Martin Chuzzlewit is one of Charles Dickens’ earlier novels. Old Martin is a very unappealing character, avaricious and sneaky, and in speaking of him Dickens remarks that in some people there is a naivety or duplicity of cunning, by which he meant that often cunning people believe that they are the only ones who operate that way and are often tripped up by the very people they think they are outwitting. Thus, Martin is ruined by a shyster wh
o he, Martin, thinks he is taking advantage of.
I thought of this last week when a customer of mine was lamenting to me a very poor transaction that he had gotten himself into. He wanted to sell off a large group of US postage from his holdings and prepared an inventory. He found a dealer who promised to pay 90% of the face value of the postage. Now, alarm bells should have gone off in my friend’s mind, questioning why someone in the field would pay 90% for something that he could buy in almost unlimited quantities for 70%. But my friend was blinded by his cunning from seeing the cunning of others. Long story short, he sold the postage and later when he added up the face value from the inventory he had prepared (why he didn’t do this before he sold the lot I don’t understand) he found he had received 30% from the seller not 90%. This is yet another story of the “no free lunch” “if something sounds too good to be true it probably is” trope that the vast majority of us learn as children. For me though, it was Charles Dickens who first showed me how it is that those who think they are duping others are often duped themselves.