By admin 
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.
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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.
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.”
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.)
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 them moving, “brave,” and “insightful.” Defenders did begin to distance themselves when the lies became even more lurid and inexplicable, as with the claims that a masked man invisible to security cameras had menaced Arday with a knife and that someone had sent him the head of a pig, which he disposed of rather than preserved as evidence. The trajectory of his deception seems to have been from tragedy (a man carried away with lies and too compulsive to stop telling them) to farce (once the lies became ridiculous enough that only a complicit person could believe them) and finally back to tragedy on Friday. Arday’s colleagues, his editors, and the people who knew he was a fraud but said nothing have absorbed some ridicule for their role in hiring and publishing him. But to date, I have seen no evidence that they have considered their complicity, let alone repaired the damage to their institutions by explaining their error or, better yet, just resigning.
They elevated Arday, a fragile and disturbed person, into a position where his fragility would be tested and he would be shattered. Even if the Cambridge Faculty of Education’s standards were so low that his inadequacies would remain unremarked there, he was a fellow of a Cambridge college with real scholars who would eventually be indignant upon realizing that their new colleague’s scholarship consisted of copy-paste jobs, semiliterate nonsense, and fan notes on his favorite 1990s Brit-pop. Did Arday’s allies think no one would notice? That those who noticed would be forever intimidated into polite silence? That drinking sherry in the common room of Jesus College would be a pleasant experience for Arday himself as he waited to be found out? Those who placed Arday in that situation were cruel and heartless. They may as well have taken a skin-and-bones Make-A-Wish kid, told him that he could fly, and shot him out of a cannon. The journalists were not the ones who stuffed Arday into the cannon and lit the fuse. They were gravity.
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In The Wild Duck, Ibsen’s main villain is Gregers, the crusading moralist who makes it his mission to “rescue” the characters from their sustaining life-lies and help them and those who respect them see their deficiencies. The Gregers in this case is Nathan Cofnas, a philosopher with an abiding interest in race and a particular curiosity about the supposed mental deficiencies of Black people. Cofnas’s views on race science (he believes that very few Black people are cognitively equipped to be employed at a “meritocratic” university) led him to be run out of Cambridge in 2024, just as Arday was being appointed to one of the university’s most prestigious chairs. Cambridge’s failure to vet this appointment left an opening for Cofnas, smarting from his own dismissal, to take on the unsavory task of assembling a dossier on Arday’s work. The results were so galling that morbid curiosity drove others to scrutinize everything else about Arday, including his implausible claims that he secretly raised large sums for charity and was among the world’s greatest long-distance runners.
Dr. Relling calls Gregers’s urge to disabuse and expose “an acute attack of integrity” and warns that the patients going cold turkey off livsløgn will not end well for them or others. (Other Ibsen plays are relevant here too: In some, the collapse of illusions afflicts whole towns, not just a few of their members.) The difference between Gregers and Cofnas seems to be that the latter, perhaps as a result of his being scorned by Cambridge, has no affection for the people whose life-lies he methodically destroyed. Cofnas recently told the podcaster Winston Marshall that he accepts that “talking about” race “makes people feel bad, and there are a lot of things that are true that make people feel bad that we don’t need to talk about.” But the subversion of academic standards, at what Cofnas perceives as his own expense, demanded action. The result will be good for academia, Cofnas insists, a far better outcome than preserving the good feelings that went along with silence.
In Ibsen, when Gregers forces integrity on a self-deluded character, that character’s daughter decides to kill herself. Gregers sounds most like Cofnas in the final scene. He is confident that her death, however horrible, will “set free all that is noble” in those who partook in the life-lie as they see life for what it is. Life sustained by delusion “is not worth living,” Gregers says. But he knows the cost of being an odious truth teller. “I am glad that my destiny is what it is,” he tells Relling: “to be the thirteenth at table,” the guest who everyone wishes would stop showing up, because he brings misfortune to any dinner he attends.
Arday was hired to teach social science. A terminal irony is that his main contribution to that body of knowledge will be as a case study, about a community that elevated a flawed man to a position exalted beyond his ability, without knowing or caring that they were actually offering him as a human sacrifice.
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