Soapy Minds

“Yes, Sharon Stone is my fiancée”, my uncle said, looking slightly sheepish, sharing an uncomfortable, implausible fact, but one filled with pride.

I sit across from my uncle in my grandma’s house on a winter day, built in 1930 by my great grandma, in a village boasting 700 inhabitants and which didn’t have a solid road connection to the outside world until 1965. In that far corner of the world, my uncle spoke, and I leaned in, carefully placing an expression of awe onto my face, saying “Wow! How did you manage that?”.

Everyone knew he thought he was dating a famous actress, and my uncle knew nobody believed him. He was both excited for me to know, and worried I wouldn’t believe him either. I didn’t, of course, but you see, I was there with a mission, and that mission required me to turn what had become a stranger over 15 years into a friend, quickly.

Earlier that day, I was on my way back to my mom’s house, after a short stroll through the village. I was feeling particularly reinvigorated, mentally capable, and ready to continue my workday after a good lunch, when I ran into my grandma. She was bringing in some food for my cousin who had caught a cold. We exchanged pleasantries, and before we parted ways, she mentioned, looking apologetic: “Say, would you have some time to talk to your uncle? He heard you’re visiting from the US and had some questions”. From her tone, I got the impression she wanted me to refuse, and proceeded to give me a few easy outs. She is incredibly sweet on her son, I knew, and would do everything for him, while at the same time, recognizing his faults and wanting to protect people from them. His faults mainly included believing in conspiracy theories.

To her surprise, I agreed. It was a surprise to me, too. I guard my time closely, and yet I was willing to spend it in the expectation of wading through a long, likely meaningless conversation about covid nano bots or something. I have been in many conversations with conspiracy believers, and if you have too, you might understand the sense of frustration and bafflement one can feel. I had a sense, however, that life was about to happen, and that I would be failing at life if I closed myself off to this experience. That this was a chance to really listen to someone, when I was at my best. I chose to view it as a challenge: I always liked lockpicking… so maybe I can try lockpicking his brain? To open to the truth? I was also curious to see my grandma’s place again, which I hadn’t in about ten years, and delighted in the opportunity to savor some nostalgia.

My goal was clear: for at least one conspiracy, I wanted to incept him to be robust against that sort of conspiracy. It’s no good to just rid him of a specific theory, he’d just find another. It would have to be real change. I crack my knuckles, and follow my grandma.

After a short, slow walk to my grandma’s house, past ancient trees and familiar buildings, I step into the old, rustic kitchen. The wood cooking stove was already lit, and my grandma started making tea. She used the wood stoker, which doubled as a hook, to take out part of the solid iron stove-top plate, so that the fire burning below would directly lick the base of the kettle. The kitchen hasn’t changed since my earliest memory, and maybe not since another lifetime before that.

I sit down on a chair that might be older than I will ever be, across the table corner from my uncle. My grandma serves the tea, made with fresh mint and herbs from the garden, and places a jar of spruce resin next to my cup, for sweetening the tea. I felt only a tiny bit of shame at my surprise that no tea bags were used, having gotten too used to life in the city.

My uncle, a helicopter pilot, close to retirement in age, though I don’t know if he’d qualify for it, looks in all ways like a serious, mature man. His voice is firm and deep, his eyes kind.

We talk. He tells me that he’s engaged, and that he wants to go to the US again, having last been a long time ago, and asks me about the visa process. I give him the breakdown, happy to share my knowledge, even if AI could answer all the same, which he doesn’t know, and I don’t bother telling him. He says that his fiancée has a friend in the immigration office and is trying to butter them up so that he can get fast-tracked to a special visa. It’s almost guaranteed already, he says, but he’s sort of unclear on the details. He thinks he needs a pro-forma appointment at an embassy, and then has a promise of permanent residency “as soon as he touches US soil”. If you’ve ever had anything to do with US immigration, you’ll know this smells like a fish market.

The situation becomes clearer after some minutes. He thinks he’ll be re-united with his American “fiancée” soon, but the visa process is, even with networking connections, slow and unclear, and he wants to enlist my help primarily to hasten and clear up the process. I was prepared for conspiracies, not for this, but maybe being scammed isn’t so different from believing in a conspiracy. Both are comfortable lies, tied to one’s need for validation, and my goal was to strengthen the ego to break those ties.

This goal was ambitious, because it hinged on multiple feats of persuasion. First, it required him to be in the right mindset. To feel comfortable and trusting. I needed him to see me as authoritative: someone successful enough to warrant listening to, but not enough to be aloof. Distant enough from his life to not care about petty family squabbles, while close enough to help out a relative. Different enough to be open-minded to his opinions, and familiar enough that he’d entrust me with it and know that I’d care.

Secondly, he needed to not just see the scam for himself, but be squeezed out of it through a narrow tube of obvious truths and undeniable, incremental realizations, which need to come from himself and be voiced openly. I knew his mind would shy away from anything that could be made ambiguous. The truth would slide off his brain, like it was a wet bar of soap and the truth a firm squeeze trying to capture it. I would have to ask him questions which would be socially uncomfortable not to answer, and where the only answer that wouldn’t make him sound stupid would also be the one that is obviously true and in opposition to the scam. Essentially, I needed to get him to admit the lie openly.

Finally, his life was entrenched in this scam. He had spent years emotionally bonded to this fictional person, under the expectation that he would imminently be living the big life. He staked his pride and social status and likely a lot of money on this, and oriented his future around it. Even if the scam was clear, it would be impossible for him to detach from it, to allow doubt, if it means setting fire to his perception of himself, and his only source of validation. The moment of decision needed to come at a point in time where he felt confident, validated, and strong.

