On Cooling America Out

Venkatesh Rao re-reads Erving Goffman's 1952 paper "On Cooling the Mark Out" and argues that its ideas shed light on America's current self-image. Goffman describes how con artists console a victim, the mark, so the loss is accepted quietly, since the real cost is the collapse of the victim's self-image. The article then extends Goffman's thesis that society as a whole runs on selling aspirational scripts to many people and cooling out those who fail. It argues that America is a particularly collective example, relying on litigiousness, a veto-heavy governance system, and international deference to American narratives to cool itself out.