Who He Thinks He Is

When I was young, I lost the Don a restaurant with one sentence. The cook there was good. But the tablecloths came back to us in a terrible state: wine, grease, candle wax. I drove over to talk about the stains. And in passing I said his kitchen looked like a mess. He said nothing. A week later the tablecloths went to the competition.

The Don heard me out and asked, “What did you talk to him about?” I said: the tablecloths. “No,” said the Don. “You walked in on a cook and told him he was a bad cook. He didn’t hear one word about tablecloths.”

The restaurant came back a year later. The Don brought it back. He said nothing about the kitchen. He asked what tablecloths the cook wanted to see at his banquets, and spent a long time writing down the answer.

The Word That Becomes You

Forty years on, I understand what happened. I said, “Your place is a mess,” and he heard, “You’re a slob.” If I’d said, “There’s a stain here,” he’d have got it out.

Mafiosi knew this better than psychologists. Antonino Calderone of Catania, who later turned state’s witness, put it this way: they were mafiosi, and everybody else was just ordinary people. The historian John Dickie explains that becoming a “man of honour” meant taking on a new identity and entering a new moral universe. Hence the hard conclusion he draws: a mafioso without honour is nobody, as good as a dead man.

Gambetta hears the same thing in the grammar. Salvatore Contorno didn’t talk about joining an organisation but about “becoming cosa nostra”, that is, becoming the thing itself. Gambetta, who gives these words in English translation, warns that this is about more than bad grammar. And when mafiosi introduced one another, they said: this is “the same thing”. Not “he’s with us”. He is the same as us.

That’s why you don’t leave an organisation like that the way you leave a job. A man leaves a job. From there, you’d have to leave yourself.

One Word in the Question

Scientists tested this on smaller matters. In 2011 the psychologist Christopher Bryan and his colleagues surveyed Americans on the eve of an election. Some were asked how important it was to them to vote. Others, how important it was to be a voter. One word of difference. But noticeably more of the second group turned up at the polls.

A couple of years later Bryan and another set of colleagues tested it the other way round. People were given a simple game for small money where cheating was easy. Some were asked, “Please don’t cheat.” Others, “Please don’t be a cheater.” The second group cheated less. The idea is plain enough: a verb is an act, you can skip it just this once. A noun is you.

Only, with the elections, it later misfired. In 2016 Alan Gerber and his colleagues repeated the experiment in several states, on far more people, and found no difference from the one word. The conditions were different, so the argument isn’t settled. But I won’t promise you that one word will remake a man.

The Don didn’t fully trust words either. He never fined drivers for being late. One new man was late twice in a week. The Don told him, “Carmuso drivers aren’t late. So you’re not a Carmuso driver yet. We’ll wait.” One word wasn’t enough. A month later the boy was late again, and the Don called him into the back room. He didn’t try to keep him: he said a friend at the market needed a driver, and nobody there asked about the clock. The boy thought it over for a day and stayed. He was rarely late after that, but it happened. And a year later he was teaching the new boys how things were done at our place.

Just remember that this cuts both ways. “Layabout” is a noun too. Say it to a man, and he’ll start defending not the work but himself. And sometimes he’ll become what you called him.

Two Cracks

In 1987 the psychologist Edward Higgins described what happens to a man when he falls out with himself. There’s the man he really is. There’s the man he ought to be, by other people’s demands. And there’s the man he dreamed of becoming. The gap with the “ought”, according to Higgins, brings anxiety and unease. The gap with the dream brings dejection.

This is most useful to you yourself. When you’re told over and over “you ought to”, “a man at your level should”, know this: someone is hanging their “must” on you so you’ll get nervous and give way. Take it off out loud: “Ought to whom? Who decided that?”

The Price of the Part

Saviano writes about teenagers who grew up on gangster films. Anywhere else you can love Scarface and try the hero on for size. But on Camorra land, he says, “here you can be him, but you have to be him all the way”. A part taken whole is paid for whole.

Joe Pistone took on a part for almost five years. He writes that the Bureau pays for an undercover agent’s Cadillac, apartment and gangster clothes. All around you people throw money away, and sometimes, he says, it’s all too easy to forget you aren’t one of them. He names the main danger of the trade outright: the biggest mistake an undercover agent can make is to fall in love with the character he’s invented.

He changed his clothes, his speech, his habits, his circle. He kept back one thing: who he thought he was. And in the very first chapter he writes about what he’s proud of: that the Joe Pistone who started the operation and the Joe Pistone who finished it were one and the same man.

The Bottom Line

The honest way is simple. With a man, talk about the work. About him, only the truth, and only when he asks. And if you want him to hold to something, give him a name he’ll want to wear. “Carmuso driver” held, because there was real work behind it. And because the boy had the market, where he could go without shame. Don’t fool yourself: even then the Don was pressing on the same spot people press with the words “you’re one of us”. It’s the same lever. The difference is whether a man can say no and keep his job and himself. An empty title holds nothing.

Now from the other side. You’re told, “you’re one of us”, “people like you don’t do that”, “a real professional would agree”. That means they’re selling you not a deal but an identity. Walking away from a deal is easy, walking away from yourself is hard, and that’s what they’re counting on. Ask who you’ll still be if you say no. If you’ll still be yourself, say no calmly. Calderone, to become an ordinary man again, had to go to the investigators.