in scholarship and prize money by Wheeler. But to count the wages of such deception in purely monetary terms misses the point. As a canny character in Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man observes about such frauds, “Money, you think, is the sole motive to pains and hazard, deception and deviltry, in this world. How much money did the devil make by gulling Eve?”
People like Psalmanazar and Wheeler aren’t interested in stealing fortunes or taking lives, but in getting an unearned share of esteem and prestige from society’s supply, earned shares of which are often disbursed according to dubious principles of merit anyway. So what good is honesty? As a virtue, it’s clearly a sometimes thing. When we all know that “the system” can be gamed, why shouldn’t we applaud the most audacious players—or better yet, join them?
To some degree, all ambitious college applicants are junior varsity Adam Wheelers. Everyone knows what admissions committees want to hear—that they were born without money, parents, or a majority of their limbs; that they rescued abandoned puppies, attended to pediatric cancer patients, and tutored a moderately sized village in sub-Saharan Africa, all while holding down an A average and playing goalie for the state-championship soccer team. College admissions has become an elaborate game of exaggeration and self-promotion not wholly unlike outright self-invention. One impressed writer for the student gossip blog IvyGate put the dilemma clearly:
The loquacious and devious Adam Wheeler presents us with quite a pickle. He’s learned our language, mastered our ways, and taken the self-promotion and ambition that we’re all groomed for—yes, all—to its natural conclusion…. If it walks like an Ivy student, talks like an Ivy student, then it is, without a doubt, an Ivy student.
Imitation can be as good as the real thing, when the real thing is itself bankrupt. If impostors like Wheeler can slip past the exalted gatekeepers so easily, then what’s so special about the stuff behind the gates? Very little, according to David Samuels’s 2008 book, The Runner, an account of serial con man James Hogue’s 1989 effort to win admission to Princeton by inventing the persona of a self-educated cowboy orphan who “read Plato under the stars.” Although Hogue’s application was a wholesale fabrication, once at Princeton he proved a stellar student, earning nearly all As. By contrast, Walter Kirn, who attended Princeton the “honest” way a few years before Hogue, explained his approach to his studies thusly:
I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas disguised as conclusions that I’d reached myself…. I sought solace in the company of other frauds (we seemed to recognize one another instantly), and together we refined our acts…. I came to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they, too, were actors. In classroom discussions, and even when grading essays, they seemed to favor us over the hard workers, whose patient, sedimentary study habits were ill adapted, I concluded, to the new world of antic postmodernism that I had mastered almost without effort. To thinkers of this school, great literature was a con, and I—a born con man who hadn’t read any great literature and was looking for any excuse not to—was eager to agree with them.
When it’s frauds all the way down, past even the turtles, what possible justification is there for the ambitious to develop those “patient, sedimentary study habits” that will win them nothing but Bs and a slow, painstaking rise to middle management? Kirn can afford to admit all this to us now, three decades after the fact, precisely because these youthful tricks resulted in a highly successful writing career. Would you, too, like a successful writing career? Talent in the arts is hard to quantify and subject to variations in taste. Every step after college admission requires ever more aggressive self-aggrandizement. Everyone’s doing it. So what does it hurt to improve your self-presentation a little? As long you don’t find yourself going by a fake name.
Or at least not more than one at a time.
That’s the line the opponents of honesty trot out, anyway. They emphasize that the system is full of holes, that its most successful products are self-inventors of a sort only barely discernible from the outright frauds, and that the best response to all this rottenness is to be even more rotten than everyone else. Either because nothing less will get you where you want to be, or because the spread of rot will speed the collapse of an already hollow structure.
There is, to be sure, another view. The Impostor Defense Front is checked by what we might call the Honesty Enforcement Front. Honesty enforcers respond to the same provocations by doubling their commitment to “the system,” and trying to seal the cracks in the structure through which Adam Wheelers slip. It’s hard to know who’s worse.
