How Madoff Did It: Victims’ Accounts

Excerpt

The art of acting is the art of impression management. One need not go to a theater, however, to see actors and acting. “All the world is a stage, and all of the men and women merely players,” William Shakespeare wrote. Since Shakespeare, other dramatists have observed that individuals are able to nimbly shape reality. A character of the early twentieth century playwright Luigi Pirandello cogently makes this point: “Inevitably, try as we may, we make ourselves over. Let me explain. I come into this house, and right away—as far as you are concerned—I become the man that I am going to be—the man I have the possibility of being. I make myself over—that is to say, I present myself to you in a manner adapted to the relationship I am about to establish with you. And you do the same as regards me. But, after all, behind these two fictions which we set one opposite the other—behind the closed doors and the drawn shutters, so to speak, we keep our most secret thoughts, our most intimate feelings, hidden—everything, in short, that we are for ourselves outside the relationship which we intend to establish.” …