Tartuffe: A master of deception and manipulation
The word Tartuffe has since entered the English language to describe a confidence trickster — someone who masks dishonesty with false morality.
I recently had the misfortune of knowing a Tartuffe. He was exceptionally skilled in deception — too good, in fact.
At first he appeared kind, generous and understanding, exuding charm and attentiveness. He made me feel special, boosting my confidence and offering unwavering support.
I trusted him, relied on him. Before I realised it, he had become an indispensable part of my life. But beneath this crafted persona was something sinister. He was not my friend — he was a fraudster, a manipulator, a predator who thrived on control. His goal was never to help but to exploit, targeting those who were generous, kind-hearted or emotionally vulnerable.
A skilled con artist does not rush. He embeds himself into your life, studying your vulnerabilities — your insecurities, struggles or need for support. He offers solutions, making himself appear irreplaceable. At first his generosity seems boundless. He helps with errands, provides small favours and listens when needed. He never asks for anything in return for the small favours — until he does. In addition, when he finally does, it seems only fair to repay his kindness. Generously.
One of a trickster's most dangerous tactics is isolation. He subtly undermines your relationships, planting seeds of doubt — "You know you can't trust him, right? But don't worry, you have me." He convinces you that anyone who questions him is lying. He publicly performs small acts of kindness, reinforcing his carefully constructed image.
Slowly, your circle of support shrinks. You withdraw from genuine friends, believing only he has your best interests at heart. By the time you recognise what's happening, you may feel entirely dependent on him.
A tartuffe is a master of deception. He constructs false narratives to manipulate your emotions. He may claim financial hardship or personal crises, making you believe that only you can help him.
It starts small — the mention of an unexpected expense, a minor favour. But they grow. You find yourself giving more and more, feeling guilty if you hesitate. He places you in situations where saying no feels impossible. After all, he has been so helpful — how could you refuse?
What you don't realise is that you are being conditioned. Each act of generosity strengthens his grip. You justify it by reminding yourself of all he's done for you. The cycle continues, deepening his deception.
Most confidence tricksters exhibit sociopathic tendencies. They lack conscience, empathy or genuine emotional attachment. To them, people are tools — stepping stones to financial gain and control. They feel no remorse when they manipulate or ruin their victims.
Their ability to mimic genuine emotions makes them especially dangerous. They can appear sad on cue, feign affection and display concern when necessary. They claim people have lied about them, insist they have done nothing wrong and always offer a well-rehearsed smile.
Their lies come effortlessly. But it's all an act. Once they have extracted everything they can from you — or more likely when they sense you're beginning to see through them — they discard you without hesitation, moving on to their next unsuspecting victim.
For those caught in a confidence trickster's web, the realisation is devastating. Victims feel guilt, shame, anger and betrayal. Many struggle to accept that someone they trusted so completely was deceiving them all along. Escaping a fraudster requires strength and, often, outside help. If you suspect manipulation:
- Cut ties completely. Do not engage, argue, or give them the chance to manipulate you further.
- Stop providing money or assistance, no matter how persuasive their excuses.
- Reach out to those who genuinely care about you.
Most importantly, remember — you are not to blame. These con artists are experts in deception, and anyone can fall victim. The best defence is awareness: recognising the signs before they take hold and ensuring that your kindness is never exploited.
