I had a dream a couple weeks ago that I can’t remember save for one detail. The titular theme from Fellini’s movie Il Bidone played at some point over whatever crisis I was facing in my dream. I have vague memory of rolling my eyes at the circumstance I found myself in. I felt something like a quiet exasperation, as if I was being made the punchline of the film playing out in my mind. Il Bidone is about this group of conmen and hucksters who very often cross the line from morally ambiguous to downright cruel. They pose as church members and city officials to scam people, usually farmers, out of their life savings and never look back. Yet, realizing that these are not lifelong careers some of the younger protagonists exit the life one by one as they set their sights on more stable enterprises. Except Augusto who cannot stop playing the role of swindler because he is addicted to the life, or perhaps more accurately, he’s not playing at it because he was born a con artist and will die one. Eventually Augusto in his immense audacity tries to con the very conmen he’s with out of the money they just stole by pretending to have a burgeoning conscience. The audience knows that he needs a lot of money to give to his estranged daughter so she can go to college, yet it remains ambiguous whether this was his hail Mary effort to get it for her, or whether he just would have kept it. The audience is left questioning his motives as he is left to die on the side of cliff, left there by his colleagues in thievery.

So why would these themes invade my dreaming mind. We’ve all heard of impostor syndrome, the feeling that you don’t belong and that you will be discovered for the phony that you are at same time as you are receiving what you feel to be unjust praise. It’s the other side of the coin to assuming roles in our daily lives, the acute awareness that we are not who we are pretending to be. To me this is a sign of a disconnection between the standards we hold ourselves to and the standards of others. As humans we shift in and out of various states constantly experiencing ourselves as the object of others’ gaze as Sartre would put it. This wrestling with the perception of you by others can lead to a tunnel vision: trying to be the perfect waiter to your customers, the perfect son to you parents, the perfect athlete to your coach. Yet since we are not objects but multidimensional beings setting our measure of success to perfection has already assured we fail, at least in our own eyes. So the feelings of inadequacy are our own creation, and I would banish them by simply admitting: Yeah I could be better but you know what, I’m already pretty damn good.

Yet if we take impostor syndrome one step further, are we con artists? That’s the real fear, that we are inadvertently tricking everyone into metaphorically giving us their life savings by placing their trust in us. If we decide that yes we are impostors and that we’re not gonna stop then we have crossed an ethical boundary which we can’t come back from. This border area between the ethical and unethical is where we wrestle internally with ourselves. Most of us would try to lower expectations, deflect praise, and admit failure readily in an effort to further distance ourselves from that borderline. Yet am I Augusto? Am I in for a penny, in for a pound? Self-advocacy can feel as if I’m walking around dressed up as a priest telling the people around me about how awesome the church is and how just with a little bit of money we can make the much needed repairs to the house of God. Then I take their money, ditch the priest robes in a garbage can and use it to buy Slayer records. Maybe the invisible line is between humility and pride. Being humble gives us the chance to accept praise while hedging expectations, being proud can be seen as boastful, unjust and sinful. Yet in the modern society we live in, being loud is often the path to recognition. Maybe that’s why the Il Bidone theme is so fun, because sometimes you gotta play into the con but not so much that we are left for dead on the side of the road.