The great attraction of petty liars

A mini essay about lying that makes no mention of Trump or Elon

Joaquin Phoenix in The Master

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Charlatans have a strange appeal. I get recommended a lot of videos from a particular business influencer. He’s not explicitly selling scams like dropshippers et al., but he offers advice – on topics I don’t care about – with an obviously empty level of confidence. Every potential challenge or doubt someone else faces is a jumping-off point for a simple three-point plan, or elucidates a counter-intuitive principle that he can break down with clarity and ease, like a hot knife through butter.

I’m not trying to launch or scale a business. To the extent that I am, I am a self-employed writer pursuing a craft that keeps me interested and engaged with little consideration of more profitable ventures. I navigate the market enough to keep going, and that’s exactly how I want to live. He’s pretty explicit about what he’s selling: sales itself. The product is circular and self-referencing; often it’s so exposed as to become absurd, like when he justified the $5,000 cost of a course to someone by saying its real value was understanding ‘what they didn’t need to do.’

Despite all my complaints, I watch the videos and keep watching them. Perhaps it’s as straightforward as the pleasure of hearing a confident patter; the reassuring comfort that in about 30 seconds, he will set up a tension and dissipate it, like a children’s story that pretends to be about the adult world. Sometimes I am jerked out of my stupor by the sheer callousness of his worldview: often he recommends that people abandon friendships and cut social ties to be more focused on their ‘goals'. In these moments, my attention shifts from comfort watching to being fixated on a car crash. I don’t particularly like these heightened moments. I want to return to the familiar rhythms of his ‘advice’ – and eventually the algorithm brings me back there.

I have heard his from-rags-to-riches life story a dozen or so times, and believe it less everytime I hear it. I don’t need to bore you with the details. Perhaps most interesting is how he attributes fantastical outcomes to minor daily rituals, such as the Pomodoro Technique which involves repeated short bursts of focus. His narcissism invites me to consider my own: What kind of life story would I tell about myself? I could lean into soliciting empathy: raised by a single mother; disconnected from cultural centres in rural Ireland; an awkward stuttering kid who managed the courage to fight bullies; moved to a new city with no connections and persisted. But I know it's fiction, and I would feel embarrassed talking about myself that like that, knowing that everyone knows I’m lying. My childhood was good and pleasant; I had friends and interests and always felt supported at home, even if we didn’t have a lot of money for superfluous things.

His life story is a form of content to pitch productivity hacks. Perhaps I keep watching because I think there’s a mystery to solve; I am fascinated by a psychology that is so raw and on the surface yet disguised, hidden, and totally alien to my own sense of what a meaningful life would look like. People lie all the time: I keep thinking about how former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, someone who has always shown a particular affinity for the business-oriented Silicon Valley-adjacent world, repeatedly said he woke early in the morning – around 5 or 6am, if I recall correctly – to run on his treadmill, but the device got hacked and it showed he had done so once or so during his entire premiership. I believe he believed it when he said it: he identified as someone who woke up at sunrise to run, and that was good enough.

There’s a big difference between creating a fake story to sell something, a classic form of hucksterism that deserves its own kind of respect due to the longstanding history of such blatant conning, and lying to yourself, probably because you admire others who posture in this way. I am equally repulsed and beguiled by these characters. How do they live like this? Very well is the answer.