Jason Arday’s Final Self-Delusion

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.

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.