The goal was ambitious, and I would likely fail. If my uncle had the kind of solid, grounded ego that you’d need to survive a total world shift, he would not be in this situation in the first place, but that did not stop me from trying.

We haven’t been talking for more than a couple of minutes, and my main priority at this point was to understand the situation and set the mood. I give him chances to talk about things he’s proud of, like the time he was praised by his superior during an oil prospecting trip in South America, and I make sure to recognize his achievements. Then, when it comes to more visa talk, my strategy was to first cast doubt on his fiancée’s friend in the immigration office, then start pulling the threads apart, leading back to his actual scammer. He shows me a picture of his fiancée at a government press conference, close to some lady who is supposed to be the immigration officer. A quick google reverse image search turned up a helpful AI summary akin to “Famous actress Sharon Stone at a white house event next to an unknown person”. I ask him whether that sounds right, and he says: “why yes, Sharon Stone is my fiancée”.

Of course, I should have thought of that. As a scammer, you’d want to impersonate someone famous. Lots of reasons to be “busy”, lots of publicly available media for imitation, lots of semi-verifiable details, and you get to pretend to be rich and famous, stroking the victim’s ego. That made everything a lot easier, and a lot harder. Proving that his fiancée was real was as easy as requiring her to message him via official means, however, he would have to seek this out, and of course, that’s not how it works.

“Sharon” was always a little too busy, never calling or sending videos, only sending voice messages that sounded a little distorted or robotic (presumably since scammers don’t know about good AI yet), sending photoshopped images that looked just a little uncanny, making up excuses that sounded just slightly believable enough for my uncle to fool himself into believing them. Nobody looking at their chat history from the outside would be fooled in the slightest, but his mind was performing gymnastics at a level that olympians wouldn’t dare attempt. They met on Facebook, of course, and he says he texted her first, and I can see in his eyes that he didn’t really, but needed to believe it for some reason.

It took some time to put the visa situation into doubt. Asking lots of questions, never seeming like I might be disbelieving, praising or recognizing him regularly to make him feel like I’m in it with him, asking and asking and asking until he’s mentally struggling to paint a picture that isn’t as distorted as his reality was. “You’re right”, I say suddenly, apropos of nothing, “it is strange that she wouldn’t visit you when she came to Italy for that gala, it would have been so close after all. And you’ve been engaged for this long, presumably you must be really important to her, more important than her work, even, and she has all that time and money. If I was her, I’d have visited. It’s strange…”. I kept shoveling like that. Reminded me a bit of shoveling dung during my farm stay last year, actually. Eventually, I introduce lots of theories to fill the void of implausibility, like “what if your fiancée is just pretending to be Sharon, because she wants you to think highly of her” or “what if she’s just stringing you along and actually has tons of boyfriends” and lots of other ridiculous alternatives. They all sounded more plausible than the truth, I could see him notice.

I try and fail to make him come up with the right hypothesis himself. He’s already admitting to the strangeness of it all, yet his mind doesn’t want to go to the obvious conclusion. I feel like I’m close, but missing some critical move. I search for a different avenue, but get forced into a continuation before I find one. I retreat to attacking evidence, possibly my first mistake. “How do you know it’s actually Sharon?”, I ask, and he shows me a picture of what looks like Sharon holding a big too-white sign saying “I love you” written in comic sans. God, if it’s this easy to be a scammer, I fear for humanity. I send off an AI query on my phone, prompting “give me a picture of sharon stone holding a sign saying ‘I love cats’”, and show it to him. I can see something crack in him, a hint of acceptance of the new theory, mixed with some frantic energy. He asks me whether he can smoke a cigarette, “this is a bit overwhelming to think about”, he says. I dislike smoke, but I say yes, of course, thinking he’ll need it to survive the rest of this conversation.

More time passes. When he starts asking more of the right kinds of questions, I feel he’s ready for the final push. I prop him up some more, remind him of times he’s overcome adversity, that the world is cruel, and then I propose a simple truth test to him. It’s morning in the US, I tell him, she should text him from an official account, doesn’t matter which. If she refuses, why, it would only take her a minute, and she loves you more than anything, right? I could see his brain working. I could see him clutching his phone, repeating my words back to me. Deciding whether he had some sort of plausible deniability. The moments stretched, a battle raging in his mind, until finally: “Yes, that’s a good idea, but I will do it later”, he said. That’s when I knew I had lost.

Hindsight: it feels, too often, as though touching the mind of another person is like grasping a bar of wet soap. Our desire for love, attention, and recognition putting a slippery layer between us. And yet, paradoxically, we want nothing more than to be held, and to hold, and would have great capacity to do so.

In the end, nothing came of it for him. If anything, I feel like maybe I just made his life worse, planting more cognitive dissonance, but not resolving anything, and I feel a little bad. It also felt icky, both to manipulate, and how easy it felt to manipulate. I do also believe, however, that none of us are as great at manipulating as we think we are, and more than I managed to make him think anything specific, he might have simply recognized my earnest attempt to understand and help.

For me, it was an odd experience. It’s rare for me to bring my full attention and capacity into reading the mind of a person that I’m not close to. It’s already too rare for me to do it with friends, though I wish I did more often, and I realize that I spend a little too much of my energy on work, and too little on real human connection, and these things draw from the same well.