Other people’s failures of self-knowledge are frequently the subject of passionate indignation. Scandals, downfall stories, and politicians’ sexual imbroglios, are always reliable venues for cultural fasci
nation. And they are in fact commodities—scandal is one of the few reliable growth industries at the moment. In turn they are also a mindset—the “gotcha” mentality is the emergent character type. Though the interest in other people’s self-deceptions, which do, so often, involve questions of sexual morality — from John Edward’s secret love-child story (a recent scandal example), to the Sartrean conception of bad faith itself (one of the more sustained philosophical forays into the subject) — invariably has a paradoxical quality, since the forms of intersubjectivity put into play are hardly self-evident and can never fail to know something about their own procedures.