Towards a Politics of Strategic Gullibility

One of the many social phenomena that I thought were specific to Lebanon when I left it in the mid 1970s and that I have seen grow with a vengeance in the western world since, is something that I will call decipiophobia: an excessive fear of being deceived, in the sense of being hoodwinked, conned or tricked (decipio in Latin). 

 

What I mean by excessive is that it is out of proportion to how often one is actually tricked and conned in life. Decipiophobia is an invitation to see trickery and deceit as a dimension of every kind of interaction one has with the world. Excessive also means that the subject acts as if his or her life depends on it: anything but being caught out as naïve; anything but people finding out that you have trusted someone who cannot be trusted; or worse still, being seen to having been taken for a ride. ‘Being seen to be’ is an important aspect of the phobia: the fear is not just of ‘being conned’ but of ‘being seen by others to have been conned’. For one can cope with failure but not the reputation of being a failure. Likewise, one can cope with being conned, but not with being thought of as gullible. Thus, an important preoccupation when presenting oneself in everyday life (à la Erving Goffman) is to ensure that one is seen by others as the kind of person who is not easily duped.

 

In Lebanon decipiophobia is an integral part of the culture of shatahra (cleverness). This is a culture integral to the mercantile laissez tout faire capitalism that dominates Lebanon. It pits people against each other and against a social environment that is perceived as challenging, if not outright hostile. You’re driving home through a traffic jam, you’re finalising a business transaction, you’re in a government office trying to obtain a permission to do something or another, you’re in a busy shop trying along with many others to reach a counter to pay: there are no forms of organised behaviour and no laws to help you. It’s you and your wits alone against everyone and everything. In this situation, the imperative of avoiding being outsmarted by someone who ends up being more of a shahterr (masculine) or a shahtera (feminine) – cleverer and sharper at dealing with a situation and coming out a winner – than you is paramount. This was and remains one of the salient dimensions of social and economic interpersonal interaction in Lebanon. 

 

The fear of being seen to have been outsmarted extends into a fear of being seen to be gullible, and of being seen to trust people who shouldn’t be trusted. It creates an ethos and disposition whereby it is safer to act as if you do not trust anyone and don’t believe anything. Everything that comes your way has to be handled with suspicion. This traditional retort to someone you think is trying to outwit you captures this attitude well: ‘wleh, ana lamma khelik el sheetahn, kint ’am dayyif meghli.’ This has to be said in a tone similar to the famed De Niro’s rendition of ‘You talkin’ to me?’ in Taxi Driver. It translates as: ‘hey smartie pants, who you’re talking to was distributing meghli when the devil was born’. ‘Meghli’ is a traditional spiced rice pudding distributed by the hosting family when celebrating the birth of a baby. Thus, the retort implies ‘I was already part of the devil’s family celebrating his birth when the devil was born’ which in turn suggests ‘I can outwit the devil, so don’t try and outwit me’. 

 

Decipiophobia generates a society where the lack of trust is endemic. This comes at an incredible psychological cost. For the level of tension and the psychic expenditure needed to relate to people with this continuous overdeveloped state of suspicion is enormous. There is a clear affinity between decipiophobia and paranoia and the first can easily turn into the other. It is exhausting. It is all the more so because the Lebanese have to sustain at the same time a quasi-feudal myth of Lebanon and of themselves that is the exact opposite of the above. In this myth, Lebanon is a place where ‘trust’ and ‘honour’ are the most important things there are. Thus, paradoxically, while suspicion is valorised within the culture of shatahra it also comes with a layer of guilt: a guilt generated by not living up to the feudal fantasy of oneself that one still entertains, despite all. This plays out as a tension between a capitalist-produced subject living a life of relative poverty and unmet needs, that encourages suspicion, petty calculations and the instrumentalization of others, and the quasi-feudal big-hearted subject desiring to be seen as if in a constant ‘state of potlatch’ where they can trust everyone because everyone owes them. It is yet another tension among many that is internalised and normalised by the Lebanese such that its poisonous effect on everyday life becomes unnoticed.

 

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My partner, Caroline, is reading the most recent messages on her ‘next door’ app, an app where people from our neighbourhood leave all kind of messages, selling furniture they no longer need, requesting babysitters, offering to walk dogs, etc… ‘Look’, Caroline says. ‘This guy is saying he has nothing to eat. ‘Show me’ I say suspiciously. A photo of the guy showed him to be a middle-aged white man. While I was wondering whether he really needs help or he is ‘bludging’ on the neighbours, Caroline had already gone to the fridge and packed some food. ‘I am about to walk the dog and he lives on the way. I’ll also buy him some bacon and eggs on the way’ she said. I was immediately confronted with the fact that while I was approaching his request with suspicion, Caroline did not hesitate for one second. She just acted. I don’t think Caroline’s behaviour is a common Australian behaviour. She is quite special this way. But my suspicion was a common Lebanese one. 

 

A memory of an aunt of mine in Beirut who used to take me out for an ice-cream every now and then when I was a child comes to me. Every time we were approached by beggars she would tell me: ‘never give these people anything. They are much richer than you think. They have gold hidden in their houses.’ I remember even as a kid thinking: ‘even if they have gold, there’s something wrong if they choose to do this for a living.’ She used to say it so often that many people would gently mock her. When a beggar showed up someone would say: ‘here comes Aunty Josephine’s millionaire.’ When I became teenager my friends and I joined in mocking her. We would say to her: ‘you know you were right aunty. So and so, the beggar near the petrol station, he’s bought a bungalow next to us at the beach resort.’ ‘Really!?’ she would say. ‘Yes, we swear we’ve seen him’ we would reply. Still, despite this, what she and many others had instilled in me made it impossible for me to see a beggar without being suspicious at first wanting to know whether they’re not taking me for a ride, whether they ‘really’ deserve it or not.

