If you live by the sword…
Some thoughts on Arday
“That a man who no longer wishes to live for himself must go on living merely as a machine for others to use is an extravagant demand”
I have often thought about what I will do when the web of lies finally collapses and I am hounded by the national press for weeks. I like to think, though I may be wrong, that having two children as Arday did would be enough of an incentive to keep clinging on to life. But I can also understand why somebody in his situation would reach the logical conclusion that suicide is the right option.
Without the ability to dupe other people Arday had nothing. He had no academic ability, hence the plagiarism and his decision to use an LLM to write his resignation statement for the Good Law Project. Without his talent for brazen lying Arday would probably have kept a series of jobs doing charity work for troubled yoofs in his corner of South-East Lewisham. Because Arday was born in the right time with the right skin colour he was able to take advantage of deliberately credulous academics and the infrastructure of anti-white racial animus in academia and the media. Using this he was able to instead draw a salary probably approaching six figures along with all of the other material benefits in kind that having a professorship at Cambridge gives you.
But more importantly for Arday it also allowed him to create a prestigious version of himself. He was not just in it for the money. If he was, post exposure, he could had hung on in there like Anna Delvey and enjoyed a Netflix adaptation, vast book sales and some level notoriety in the press for years. Arday had a desperate need for other people to think that he was an impressive person. Many of his more absurd stories such as him having an epileptic fit whilst running his twentieth marathon in a row seem to have been improvised ad-hoc during interviews where he, in the spur of the moment, felt he needed to up the ante. He had to be in the spotlight and he had to shine whilst there.
I do not have sympathy for Jason Arday, because I believe he reached his decision rationally. He was not a ‘victim’ of either the press or Cambridge University. No institution should have a ‘duty of care’ for any adult, not least a forty something. Arday should be rescued from this condescension and understood on his own terms. He killed himself because he knew that once he had been exposed as a fabulist there was no way of going back to the old life that he enjoyed, as a social mobility success story in the face of racial oppression enjoying a coveted academic position in a prestigious University.
The decision to kill himself was probably made final when Cambridge eventually relented and announced that they would investigate his academic work. Not only was the jig up, but suicide provided an opportunity to recover some of the reputational damage. He no doubt believed that his act would make it more difficult for journalists to continue pressuring Cambridge over their hiring decisions and that it would become politically incorrect to talk about his fabulism. That by ‘breaking cover’ in this way he would encourage many ‘neutral voices’ to emerge from the woodwork and start saying how dreadful it was that Arday had been exposed and that now it was time to reflect (and maybe finally implement Leveson). It was one final act of politically motivated narcissism in a life defined by it.
