I agree that it would be very hard to hold him directly liable in terms of fines and penalties, and wouldn’t really approve of the sort of law that would make it easier, I don’t think.

I don’t know if anyone will actually believe him. But he’s courting their belief, so there’s the intent to deceive regardless.

I do think that there is a certain complicity between the audience and con man in these cases. To extend the metaphor of the TV/computer. What really upsets people is not discovering that the device isn’t plugged in so much as the chance that somebody is going to realize that much of the fans knew it wasn’t plugged in all along.

It really depends on the way the book is ‘sold’… and the passage of time. The honesty of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater or even Naked Lunch or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas isn’t as much an issue, is it?

Well that was me, and it was a computer not a TV. But the point is that it doesn’t matter whether the book “worked” in a manner acceptable to Frey, or to his publisher, or even to you or me. It doesn’t matter whether it worked in the sense of offering pleasure to the reader prior to the discovery of the hoax. The point is that when you sell something to someone, you make a contract with them, and the integrity of your contract depends on the undertanding that is reached between you and the buyer. You make representations about what you are selling, and your buyer is given by you to understand that the object has certain properties, which are part of the basis for the buyer’s willingness to part with something else in exchange.

Now I think you know very well that there are a lot of people who bought this book because they were deceived about the truth value of it’s contents, and that the deception was intentionally perpetrated by Frey himself. You know many of them would not have purchased the book if they had known at the time of purchase what they know now about Frey’s intentions.

You may believe that these people are an ignorant and contemptible hoi polloi, who lack a proper postmodern appreciation of the absence of the author and the myth of the fact, and are deficient in other sophisticated literary sensibilities. But nevertheless, they have the sensibilities that they have, and it is wrong to take advantage of people by using false pretenses to get them to hand over their money. Even if we accept your premise that the readers would never experience any distress or come to any real harm if they never discovered the hoax, they have still been defrauded – and assuming Frey perpetrated the fraud willfully (rather than through, say, a drug-induced failure to distinguish memory from fantasy), his behavior shows a selfish and deplorable contempt for the value and integrity of other people.

But turning now to that other point about the actual effect of the hoax on others, you suggest here, and I think in your example of the Noah story, that the truth or falsity of the story doesn’t matter to whether it will succeed in accomplishing its effect – that so long as the readers don’t discover the story is BS, it will “work” just as well as the real thing. You may be right about that, but it is a contestable empirical assumption. For example, if Frey had sold a book that descibed a weight loss method consisting of ingesting two pounds of lard a day, along with a certain quantity of arsenic, then I don’t think we would say that the method is sure to work so long as the readers don’t discover Frey never really employed that method. The psychological power of hope alone is not negligible, but at some point it runs up against the natural limitations of corporeal human beings.

Giovanni, so lies are okay if the phrases are turned well? I agree that Frey’s book is horribly written – really, really horribly written – but it seems just plain weird to me to say that its dishonesty would cease to matter if it were written better.

About 20 years ago a friend of mine explained that “impression management” is the key to life. If people think you’re wise, you’re effectively wise, etc., whereas if you really are wise but no one respects you, you’re nothing.

There is a perception there, but a lot of people take the wrong lesson from it. The level of cynicism I see among young (under 40) educated people these days is pretty appalling. They’re not saying, “Our society is fraudulent, I need to escape from that.” They’re saying “Our society is fraudulent and if you don’t get in on the action you’re a sucker.”

The vindictive side of me wants to see some of the hipsters here get into something painful and get ripped off by this sort of con too. Then the rest of us can quote aphorisms and blame the victims and it will all be very goddamn jolly.

Sorry to be so uncool about this, but I don’t think some past stupid decisions – which addiction nearly always involves – should make people pariahs, and I care about the scum who prey on those who are now trying to get out of the messes they got into.

I also think that one of the clear lessons of the last century is that social elites who become uninterested in questions of basic honesty are useful preconditions for the emergence of political tyranny, but I don’t want to harsh anyone’s mellow by pointing out how much some of this sounds like Weimar Berlin after that vulgar Hitler fellow became Reichschancellor. On with the mocking of the lumpenproletariat and anyone who might be mistaken for them. Surely such things cannot bear on the lives of the bourgeoisie, let alone we favored intellectuals.

Maybe I’m reaching, but it seems to me that the notion that what matters in the Frey case is the factual accuracy of the narrative is rather like the idea that the Noah story in the Bible is vindicated or refuted by whether or not there was once a big flood in Iraq.

Well, yes. I’d say that you are reaching.

But even if you weren’t I think that you undercut your own point. If you are a literal-truth fundamentalist about the Bible then the existence of the flood matters very much indeed. If a scientist claimed to have proved once and for all that no such flood had ever happened and you were such a literalist, then hearing that would either seriously affect your reading of the Bible or your willingness to believe the scientist. (Hence the current ridiculous debate about evolution.)