Evidence receipt / uncertainty
Published · transcript-backedEmily St. John Mandel: uncertainty
8 Apr 2020 Conversations with Tyler Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar
“I don’t know if it’s a manifestation of guilt, this subconscious desire to be caught and to face consequences, but it would not be difficult for these people to flee, and yet they usually don’t.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Emily St. John Mandel
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- uncertainty
- Recorded
- 8 Apr 2020
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
Transcript context
…But a novelist is a psychologist somewhat, right? I wouldn’t quite call myself qualified, but something that fascinated me about the Bernie Madoff story on which the crime in The Glass Hotel is based . . . And just to backtrack a little bit, none of the people in The Glass Hotel are real. It’s not a novel about Madoff, but the crime is the same, so I did a lot of reading about it. What Madoff says is that it never occurred to him to flee, which I find absolutely baffling. Imagine yourself in that position. You have an extraordinary amount of money. You realize that your Ponzi scheme is falling apart. What are you doing going home to your house in New York? Go to the airport! Get out of town! It’s honestly baffling to me. I don’t know if it’s a manifestation of guilt, this subconscious desire to be caught and to face consequences, but it would not be difficult for these people to flee, and yet they usually don’t. I don’t know what that’s about. It is interesting. Maybe it’s the bias of routine. Or with white-collar criminals, you might be selecting for people who think they’re invulnerable, right?…
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