Dinkaltranen

If you lie enough you begin to believe your own lies, and become completely unable to distinguish when you are telling the truth.

Pathological liars are fundamentally deeply narcissistic. When you challenge their lies, you challenge their identity, and they will respond to it with appropriate existential-protecting force. They are unable to differentiate who they are from how others perceive them.

Jason Arday’s suicide was both inevitable and calculated. For him, suicide was not just the result of the discovery of his fabrications and the dissolution of his persona. It was an action that was chosen to both punish the public for recognising his dishonesty, and to invoke one last bit of pity and sadness, one last act of narrative redirection. It is sad when anyone kills themselves as the result of a humiliating ordeal. But it’s worth remembering that Arday literally did this to himself, even if compulsively, to great personal benefit.

“Bet you feel bad for exposing me now, huh?”

Everyone loves a martyr. In even a couple years people will say the response to his lies and plagiarism were overblown, overzealous. He was misunderstood, we should have heard him out more – take note that he killed the primary witness that could tell you what really did or didn’t happen, even if he did or didn’t believe it. Now his entire life will be investigated by secondary accounts, which will be criticised for their motives, their accuracy. Arday being dead stops the fact-checking at cross-examination, and the sentencing altogether.

In the late 90’s, a young and highly talented journalist liar named Stephen Glass was discovered to have fabricated over half of his fantastic entries to the magazine he worked at. As his lies were revealed, he did what every proficient liar does. Shift, fabricate more evidence, create more space, more ambiguity, and eventually, only at the very end, begin lying again and “come clean” with more small lies. Then comes the bargaining, the guilt, the attempts at manipulation. Eventually the defeat, in which, even when they are still discovered and condemned, they are still playing the victim. Sound familiar?

Either way, Glass went on to create a piece of autofiction, though he’d call it fiction, about how he made it all up and is almost certainly close to and in a more flattering way of how he pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes. By fictionalising the truth, you protect the lies.

Liars don’t have to be smarter than you, they just have to recognise what you are willing to be lied to about. The reason Glass got away with lying about increasingly absurd, blatantly false events is not just because fact-checkers failed or because he was a brilliant fabulist who tricked everyone, it’s because people wanted to believe them. The same is said of Arday.

Consider what it means that so many people wished to believe what was so obviously exaggerated, fabricated, and, ultimately: fiction.

By killing himself he has drawn the attention away from “How and why do we tolerate what is obviously false?” at its peak to that of a conversation around him.

Just one last sleight of hand.