The Jason Arday case is being framed as a story about race. But Dr Jenny Taylor believes it is really about narcissism, institutional failure, and a society that has dismantled the very structures designed to protect us from those wired to exploit
No doubt books will be written about the tragedy of Jason Arday. What must be learned is where the blame lies – and it’s not quite where we think.
The academics who over-promoted him? The man himself for self-love? The media “just doing their job” until their victim could bear it no longer?
Poor Arday. His very name will come to encapsulate an unforgettable cultural moment, and perhaps there is redemption in that.
While many will want to focus on racism, I believe of more importance now will be explaining to people the peculiar combination of character defect, institutional blindness and what one senior journalist calls “the Extraction Pattern”.
Vaughan Smith, one of the most illustrious war correspondents and video journalists of our age, who set up the Frontline Club and stood bail for Julian Assange, has just published a most prophetic book about why institutions fail and who benefits.
Called The Extraction Pattern, it reads as if the Jason Arday tragedy was set up as a case study to promote it.
The big question about Jason Arday centres on the blindness that allowed his rise. Smith says this was “not conspiracy. It is curriculum.”
Knowledge of personality disorder is out there. It’s just systematically ignored.
You cannot choose your wiring. You can choose your architecture
Jason Arday was a person who manifested for years many of the classic attributes of narcissism. In Smith’s take on narcissism, it is one who clearly needs enormously from others, and cannot take in what is offered. His grandiosity, his fantastical achievements and the honours that just kept growing and growing are classic symptoms.
Yet although the literature is out there, it was just ignored, and the real question is why that was.
Is it simply a matter of “the truth will set you free”, as Jesus promised? Well yes, but some personalities are so disordered, they are averse to truth. And society also, cut off now from the collective importance of truth, and the protective walls it once prompted and built, cannot save itself.
Smith himself disavows the spiritual dimension of his thesis. Instead, he uses the metaphor of the “grandmother” who watched; the village that stayed together long enough for truth to be evidenced: whether a person was true to his word, stayed faithful in good times and bad, delivered on his promise.
He may not, but I like the metaphor of the yeast of truth working through the whole loaf: biblical images with salvific power.
Instead, Smith tells the story of a mental health worker on a psychiatric ward in Penn State who was there to watch the patients the professions had learned to dread, and to understand them.
What Kenneth Levy discovered was that no one was training the next generation to learn from what he found.
“Only 16 per cent of programmes have faculty interested in personality disorders. Only 15 per cent offer practicum opportunities … a substantial disservice to both trainees and the public,” writes Smith.
No psychology programme responded publicly to his research. The profession did not dispute the findings; it ignored them.
“Silence is also an answer”, writes Smith.
Smith’s thesis is that society has reconstructed itself to benefit the “extractors”, those whom people give up on, or dread. Those who shine because they are charismatic, or tall and interview well, but who are wired to take.
It explains why many psychopaths are CEOs. They lack walls. We need protection. But without re-building the walls and enabling the watchers, we don’t have a way for society to tame the defects; instead we honour and promote them.
The personality disorders of some work to the advantage of others - in the short term. The longer-term pre-modern village solutions to problem people, principally “containment”, have been dismantled.
Institutions that replaced the vigilance of the village are being hollowed out by narcissists who leave a trail of destruction, and move on.
And we can see it everywhere, from the water industry producing dirtier water even as our bills go up; banks charging more and more for our money even as they load more and more admin onto their customers; universities like Cambridge making profit out of post-colonial guilt. “Blindness is curriculum”.
According to Smith, there are two kinds of architecture.
Architecture-that-enables the exploitation: the anonymity of the city, the captured regulator, the institution that assumed good faith from people who don’t operate in good faith, the glossed CV. Systems where extraction is invisible and free.
And there is architecture-that-contains the would-be exploiters and psychopaths: the village, the watching, the factory inspector, the Plimsoll Line to prevent over-loading ships.
“Architecture is what surrounds you, the systems, institutions, incentives and structures that shape what anyone can do. Wiring on the other hand is what’s inside you, the neurological configuration you were born with or that childhood shaped,” says Smith.
You cannot choose your wiring. You can choose your architecture. And that requires grace and truth.
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