Ours is an increasingly litigious society, one which financially encourages claimants to exaggerate their suffering. In a piece at Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple says the psychology behind the claimant’s exaggeration is often subtle:

Nobody likes to think of himself as dishonest, and so many a plaintiff comes to believe his own exaggerations. He feels obliged to suffer the suffering that he claims the wrong has done him, and even if he wins the case and receives the grotesquely inflated sum that he claimed, he feels obliged to go on suffering, for otherwise his own dishonesty would stand revealed to him. It is all a highly poisonous business.