Page 50 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

people at Renaissance are brilliant. Yet in one crucial respect, they were exactly like the students in
Levine’s experiment who watched the instructor leave, spotted the envelope with the answers lying
conspicuously on the desk, but couldn’t quite make the leap to believe that it was all a setup.
But not Markopolos. He was armed with all the same facts but none of the faith in the system. To
him, dishonesty and stupidity are everywhere. “People have too much faith in large organizations,”
he said. “They trust the accounting firms, which you should never trust because they’re
incompetent. On a best day they’re incompetent, on a bad day they’re crooked, and aiding and
abetting the fraud, looking the other way.”
He went on. “I think the insurance industry is totally corrupt. They’ve had no oversight forever,
and they’re dealing with trillions in assets and liabilities.” He thought between 20 and 25 percent of
public companies were cheating on their financial statements. “You want to talk of another fraud?”
he said at one point, out of the blue. He had just published a memoir and was now in the habit of
scrutinizing his royalty statements. He called them “Chinese batshit.” The crooks he investigates, he
said, have financial statements “more believable than my publisher’s.”
He said the one fact he keeps in mind whenever he goes to the doctor’s office is that forty cents
of every health-care dollar goes to either fraud or waste.
Whoever is treating me, I make sure I tell them that I’m a white-collar-criminal investigator, and
I let them know that there’s a lot of fraud in medicine. I tell them that statistic. I do that so they
don’t mess with me or my family.
There is no high threshold in Markopolos’s mind before doubts turn into disbelief. He has no
threshold at all.

3.

In Russian folklore there is an archetype called yurodivy, or the “Holy Fool.” The Holy Fool is a
social misfit—eccentric, off-putting, sometimes even crazy—who nonetheless has access to the
truth. Nonetheless is actually the wrong word. The Holy Fool is a truth-teller because he is an
outcast. Those who are not part of existing social hierarchies are free to blurt out inconvenient truths
or question things the rest of us take for granted. In one Russian fable, a Holy Fool looks at a
famous icon of the Virgin Mary and declares it the work of the devil. It’s an outrageous, heretical
claim. But then someone throws a stone at the image and the facade cracks, revealing the face of
Satan.
Every culture has its version of the Holy Fool. In Hans Christian Andersen’s famous children’s
tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the king walks down the street in what he has been told is a
magical outfit. No one says a word except a small boy, who cries out, “Look at the king! He’s not
wearing anything at all!” The little boy is a Holy Fool. The tailors who sold the king his clothes told
him they would be invisible to anyone unfit for their job. The adults said nothing, for fear of being
labeled incompetent. The little boy didn’t care. The closest we have to Holy Fools in modern life are
whistleblowers. They are willing to sacrifice loyalty to their institution—and, in many cases, the
support of their peers—in the service of exposing fraud and deceit.
What sets the Holy Fool apart is a different sense of the possibility of deception. In real life, Tim
Levine reminds us, lies are rare. And those lies that are told are told by a very small subset of
people. That’s why it doesn’t matter so much that we are terrible at detecting lies in real life. Under
the circumstances, in fact, defaulting to truth makes logical sense. If the person behind the counter
at the coffee shop says your total with tax is $6.74, you can do the math yourself to double-check
their calculations, holding up the line and wasting thirty seconds of your time. Or you can simply
assume the salesperson is telling you the truth, because on balance most people do tell the truth.
That’s what Scott Carmichael did. He was faced with two alternatives. Reg Brown said that Ana
Montes was behaving suspiciously. Ana Montes, by contrast, had a perfectly innocent explanation
for her actions. On one hand was the exceedingly rare possibility that one of the most respected
figures at the DIA was a spy. On the other hand was the far more likely scenario that Brown was
just being paranoid. Carmichael went with the odds: that’s what we do when we default to truth. Nat
Simons went with the odds as well. Madoff could have been the mastermind of the greatest financial