For every Adam Wheeler who wins a seat at Harvard, the members of the Honesty Enforcement Front argue, twenty honest, hard-working, high-achieving, never-sleeping applicants are left out in the cold. (And one of those just happens to be their very own child!) All of which is why admissions offices ought to conduct top-secret, clearance-level background checks on applicants. And if schools aren’t going to tap into the NSA’s records, then at least there ought to be a test for such things. One test, for the whole country, everyone sitting for it at the same time, and felony convictions for cheaters. It could be like just like China’s gaokao.
Like the Impostor Defense Front, with its mixed constituency of sincere strivers looking for an open door and hardened cynics looking to bring down the edifice, the Honesty Enforcement Front is also an uneasy marriage of opposites. There are the hard-line panopticists, who would not let a single lie go undetected. These have made common cause with preachers of the gospel of authenticity, another parent-heavy sect that believes that poor Adam Wheeler was driven to his misdeeds by the intense pressure and competitiveness of our society, which prevents students from “just being themselves” or “learning for its own sake.” If only we didn’t push ourselves and our children so hard! Once we’re freed from competitive impulses, our authentic selves will emerge from encrusted layers of self-promoting spin. As totalitarian as a panoptic world of enforced honesty might sound, it’s hard to know if it’s really worse than this alternative world in which nothing is worth lying about because there is nothing to strive after.
Against both the Impostor Defenders and Honesty Enforcers, we might consider how the particular dishonesty of imposture is, like obesity, an unsightly sign of a certain kind of societal health—and one whose natural punishments are sufficient to put us off imposing artificially draconian measures against it. As our faux-Formosan friend demonstrated, the phenomenon of self-invention is neither uniquely American nor uniquely contemporary, and our Adam Wheelers are perhaps best understood in a context broader and wider than the woes of the modern American university or its diseased appendage, the meritocracy. Imposture is an inevitable result of open and mobile societies. It is the dark side of free markets and free movement. Adam Wheeler isn’t a symbol of American social immobility. Just the opposite. It is precisely because a kid from a public school in Nowheresville can get into Harvard that Wheeler tried to do so.
But it is also because Wheeler could get into Harvard by fraud that public school students everywhere can continue to do it honestly. Melville wryly observed that the suppression of barbarous forms of criminality like brigandage “would seem cause for unalloyed gratulation, and is such to all except those who think that in new countries, where the wolves are killed off, the foxes increase.” Rather than signaling civilization’s decay, fraud grows out of security, prosperity, and above all, trust. It is opportunity’s cost.
Precisely because the line between self-improvement and self-invention is so elusive, honesty is difficult to value properly. Benjamin Franklin, the first and perhaps greatest of America’s self-inventors, conspicuously left honesty out of his catalog of virtues. Instead, he preferred “sincerity,” which he defined “us[ing] no hurtful deceit”—a definition that leaves ample latitude for ambition’s designs. Franklin saw clearly the demands that a commercial economy and democratic sociability would make on us, and strict honesty was not among them.
Fortunately, self-invention has a certain natural limit in the very sociability that spawns it. We undertake to improve ourselves—even to the extent of outright self-fabrication—in order to win the esteem of people we aspire to be like and to befriend. Yet friendship requires us to sustain consistent identities, to be trustworthy and reliable, while successful fraud requires quite the opposite—a constantly changing identity whose foundations no one can know. The highest pleasures of friendship—its intimacy and confidence—are the very things the self-inventing fraud must avoid at all costs. The perfectly undetectable fraud may be doomed to perfect loneliness. This is a higher price for success than most strivers are willing to pay.
This is, admittedly, all a rather sanguine view of the self-limiting nature of fraudulence, and the necessity of tolerating even the most preposterously deceitful cases of it. It would be remiss, even dishonest, to omit the darker view of the situation depicted by Melville, which is perhaps the definitive account of the price of American self-invention. The Confidence-Man follows a protean figure aboard a Mississippi steamboat who spends an April Fool’s Day convincing the boat’s cynical passengers to invest their “confidence,” and usually a small monetary deposit, with him. The boat is a microcosm of the reigning spirit of the country, “the dashing and all-fusing spirit of the West, whose type is the Mississippi itself, which, uniting the streams of the most distant and opposite zones, pours them along, helter-skelter, in one cosmopolitan and confident tide.”
