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" Bradley Cooper&amp;#039;s plagiarism film, The Words, has had the incredible good luck to come out the same week that the sum total of Jonah Lehrer&amp;#039;s misdeeds have finally emerged into the squalid light of day. There have now been so many plagiarism and fabrication scandals and in such short order \u2014 Glass, Blair, Frey \u2014 that the movie has a kind of subcultural base to build on. Catching writers at misdeeds has become a spectator sport, an Internet hobby. It&amp;#039;s all based on a fundamentally wrong assumption that writers are good people and that writing is a good act. It isn&amp;#039;t and we aren&amp;#039;t. In fact, we&amp;#039;re mostly assholes. We almost always have been. Get used to it.  Now, I disliked Jonah Lehrer&amp;#039;s work before there were any misdeeds discovered, so I have difficulty defending him. But let&amp;#039;s go over what he actually did. Some stuff is serious: stealing blocks of text from other writers, putting words in people&amp;#039;s mouths. But most of the &amp;quot;crimes&amp;quot; that he was crucified for can also be found in the work of George Orwell. &amp;quot;Self-plagiarism&amp;quot;? I was told by an octogenarian reporter the other week about how they all used to insert their own quotes into their stories on a regular basis. How was anybody going to check? Their notebooks? Some people have actually indicted Lehrer for not fact-checking his blog posts, to which I can only say we all wish that there was so much money in the world.  All these finicky criticisms emerge from a very strange idea that writers are, or should be, responsible figures in the larger order of the world, like doctors or politicians. Maybe this ludicrous idea came from Percy Bysshe Shelley&amp;#039;s theory that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. (They spend an awful lot of time acknowledging it to themselves.) Or maybe the root is more recent \u2014 Woodward and Bernstein in All the President&amp;#039;s Men. All I can say is it doesn&amp;#039;t jibe with reality. I suppose I already revealed myself when I wrote that James Frey was one of the most important writers in America. But most writers I know are lonely skulkers who sit in quiet rooms judging people. That&amp;#039;s the job. Sometimes they pretend to be good. They flaunt their sanctimonious politics or their petty local virtuous causes, but it&amp;#039;s always in the service of the will to power, the bottomless vanity that consumes all of us. To be a writer is to take the world as your plaything. It&amp;#039;s a task for self-consuming bastards. Janet Malcolm said it best, as she often does, in the opening line of The Journalist and the Murderer: &amp;quot;Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.&amp;quot; It is not a coincidence that the best writers are also some of the most dubious ethicists. From the evidence we have, Shakespeare was a litigious bisexual cheater who showed no compunction about the originality of his material.   Faulkner had it just right in an interview with The Paris Review from 1956: INTERVIEWER The writer should be completely ruthless? FAULKNER The writer&amp;#039;s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the &amp;quot;Ode on a Grecian Urn&amp;quot; is worth any number of old ladies. That&amp;#039;s exactly what the premise of The Words misunderstands about the nature of writers. Anyone who has really wanted to be a writer wouldn&amp;#039;t have the slightest compunction about stealing a manuscript. Some old man shows up claiming he wrote it? Prove it. If he can prove it, knock him off. But the action a real writer would take if he found a gorgeous manuscript in the attic wouldn&amp;#039;t be to pass it off as his own. He&amp;#039;d burn it. Let there be no beauty but mine, he would say. He would warm his ink on the flames. That&amp;#039;s just how bad writers are. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a15631/the-words-jonah-lehrer-12403444/>