 

Such is decipiophobia. It is like racism and sexism. If you have been formed to think in this particular way, it is a continuous struggle to stop oneself from doing so. As a first step, what you can hope for is becoming aware of yourself the moment you are exhibiting the unfortunate symptoms, and not allowing your behaviour to be influenced by these unfortunate tendencies that have been instilled in you. But you can do more. When you are overtaken by suspicion and the fear of being conned, you can ‘wager on trust’. 

 

The idea of ‘wagering’ comes from Pascal’s notion of ‘wagering on God’. For Pascal, even if you do not believe in God you can put yourself on the road towards believing by simply practically doing what believers do: go to mass, taking the holly water, etc… Assuming you really desire to believe, of course. Likewise, if you really desire to be a trusting kind of person, it is practice infused with this desire, not just intellectual reasoning, reflexivity and self-critique, that sets you on the path. After Caroline left for her walk, I said to myself as I’ve said to myself on a number of occasions: ‘Next time I see a beggar, I commit myself to simply give him or her money without even thinking about ‘why’ and ‘what if’’. And I did, knowing I’ll lapse into decipiophobia again and will try work on myself again by wagering on trust. I like to think that this way of working is guided by a kind of ‘strategic gullibility’ which is another way of conceiving of ‘wagering on trust’. Clearly, I don’t mean by strategic gullibility ‘acting as if you believe every word uttered by the Prime Minister today’. As with anti-racist and anti-sexist practices, strategic also means politically directed, in this case directed strategically towards creating spaces of trust and solidarity with downtrodden people. It is to this politics that I will now turn.

 

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As I began by writing, my interest in decipiophobia did not simply emanate from a desire to explore the way it marks Lebanon and the Lebanese, or the way it marks me personally and how I deal with it. It is also motivated by the fact that I see it as an increasingly diffused phenomenon worldwide. More importantly, I think there is a strong affinity between the rise of decipiophobia and the rise of right-wing populism, thus the importance of making it the target of intellectual critique and of thinking of ways of challenging it practically at an individual and a collective level.

 

In Australia, for instance, but I know that this has been the case in many places in Europe and the United States, the opposition to refugees is marked and reinforced by a clearly decipiophobic impulse. Refugees are routinely portrayed by right-wing nationalists the way my aunt saw Beirut’s beggars, as ‘faking it’, as being less needy that they make out to be, and as trying to con a naïve and innocent western world into accepting them. Once perceived this way, anything the refugees can do to demonstrate that they are genuine becomes proof of how cunning they are. Thus, we often see among those opposed to refugees an on-going inter-play between racist essentialism and decipiophobia with each reinforcing the other. In Australia as elsewhere, a symptom of this decipiophobia is a nostalgia for an imaginary white innocent self that is seen as having been corrupted and lost by the cunning and lack of sincerity of those requesting refuge: we were kind, and by trying to con us, they made us nasty.

 

One would think that there is at least a positive dimension to such a culture of suspicion when it comes to the politics of knowledge. For it can be reasonably assumed that suspicion fosters inquisitiveness and a desire to question received knowledge. An academic might even fantasize that a lay people’s culture of suspicion could translate into a receptiveness to those whom Ricoeur has called the ‘masters of suspicion:’ Marx, Nietzsche, Freud. But it has not often worked this way. Here, the importance of the ‘being seen’ dimension of the phobia comes to the fore. For the decipiophobic fear that marks the domain of knowledge is not a fear of ‘not knowing’ but a fear of ‘being seen to not know’. Thus, decipiophobic subjects never ask inquisitive questions in public for this can be seen as a mark of ignorance. In Lebanon, and one finds this tendency emerging elsewhere today, there is an imperative to appear to always already know everything there is to know such that as to consolidate in the face of others the image of the-subject-that-is-not-easy-to-trick. This in fact fosters sociologically unsophisticated claims of having ‘cleverly cracked the code’ that allows one to understand all there is to understand that is happening ‘behind the screen.’ In anthropology it is argued that if social science entails the search for the social mechanisms that are behind the people who are behind the event, magic such as the belief in the causal power of curses, involves the search for the people who are behind the mechanisms that are behind the event. Decipiophobic explanations are always on the side of magic in this context. The interpersonal ‘you’re not going to get me, I know what you’re up to’ is elevated into a mode of explaining macro political events: I know what governments are up to, I know what world leaders are up to. This is why there is a close relation between decipiophobia and the claims to total knowledge that one finds in conspiracy theories. As with arguments concerning refugees such ‘modes of knowing’ create a closure that make them self-perpetuating: any attempt to change the views of ‘knowing subjects’ are experienced by them as the work of either naïve people who can’t see the scheming that is happening behind the scenes or worse someone who is actively trying to influence them because they are themselves part of the conspiracy.

 

I am sure that neither the rudimentary analysis of the way decipiophobia articulates itself to right wing politics, nor the concepts that I have proposed to challenge it such as ‘wagering on trust’ and ‘strategic gullibility’ are enough to treat the phenomenon thoroughly, or to fully explore how to combat it politically. But I hope that what I have presented can at least begin a discussion about the importance of the phenomenon and its role in reinforcing right wing politics and immunising it against any challenge.