That and the fact that the people who knew him casually or professionally just didn’t care to get entangled with his crap, so they just let him spin while they thought of other things.
So true!
Science offers abundant confirmation of what we know: everybody lies. Bella DePaulo, a well known expert on lying and lie detection,
sums it up this way: "Lying is just so ordinary, so much a part of our everyday lives and everyday conversations that we hardly notice it. And in many cases, it would be more difficult, challenging, and stressful for people to tell the truth than to lie."
In fact, there is a model of human intelligence called the "Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis" which holds that a great advance in human intelligence was triggered by the need for humans to develop their capacity for manipulation, pretense, and deception, because they enabled the relatively harmonious social interaction that allowed humans to work together in groups - an enormous evolutionary advantage. [Dunbar, R.I. & Schultz, S (2007, September 7) Evolution in the Social Brain.
Science, p. 317, 1344-1347. doi:10:1126/science.1145463].
It seems obvious to me that we all enable one another's lying to some extent.
What seems to distinguish BM from the rest of us garden variety liars (MOO) is a lack of empathy for others, and a lack of remorse for cruel behaviors. It seems obvious that he can put on a glib and superficially charming front, but it's also apparent from the AA that he tends to be dishonest, manipulative, and unwilling to accept responsibility. I am not an expert in psychology by any stretch of the imagination, but to me this looks too much like a psychopath to hold his family, friends, and neighbors to account for enabling. This might just be a wiring issue.