The writer is a former Cambridge School Principal and an interview skills advisor
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Observer
a day ago
- Observer
France museum-goer eats million-dollar banana taped to wall
A visitor to a French museum bit into a fresh banana worth millions of dollars taped to a wall last week, exhibitors said on Friday, in the latest such consumption of the conceptual artwork. Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan -- whose provocative creation entitled "Comedian" was bought for $6.2 million in New York last year -- said he was disappointed the person did not also eat the skin and the tape. After the hungry visitor struck on Saturday last week, "security staff rapidly and calmly intervened," the Pompidou-Metz museum in eastern France said. The work was "reinstalled within minutes", it added. "As the fruit is perishable, it is regularly replaced according to instructions from the artist." Cattelan noted the banana-eater had "confused the fruit for the work of art". "Instead of eating the banana with its skin and duct tape, the visitor just consumed the fruit," he said. Cattelan's edible creation has sparked controversy ever since it made its debut at the 2019 Art Basel show in Miami Beach. He has explained the banana work as a commentary on the art market, which he has criticised in the past for being speculative and failing to help artists. The New York Post said the asking price of $120,000 for "Comedian" in 2019 was evidence that the market was "bananas" and the art world had "gone mad". It has been eaten before. Performance artist David Datuna ate "Comedian" in 2019, saying he felt "hungry" while inspecting it at the Miami show. Chinese-born crypto founder Justin Sun last year forked out $6.2 million for the work, then ate it in front of cameras. As well as his banana work, Cattelan is also known for producing an 18-carat, fully functioning gold toilet called "America" that was offered to Donald Trump during his first term in the White House. A British court in March found two men guilty of stealing it during an exhibition in 2020 in the United Kingdom, from an 18th-century stately home that was the birthplace of wartime prime minister Winston Churchill. It was split up into parts and none of the gold was ever recovered. —AFP
Observer
08-07-2025
- Observer
Jonathan Anderson Sets a New Dressing Agenda at Dior
A photo of Christian Dior's original salon stretched the width of the Invalides, the gold-domed palace where Napoleon is buried, offering a fish-eye view of the past to the throngs shrieking outside — and a sign of just where Dior believes it belongs in the pantheon of French power. Inside, dove-gray velvet lined the walls of a temporary event space and displayed two rare 18th-century oils by Jean Siméon Chardin on loan from the National Galleries of Scotland and the Louvre. Robert Pattinson gossiped with Josh O'Connor. Donatella Versace schmoozed with Roger Federer. A pregnant Rihanna arrived with A$AP Rocky a mere 45 minutes after the official start time. That's how much anticipation there was for the Dior men's show. Filmmaker Luca Guadagnino was even trailing around to document the moment. It was Jonathan Anderson's debut as the creative director/savior of the house, the first designer to be put in charge of both menswear and womenswear. And under all the buzz, a giant question mark hovered: Could the former Loewe wunderkind reignite excitement not just in the brand but in fashion? Anderson made it look easy. Literally. Beginning with his take on the Bar jacket, the most famous Dior womenswear shape — the one that prompted Harper's Bazaar editor Carmel Snow to jump out of her seat shrieking, 'It's a New Look!' in 1947. It was reimagined in a Donegal tweed with a flat back and a whiff of the hourglass at the front, as if it retained a vague memory of what it once was. With it, he paired not a shirt but a stiff white stock collar and a pair of oversize white cotton cargo shorts, each side sporting elaborate folds to create the plumped out silhouette of a goose, or a 1948 couture dress called the Delft. Go on, shake your tail feathers. If little Lord Fauntleroy had spent a year at the University of Southern California and then returned for a pickup game of basketball at Versailles, this is how he might dress. It was not a capital N New Look. It wasn't that radical, or shocking. But it was an awfully charming newish one. And it was situated smack in the middle of the tension between formality and informality, menswear and womenswear, commerce and creativity (Anderson's own work at Loewe and Uniqlo and what he inherited at Dior), which seems to define this particular moment. Jonathan Andersons take on the Bar jacket, Diors most famous womens wear shape, is paired with cargo shorts at the Dior spring 2026 fashion show in Milan in June 2025. (Simbarashe Cha/The New York Times) No one is all one thing or another. Neither are their clothes. Neither are the totems of wealth. What Anderson proposed was a clear and convincing argument that contradictions can gracefully coexist. Most of all, he put forward the belief that fashion and wearability are not irreconcilable ideas — that you either have to look bizarro or look boring. For every highfalutin garment there was an equal and opposite this-old-thing, usually worn together. Velvet frock coats were paired with faded jeans in Japanese denim. Olive green puffer coats and down vests were cut with trapeze backs. The exact pattern of another classic Dior dress, the Caprice, with its elaborately swathed peplum skirt, was applied to a pair of loose khakis, giving one leg the fillip of a drape. An 18th-century frock coat was exactingly reproduced — in moleskin. There were shamrocks on tennis shoes and high-tops with driving shoe soles; cable knits under elaborate waist coats. There was a lot of neck action. Book totes borrowed, again, from the women's line, with actual book titles on them from Baudelaire and Françoise Sagan. Anderson had clearly done his homework. Easter eggs to early Dior were everywhere. Even the labels inside the clothes were in the designer's preferred silk faille. He was never going to toss everything out the window and start again. He couldn't. Dior is a multibillion-dollar business, after all, and some of his predecessors (Raf Simons, Hedi Slimane, John Galliano) were his idols. Once upon a time, a designer might have had the arrogance to wipe the slate clean, but this is a new age. The industry is in crisis, and the creative tectonic plates are shifting. It is why Anderson invited seemingly every other designer in Paris to join him at the show. It is also why he picked the Chardin oils and why he seeded his Instagram with Warhol Polaroids of Lee Radziwill and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Chardin, he said in a preview, 'kind of loosened up the still life'; Warhol made pop culture high art. Both crystallized an inflection point in culture. Anderson clearly wants his Dior to do the same. His show invitation came borne on a china plate with three china eggs on top, as if a reminder that the menswear was just the beginning (and maybe to acknowledge that some shells may get broken along the way). Fair enough. The result may not knock you sideways, but it's likely to make you sit up and buy. Not to mention whetting the appetite for his first womenswear collection, come September.