This spirit is animated from one end by the hard-boiled suspiciousness and self-reliance of a frontier people, embodied in the attitude of the boat’s barber, who hangs a “No Trust” sign from his door. But from the other end, it is fed by an exuberant faith in all the faddish indications of man’s moral progress—nature, science, markets, even the idea of “moral progress” itself—that threaten the frontier man’s steady distrustfulness, mainly because these were always the optimistic motives for conquering the frontier in the first place. The boat’s passengers boast of their practiced skepticism upon meeting the confidence-man, but he quickly discerns what it is that they do believe in, and they become opportunistic philistines under his spell, serially felled by his indefatigable exhortations to trust in the goodness of man. This is a dim picture of America—incorrigibly gullible, vulgar, greedy, self-immolating. Indeed, The Confidence-Man has often been read as an indictment of the easygoing commercial American disposition drawn for us by Franklin, and the character of the confidence-man (not incorrectly) taken for a distinctly American Satan.
But The Confidence-Man is, in the end, a satire, even if it is a satire of a fallen world inhabited by the devil. The comic vacuity of the confidence-man’s “philanthropy” and his victims’ ridiculous pretensions to misanthropy show us the pettiness of both our desire to succeed through deceit and, just as importantly, our outrage at finding ourselves the victims of such tricks. Melville picks up the Hobbesian insight that nothing pricks our pride more, “nothing triggers a stronger impulse to hurt someone,” than to be made a fool.
If occasionally misplaced trust is unavoidable in a porous, commercial society like ours, then we ought to be wary of both the Impostor Defenders and the Honesty Enforcers. Just as our first impulse when watching a confidence trick unfold is to envy the confidence man, our first impulse at being duped by him is to demand traps so pervasive and effective that no one can ever elude them. But the satisfaction of such impulses would require undermining the very openness and mobility that make our liberty possible, all for the sake of thwarting future George Psalmanazars and Adam Wheelers.
The strongest argument against such folly is to realize how utterly absurd these charades are, how inveterately stupid we are to fall for them each time—and how frankly funny this fact is. Melville warns that indulging in illusory visions of moral progress weakens our defenses against fraud. Our evidently incurable susceptibility to even the most preposterous lies is his evidence that moral perfection is in fact illusory. Just as perfectly reasonable and even highly educated people mistook an obvious Frenchman for a Taiwanese refugee, so did equally reasonable and highly educated people believe that an obscure college junior had compiled the academic résumé of a senior Harvard professor.
This is our comic lot, stuck as we are between perfect knowledge and perfect depravity. We must “suspect first and know next,” as one of Melville’s passengers confidently asserts, but we can’t suspect all the time, or know everything. Since we are for the most part too credulous and too sociable to either beat ’em or join ’em, our best hope is to expect them, and to moderate our outraged humiliation when they, predictably, appear. It’s safe to assume that our reason will reliably continue to fail us—our boss’s degree from the South Pacific University of Erehwon will prove to be fake, and our neighbor’s blood relationship to the crown prince of Denmark will turn out to be fractional descent from Danish peasants. It’s good to be wary. But it’s also good to consider that too much suspicion erodes honesty as effectively as too much trust. It is good, too, to remember that gullibility is the flip side of charity, and we are fortunate to have the luxury of credulousness.
Fraudulent self-invention is an old road to success, but a narrower and more potholed one than many of those seeking to either direct traffic to it or close it off understand. Even those who avoid exposure along the way find that, at its end, there is no one with whom to share their success. Having duped everyone else, their reward is the esteem and exclusive company of fellow impostors. Those seeking a lonely life of endless evasion for a dinner date with those whose greatest achievement is claiming someone else’s achievement are unlikely to be diverted from their course by exhortations to virtue. But the high road is sunnier, wider, and better paved. And it draws the better travelers, among whom it’s easier to find someone who’ll lend you a buck after you’ve been bilked.