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In January 2022, my husband died by suicide. Seven months earlier, he had posted a tweet in which he intended to satirise what he saw as anti-Semitism on the part of Jeremy Corbyn and the far left of the Labour party. The tweet had involved an image of Corbyn reading from We’re All Going on a Bear Hunt, the front cover of which had been doctored - I don’t know by whom - into a copy of the anti-Semitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Most of my late husband’s tweets had reached a tiny audience, but this one provoked widespread outrage, and was seen and retweeted millions of times. Details of Pete’s place of work were posted online and his line managers were bombarded with literal thousands of emails calling for his resignation.
One journalist posted details online of what he thought was Pete’s home address, and I called the police, who sent a patrol car to sit outside our house overnight. My husband was put through a major institutional disciplinary procedure, which lasted months. The onslaught of tweets to him and about him, shaming him, ridiculing his academic work, calling for his total cancellation and disappearance from visibility, were incessant. National newspapers, including the Guardian, reported on the case. The shame and perceived unfairness of his loss of reputation consumed Pete, and impelled him to pursue redress through legal action. Over the following months, he lied and kept this - along with many other things - secret from me and his family, and when the legal action took a turn he hadn’t expected, and when all his lies started to come crashing down, he couldn’t endure it and took his own life.
Obviously the death of Jason Arday reminds me of what happened to my husband. And my first thought is absolute heartbreak for what Arday’s partner and children and his family and friends are going through right now, and how their lives have been irrevocably altered.
My other thoughts are these:
We’re living in an era in which there’s widespread fascination with people who are revealed to be fantasists and fabricators. Raynor Winn - the author of The Salt Path who has been the subject of an ongoing Observer investigation into the, erm, inconsistencies in her memoir of purportedly being made homeless and hiking the South West Coast Path with her husband, who had been diagnosed with a dreadful degenerative brain condition - is the subject of the longest-running and busiest series of Mumsnet threads, stretching to around 26,000 separate comments.
I fully understand such fascination. It is fascinating to think about the mechanics of deception: the psychological drives that impel individuals to lie; how they are able to get away with it for so long; how lies escalate into more and more lies; what finally exposes them and brings them down. Perhaps many of us have been hurt by other people’s lies in the past, and there’s a satisfaction in being able to publicly condemn such behaviour. Perhaps many of us are unwilling to look at times in our own lives when we’ve lied or embellished and been rewarded for it, and how easily we ourselves could have become trapped in a series of escalating lies. And perhaps we feel personally absolved by, instead, pointing the finger at those whose lies were far worse, and pretending that we’re nothing like them.
I’m certainly not going to excuse or dismiss the behaviour of serial liars. I think that deception can be an evil act, quite frankly, because when people lie and deceive, it can makes the victims unable to trust their own perceptions of reality. But I also think that the people who are harmed the most by liars are usually those who are closest to them. People who lie publicly are, I would wager, almost always lying even more energetically in their personal lives. Members of Winn’s family have posted online about their emotional and financial suffering due to deceptions she and her husband have allegedly perpetrated within the family. Students and colleagues of Arday may feel aggrieved at the possibility of his plagiarism or questionable credentials, but my heart is with his friends and family who have to process the potential contradictions between his own account of his life and the evidence offered by others. How do you relearn to trust anything in your world, when someone who has been a part of it, on a daily basis, for decades, is revealed to not be quite as you thought?
But I also think that there should be a possibility of change, recovery and rebuilding for liars who admit to their deceptions and genuinely apologise. I suspect that compulsive fantasists do not usually start off as devious manipulators, but are driven by significant psychological damage revolving around deep-set feelings of inadequacy and shame. Manipulation might become necessary further down the line, to prevent the collapse of the house of cards that they may not ever have been fully intending to build. I clearly don’t know anything personally about Arday, and I’m not going to speculate about him specifically, but I’ve read and thought and written quite a bit about the psychology of secrecy.
I think that a deeply entrenched sense of shame and inadequacy, often formed in childhood, can lead a person to siphon off aspects of their selfhood and behaviour and pursue them in hidden, secret lives. Or it can impel them to embellish, and the reward - paid in praise and adulation - can be so seductive, and so soothing of that fundamental sense of inadequacy, that it becomes impossible for the person to confess to the embellishment.
