Friday, 08.15.08

The Impostors

Photo by Flickr user Esther G under Creative Commons License

The bizarre tale of "Clark Rockefeller," a con artist wanted for abducting his child, continues, as police link him to the 1985 disappearance of a couple in California.

If you’re a pathological liar, you likely have 26 percent more white brain matter, and 14 percent less gray matter, than average folk. That means you are a natural, as elegant with lies as Tiger Woods with his swing. Less gray matter, some doctors believe, helps lower your moral inhibitions; more white matter suggests you’re hyper-wired to manipulate one of those suckers born every minute. I bring this up because every year or so, like clockwork, a breathtakingly fantastic impostor makes the news.

This week, a “Rockefeller” turned out to be the German-born Christian Gerhartsreiter. Also known in the wealthy Los Angles suburb of San Marino as the con man Christopher Chichester, Gerhartsreiter had kidnapped his daughter and fled using Clark Rockefeller as an alias. After arresting Rockefeller, investigators - realizing they had Chichester - began questioning him in the disappearance of a San Marino couple whose guest house he had lived in the 1980s. Last year, Shin Jong-ah was a rising star in the art history department at Korea’s Dongguk University when Yale publicly refuted her claim to a Yale doctorate. In 2006, Lord Christopher Buckingham was discovered to be one Charlie Stopford, a Florida ex-con who fled to Europe in 1983, stole a dead child’s identity off a tombstone, fabricated his royalty, married, and raised two English children to adulthood believing their father’s lies.

The thread here is, of course, that these frauds were living the American ideal of becoming something you’re not—or at least not yet. Jong-ah didn’t attend a prestigious American university, Buckingham grew up in the States wanting to rise above his station, and Rockefeller, an iconic name in American avarice, is really a 48-year-old snipe who came to the New World to hustle the good old-fashioned American way.

Americans generally don’t lie to become something they’re not. But this Tocquevillean sensibility of constantly “becoming” the ideal person has evolved into a third-person, post-modern zeitgeist we all inherently grasp. Even those who don’t have the academic words to describe it innately appreciate its effect, I’ll wager. Over dinner, a psychologist friend laughingly diagnosed it as something like a widespread “As-if personality” disorder, where people mimic human relations but lack originality and are essentially empty shells feigning interests in each others lives.

Identity formation during youth is an ongoing identity crisis, wrote the renowned psychologist Erik Erikson, whose theory of identity achievement says that by 21 a person must stop overidentifying with heroes and commit to adulthood’s complications. Frank Abagnale, for example, whose con-artist exploits were famously depicted in Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can, was 21 when he left his impersonation behind after serving prison time. “It is not a glamorous life, it’s a very lonely life,” Abagnale said in a radio interview. Indeed, when adolescents don’t commit, they develop diffuse identities and fail to mature into adulthood, writes J. E. Marcia, an emeritus professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University, building on Erikson’s work . Now the Internet amplifies this risk, says John Suler, a psychology professor at Rider University. When some adolescents role-play in cyberspace to address an underlying emotional need, the fraudulent identity may “split apart” or dissociate, from a person’s offline identity.

“In normal conditions, one's identity forms slowly, bit by bit, as a person gradually assimilates new life experiences,” Suler wrote in an email. The danger is that with “online identity experimentation, it tends to happen rapidly, in undigested clumps.”

But impostors essentially speed up and collapse the expected maturation process it takes to become an entirely whole human being. In an age when “identity theft” has become a household word, it’s a process we watch with increasingly lurid, and fearful, fascination—whether in the news or on critically acclaimed shows like Mad Men, whose central alpha-male protagonist, Don Draper, steals another man’s identity.

There’s an abiding hunger for authenticity, and as Suler and Erikson note, its equation cannot be sped forward haphazardly. Readers, for example, expect memoirists to have taken the time to live the lives they write—and punish them if they haven’t. Still, as technology opens up and accelerates the formation of our “As if” personas, the maturation of our culture and many of the individuals living in it will inevitably suffer, mostly unaware of their pathology.

— Rafael Enrique Valero

Filed Under: crime