So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson Page A

Lehrer can’t even be bothered to fake an apology that sounds meaningful. Call me uncharitable, but if I were a magazine editor, I’d never hire him.
    â€”J ERRY C OYNE , QUOTED ON R ICHARDBOWKER.COM ,F EBRUARY 18 , 2013
    â€œI thought of you,” Jonah said. “I thought, That’s an interesting question for Jon. Jon’s spent some time with me. Maybe I
am
a sociopath.”
    The question didn’t surprise me. Ever since I published a book about psychopaths, people have been asking me if they’re one (or, if not them, their boss or their ex-boyfriend or Lance Armstrong). Perhaps Jonah was honestly intrigued by the possibility that he was one, but I didn’t think so. I think he knew he wasn’t, and he had a different reason for wanting to have this conversation. Academics shouldn’t diagnose people from afar as sociopaths. It was a stupid thing for Jerry Coyne to have done. I think Jonah wanted us to bitch about his stupidity for a moment. It would be a way for him to recover some self-esteem—to do a bit of shaming of someone else. Jonah was at rock bottom, so I was happy to go along with it. I told Jonah that he didn’t seem like someone who had no conscience.
    â€œWho the hell knows what a conscience is,” Jonah replied. “If a conscience is living in a world defined by regrets, then, yeah, I’ve got a conscience. My very first thought every morning is what I’ve done wrong. That sounds self-pitying and I’d like you not to use that quote, but there’s no other way around it.”
    â€œIf it felt really important to use that quote, could I?” I asked him.
    Jonah sighed. “I mean, it depends how you use it, but I’d prefer you not use it,” he replied.
    I use the quote here because it seems important, given that so many people imagine Jonah has some neurological lack of conscience.
    â€œRegrets of the sort I have are all-consuming,” Jonah continued. “I think about what I’ve done to the people I loved. What I’ve put my wife through. What I’ve put my brother through. What I’ve put my parents through. That is haunting. Long after I get over the loss of my status, and the loss of my career, which I enjoyed, I will never . . . Life is short. And I have caused tremendous pain to the people I love. I don’t know what that feeling’s called. Remorse sounds about right. There’s a tremendous amount of remorse. And as time passes, that isn’t going away. It is miserable and haunting.”
    I heard Jonah’s daughter crying in the background. We talked about the “slippery slope” that led to the fake Dylan quotes. It began with the self-plagiarism—with Jonah reusing his own paragraphs in different stories. I told him I didn’t consider that the crime of the century. “Frank Sinatra doesn’t only sing ‘My Way’ once,” I said.
    â€œThe self-plagiarism should have been a warning sign,” Jonah said. “It should have been a sign that I was stretched. If I needed to recycle my own material, why was I bothering to write this blog post in the first place? Look, we can debate the ethics of it. And I’ve certainly heard lots of debate about this. But at the time I didn’t think it was wrong. If I’d thought it was wrong, I would have taken some trouble to hide my tracks.” He paused. “It should have been a huge flashing neon sign telling me, ‘You are getting careless.’ You’re taking shortcuts and not noticing, and shortcuts become habits, and you excuse them because you’re too busy. I wasn’t turning anything down.”
    â€œWhat would have been wrong with turning things down?” I asked.
    â€œIt was some toxic mixture of insecurity and ambition,” said Jonah. “I always felt like a fad. I felt like I was going to be hot for a second and then I would disappear. So I had to act while