Often, as I think happened with my late husband, a splitting occurs between the false public-facing persona - which is based on deception, and which attracts such praise - and the true, hidden, shame-ridden self. The public persona becomes invested, by onlookers and by the individual themselves, with the qualities of a saint. One of my husband’s followers on Twitter literally suggested, after his death, that he was akin to the messiah. And, while he was alive, Pete needed to believe such a thing, in order to soothe his fundamental sense of inadequacy, and to soothe the increasing shame that was building deep down about the lies he was telling in order to keep up that saintly persona. But it was a fragile sense of saintliness, built on other people’s adulation. And, because he had no deep-down sense of self-worth, and just that fundamental shame, he couldn’t survive the near-total collapse of that public approval.
The online world exacerbates all of this, and makes the possibility of confession, apology, recovery, and rebuilding almost impossible. As I’ve written before, it creates more opportunities than ever before for people - mainly men - to craft secret lives, via secret habits of gambling, or pornography, and so on. The online world also creates more opportunities than ever before for people to craft saintly personae and receive approval.
It is very difficult to be a whole, complex, flawed person on social media. The entire mechanism is geared towards distilling human personalities into single issues and sorting multi-faceted human relationships into distinct ‘camps’. Actual human beings become ‘accounts’ on Twitter and Bluesky, and the whole point of an ‘account’ is to broadcast a certain viewpoint using a prescribed set of mantras, to form alliances with like-minded people, and to attack those with different beliefs. There is little possibility on social media of the type of compromise, tact, agreement to disagree, and fellow-feeling across political divides, which characterises (or used to characterise) actual in-real-life friendships.
Social media is therefore a seductive haven for people who have a psychological need for this type of splitting of selfhoods into saints and sinners. Twitter allowed my husband to craft a saintly persona as a campaigner against anti-Semitism, and to form alliances with people who adored him as a saint, and to attack those whose views differed. And social media encourages the rest of us, who may not have such deep-seated compulsions, to behave like this too. It brings it out in us. It makes us feel the frisson of feeling like a saint, and attacking a sinner, whom we cast as the devil himself. It’s so easy to forget that people like Jason Arday, or my husband, were complex, flawed-but-not-the-actual-devil-flawed, real people with families and children, and we praise or attack them as if they’re simple ciphers for political causes. It becomes like a game: we want to vanquish the accounts who are on the opposing camp. I remember someone who had a different approach to feminism to me, tweeting that ‘I thought we’d ended her’ when I reactivated my account after temporarily taking a break due to a pile-on.
And what does ‘vanquishing’ or ‘ending’ someone really mean? What people who tweet such things are after is the complete obliteration of a person from the public sphere; driving them away from their jobs and from any online or media presence whatsoever. And because social media encourages us to forget that, behind the ‘account’, there is a real-life person, I don’t think that they see much of a problem with suicide being the means of a person’s disappearance from public view. For the terminally online, suicide basically appears no different to permanent deactivation of a Twitter account. The wider devastation is not contemplated. And the frankly inhuman and gleeful responses that have been tweeted in the 24 hours after the announcement of Arday’s death bears this out.
Before social media, there was a possibility of rehabilitation for people who lie, confess and take steps to make change. As I’ve said above, the most direct harms of liars’ behaviour are usually felt by those closest to them, and the consequences of lying and exposure were, in the pre-online world, mostly dealt with in the private sphere. A liar might - and possibly deservedly - have lost their job and their marriage, but their crimes weren’t necessarily broadcast everywhere, and there was a possibility of rebuilding over time. Today, though, I think it’s almost impossible for such rehabilitation to be accessible to people whose adulation was crafted online, whose lies and deceptions were built up online, or whose failings were conducted under the gaze of social media, and whose downfall was accelerated and shared online. I’ve done things wrong in the past but, unlike my husband’s acts, my misdeeds weren’t conducted online and I didn’t have to read tens of thousands of people publicly condemning me and calling for the end of my life. And, unlike my husband, my sense of self-worth exists in places other than the internet. I suspect that Raynor Winn has endured her cancellation better than my husband or Arday, because she is not an online person and therefore has an option for retreat. I obviously have no insight into whether she is using that distance for any reflection or remorse.
Social media encourages us to be fascinated by individuals, rather than institutions. The real public interest story behind both Winn’s and Arday’s cancellations is the lack of due diligence conducted by publishers and higher education, and why those institutions promoted such individuals with such unquestioning enthusiasm. But we have all been so warped by social media that stories of institutions don’t feed our rampant psychological drives to vanquish apparent sinners and make ourselves feel saintly in the process. We fixate on individuals instead, and pursue the fixation until they’re ‘ended’. What an awful world we’ve created.
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