Magic Madoff -- MR Trickster

He was called Magic Madoff. He was the wizard of Wall Street, a hedge-fund alchemist who invented the elixir of consistent returns. For decades his cabal of clients earned a steady 10-12% a year, in good times and bad, as if suspended beyond the natural laws of economics. Magic Madoff never promised to make you rich. The pact he offered was to make you safe. But the real world is not a safe place, and magic is never safe.

Bernard Madoff – alleged ponzi scheme huckster – evaporated $50,000,000,000 in his alchemical laboratory. It destroyed his magus reputation. It did not diminish his status. He simply shape-shifted into another archetypal role, the trickster.

Myths and wonder tales celebrate the trickster as a witty, amoral anti-hero (or heroine – being the original gender-bender) who gleefully ignores rules, laws, conventions, and the consequences of crossing them. His joy is to be a spy in the house of order and to feed on it from within like a termite. He overturns assumptions, deflates egos, dashes expectations. He sees all systems as corrupt and all people as corruptible.

The trickster is the fraudulent tailor of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Hans Christian Anderson retold a story found in oral traditions around the world. A scam artist sells cloth with magic power – it will reveal who is honest and who is not, who is nobly born and who is not. Unfortunately, the victim ignores several paradoxes, the most obvious being that none of us is totally honest or noble so none of us will ever be able to see such unearthly matter. The trickster delivers the imaginary material of our own self-deception, then flees town as we parade nakedly inside it.

People delight in the trickster when he or she strips dignity from those with power – call him a comic rascal, a holy fool, a Robin Hood, a voice for the marginalized. “You can’t con an honest man,” is the smug truism, meaning that the speaker is honest and will not be hoodwinked. But “con” comes from “confidence,” as in confidence man or confidence trick. The grifter establishes a bond of trust with the victim and then abuses it for his own gain. The link between trickster and trick-ee can be greed and false pride, or it can be compassion and community. Both ends of the spectrum involve an emotional connection built on how the victim believes the world “should” be rather than how it really is.

We are humiliated and shamed when the trickster dupes us, so much so that most small-time scams are never reported to authorities. We despise the trickster as a criminal when he harms the weak and helpless. Then we call him a sociopath. The jokester laughs because he has no respect for human constructs, including the ones called decency and fairness. He perceives time as the here and now – no past to regret and no future to strive for – and he lives reality at the root level of individual survival. The trickster dismisses culture as a fabric woven by naked people anxious to cover themselves.

Bernie Madoff, world-class bunko artist, has been compared to a serial killer in his sense of entitlement. He established himself as an imperialist god, wrote a secret set of rules that only he knew, conquered vast financial territories, peopled his universe with subjects who allowed themselves to be seduced and re-invented, and engineered their fates. Don’t we each have a little Madoff character inside us, chafing to rule the world as it “should” be?

The constructs Madoff disregarded and manipulated are the ones about how our society measures wealth. This flimsy money-stuff is, after all, just paper – nowadays even less, just electronic transfers through cyber-space. It’s meaningful as treasure only when we all agree on its value.

Bernard Madoff represents that most terrifying of tricksters, the one within. No matter how educated I am, how alert or street-savvy or just gosh-darn smart, there is in my psyche my own personal hustler, dangerously unmoored from taboos and the remorse one is supposed to feel upon breaking them. My inner grifter knows my intimate hopes and fears, abuses them ruthlessly, and then laughs like a hyena as I, daily, humiliate myself in public without even knowing it. My self-delusions are so obvious to other people. Why don’t I see them?


Addendum:
As I searched for images to illustrate this post, it became obvious how many jester/trickster portraits include a caricature of a Semitic nose. Mr. Madoff is Jewish, and I didn’t want to create a subtext about his ethnicity. But I also realized that my inner Political Correctness Officer was censoring me. So I decided to include the images I wanted but to comment about them. What I learned from this exercise is that part of the European/Christian expression of the trickster archetype is to make him the dangerous “otherly” Jew, to emphasize that he is outside of me, not inside as part of my own character.