Observer
08-07-2025
- Observer
What makes someone cool? A new study offers clues
Is there a secret sauce that helps explain why people as different as David Bowie, Samuel L. Jackson, and Charli XCX all seem so self-assured and, well, cool? A new study suggests that there are six specific traits that these people tend to have in common: Cool people are largely perceived to be extroverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open and autonomous. The study, which was published last month in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, surveyed nearly 6,000 participants from 12 countries around the world. Their beliefs about what's 'cool' were similar regardless of where the study participants lived and despite differences in age, income level, education, or gender. 'What blew my mind was the fact that it was pretty much the same result everywhere,' said Caleb Warren, one of the authors of the study and a professor at the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona who has researched consumer psychology for two decades. In the study, each participant had to recognize the word 'cool' in English, without translation, suggesting that they were already familiar with — or maybe even idolized — notions of coolness from wealthy Western countries like the United States. In that sense, the study offers a window into the spread of cultural beliefs from one group of people to another, said Joseph Henrich, an anthropologist and a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University who was not involved in the study. 'Globally, American success has led to the diffusion of music styles and an immense amount of cultural content, including, apparently, the concept of cool,' Henrich said. Coolness is not a widely studied subject. Past research has found that coolness is usually considered something positive: Cool People are also friendly, competent, trendy, and attractive. But Warren and his colleagues wanted to know what makes a person distinctly 'cool' rather than just 'good.' So the researchers asked the participants to think of specific people: one who is cool, one who is not cool, one who is good, and one who is not good. Then they asked the participants to evaluate each person by answering questionnaires that collectively measured 15 different attributes. While the cool and good people had overlapping traits, compared with their cool counterparts, good people were perceived as more conforming, traditional, secure, warm, agreeable, universalistic (the extent to which a person sees everyone and everything as being equal or equally worthy of care and respect), conscientious and calm. Those who were perceived as capable were equally considered cool and good. One limitation of the study was that anyone who did not know the word 'cool' was automatically filtered out. As a result, the data cannot determine how frequently the word is used in different countries or whether in certain cultures coolness will lead to a higher social status relative to others. In addition, while the study included participants with a wide range of ages, the population skewed young: The average age from each region was generally 30 or younger. Other studies have shown that there are important cultural differences that can affect the traits that we value. 'Factors like aggression make us have higher status in some Western cultures and simultaneously give us less status in the East,' said Mitch Prinstein, the chief of psychology at the American Psychological Association, who has written two books about popularity, which can be a consequence of coolness. Research on coolness suggests that the desire to be cool is particularly strong during adolescence, and it influences not only what people buy or whom they admire but also how they talk and what they do for fun. But what's considered cool by the broader culture might not be the same as what you believe is cool. This is why Warren and his colleagues asked each participant to think about the people they considered cool vs. good. Interestingly, across the board, the types of traits that are typically associated with kindness or helpfulness were more often perceived as good instead of cool. So is coolness a trait that's worth pursuing? To that end, Warren said, 'I have serious doubts.' The coolness that involves risk-taking and being socially precocious during adolescence may offer popularity during youth, but one study published in 2014 found that many teenagers who behaved in this way would later struggle in their 20s, developing problems with alcohol, drugs, and relationships. 'They are doing more extreme things to try to act cool,' one of the researchers told The New York Times. For the popular kids in school, 'status is dominance, visibility, attention,' Prinstein said. But, he added, it is how well-liked you are that contributes to long-term success. 'Even the most uncool kid will probably fare well if they have at least one close friend,' he added. Perhaps coolness — particularly the dismissive 'too cool for school' variety — isn't all it's cracked up to be. This article originally appeared in
