The Con

A con, or confidence game, formulates a future that will not come to bear. As the sociologist Erving Goffman describes in "On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure" (1952), a con involves the triangulated interaction of several roles: the con artist or operator, who sets the plan in motion; the sucker or mark, who is the con's victim; and, most importantly, the cooler, who ensures that the mark not go to the police or take other types of vengeance, and upon whom the con -the reproducibility of the act, as well as the future of the man -depends. The cooler cools by providing the mark basic "instruction in the philosophy of taking a loss." Yet at the same time, as Goffman insists, "cooling the mark out is one theme on a very basic social story." From the worker whose expected promotion was denied, to the lover whose marriage proposal was refused, to the patient who has been told there is no cure, to the soldier who realizes there is no return, there are endless instances in which marks must be cooled: in which people who once believed something must be adjusted to the impossibility of that belief

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