The Longest Con

The morality of the penitent.

The dogma that you can be a total cuntfucker and yet still earn eternal bliss if only you perform the prescribed rituals of obeisance.

To the honest man, it is surely baffling to see the pious cleave to a creed of such transparent ethical bankruptcy. But as any hustler knows, the softest mark is the amateur hustler. The easiest rube to grift is the rube who thinks they're grifting someone else. Dangle a way to game the system in front of them and they're yours. And the beauty of the long con of absolution is that, as with any such con, the mark can never admit that they've been scammed, because to do so would reveal their own chicanery. So the scam is protected from exposure.

Religion, the longest con of all, is the perfection of this hustle, the pitchman at the In-and-In performing and eliciting a buy-in of belief. Their very judgement invested, the sucker is taken for the faculty of ethical evaluation itself, can no longer recognise that they've been hoodwinked, let alone admit it to themself, let alone admit it to others. So those most wholly hornswoggled become shills in the next running of the swindle, willing accomplices of the confidence artist, the conviction they can never question lending sham legitimacy to the flimflam.

There are only shills, in fact, this long con having outlived whatever bunco steerer first began it, become a self-sustaining, self-propagating system requiring no magnificent bastard at the head of it all to run the show. The only sharpie at the apex of this predatory scheme is the system itself, its profit the very continued existence that it lures the mark with. Reaping eternity in the long con's endless self-reiteration, this is the Empire.

This is why it never ended.