Jason Arday’s Final Self-Delusion - The Atlantic

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In the Henrik Ibsen play The Wild Duck, Dr. Relling dispenses a drug that soothes the most profound self-loathing: livsløgn, a “life-lie,” a form of grandiose self-delusion that lets the pathetic figures who take it believe that they are geniuses and noble romantics. The life-lie, it turns out, is a hell of a drug—perhaps the most potent Scandinavian pharmaceutical invention before Ozempic—and keeps the play’s fragile characters from succumbing to “self-contempt and despair.” Against Relling’s advice, another character, Gregers, decides to free these losers from their life-lies and expose them. The play ends with a suicide.<br>On Friday, the former Cambridge professor Jason Arday died at the age of 41. British police said his death was “unexpected” but not “suspicious.” This classification, unexpected but not suspicious, includes the possibility that he died accidentally. But reports of Arday’s delicate emotional state at the time have led most to assume that he killed himself after weeks of accumulating revelations that he had lied compulsively for personal and professional gain. One of his last public statements was an interview with The Times of London in which he affirmed that he was “not a liar,” a line itself so blatantly false that any Ibsen fan would have recognized symptoms of a livsløgn overdose. He gave no George Santos–like, impish shrug at having been finally caught. (What took you so long?) He did not prepare to switch careers to pursue reality-TV stardom or write a Catch Me if You Can–style memoir about the dupes he met along the way. Instead, his response suggested—it is painful to notice this now, when nothing can be done—that he felt he had to stick with his story. That way led to a catastrophic end: narcissistic collapse, in which the lies stop working on others and finally on the liar himself. Arday appears to have convinced himself, wrongly, that the last remaining option was suicide, which was, of course, his final self-delusion. His lies won him undeserved praise and status, and they gave (unforgivably) false hope to people whose loved ones have severe developmental delays. But the only lie that ever killed anyone was the last one.<br>Some are now suggesting that Arday was the victim, and the people who drew attention to his lies, the villains. Ibram X. Kendi suggests that Arday might even be vindicated after a full accounting of the allegations against him. (Keep in mind that in addition to his straightforward acts of fabrication and plagiarism, always of less powerful academics, he claimed to have taken part in a British documentary series that preceded his birth.) And the hapless Good Law Project, which persuaded dozens of Cambridge bigwigs to rally behind Arday and dismiss his critics as racists, has issued an open letter calling for an investigation of “the press.” The media’s alleged crime: writing about this extraordinary case of a habitual liar’s appointment to a distinguished academic post, rather than letting the liar keep embarrassing himself and his institution. “Reasonable public interest” in the case had dissipated, the letter says, yet the press kept digging. Arday’s death was, it says, the “direct, foreseeable and foreseen result of press harassment.”<br>A Buddhist proverb says that when a wise man points at the moon, the fool stares at his finger. The media were unrelenting, but con-man stories are always popular, and the bigger the victim, the better. The press’s obsession was in proportion with the outlandishness of the lies told by Arday and on his behalf, and with public interest in the failures they revealed. Those failures were intellectual, institutional, and even legal. Arday called the cops on an academic who had asked him hostile questions, and he instructed a law firm to send a threatening letter to a reporter who did the same. The focus on those who pointed out Arday’s shortcomings, rather than on Arday himself and those who abetted his rise, is a clear sign that lessons from this miserable episode remain unlearned. The people responsible for it may repeat their errors and, in some cases, commit appalling new ones. (Kendi compares Arday’s treatment to a “lynching.” This analogy is tenable only if you think lynching means harshly criticizing people for actual transgressions, rather than summarily murdering them for no reason at all.)<br>Read: The truths that failed Jason Arday<br>Some lies are so preposterous that intelligent people who believe them bear some responsibility for being taken in. And they are outright guilty for repeating the lies and urging others to believe them. This is obviously so in Arday’s case. The lies depended on willful credulity, as well as amplification by other professors, including Cambridge’s Hilary Cremin, who went on the BBC and told Arday that “you are the best in the world, in terms of the research that you do.” Reviewers gushed over his books and pronounced...