The bare-faced assertion

DIANA MAHABIR-WYATT

There can be few childhood rhymes more dangerous to programme into young minds than "sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me," because names can hurt you.

Usually intentionally, as in our litigious society, people in politics, publishing, manufacturing or other power positions have learned to their cost when one politician or professional charged with the responsibility of destroying the reputation of a competitor – service or product – starts naming or implying the identity of another. The intention is to hurt. Increasingly, this is done through social media, which, less than a decade ago, was thought of as a private medium accessible only to those with the consent of the sender.

Now it is one of the most effective forms of communication used by adolescents of all ages for slander and spreading gossip.

Don’t forget that UWI turns out a plethora of new and hungry law graduates every year eager for remunerative work. They know how to draft a pre-action protocol letter in a matter of minutes for anyone in public life, which quickly can morph into a court case, resulting in substantial awards for defamation – damaging the reputation of a firm, a product, or an individual.

It can silence people. Words have weight.

It is a matter of how you use the words, the intention with which you use them, and the consequences that result therefrom.

The genuine intentions include others intended to deceive or to take advantage of the person with whom you interact. Among those intentions is one known as the "big lie" or the bare-faced assertion.

It was one that, over many years in the executive-recruitment business, I came across frequently from people applying for positions they knew they were not qualified for academically, so they got on the internet, did a little research and forged a degree, usually at the masters level. The most risky was claiming qualifications from a university they never attended, or attended sporadically, meanwhile claiming GATE or parental support.

They counted on the HR manager at the applicant company not doing their due diligence and verifying their claims. But we always did.

For example, someone claimed a PhD from a university in Hawaii, citing a thesis that had been published online, called, if I remember correctly: The Development of Ethical Standards in Islamic-Based Organisations.

By coincidence, one of my school friends ran an NGO in Hawaii at the time, so I wrote asking her to check the bona fides of the university.

I was involved in the commission of enquiry into the 1990 coup at the time, so out of curiosity, downloaded a copy of the thesis and found a plagiarised transcript copied from a textbook I was reading at the time, written by a famous Islamic professor he had not accredited in his "thesis."

My NGO friend found the campus – a one-room office on the third floor of a nearby building: what is known as a degree mill. For a given sum (I checked), at the time I think it was only US$3,000, you could buy a bachelor’s degree, and for US$6,000, a master's degree, along with a very impressive certificate on heavy parchment with gold-lettered logo and everything, which came by mail.

Degree mills still exist. You can buy anything online.

Then there is the bold-faced brand bamboozle, which I learned from a desperate teenager from a very poor family who was a scholarship winner at a prestige school.

For four years she had kept up her face by washing and ironing her one school uniform every night and using white shoe polish liberally. When graduation time came, and her schoolmates were trading stories of the designer dresses their parents were flying in for them to wear to the graduation ball, she was in trouble.

But she wasn’t a scholarship winner for nothing. She found a designer handbag with a Gucci label on it, steamed off the label, glued it on to a pre-worn long dress she got from Goodwill and casually let the Gucci tag show when a suspicious classmate asked her who designed her dress on the night of the dance.

She said, “I don’t know. My aunt sent it from New York. Read the label for me. Do you know who that is?”

Well, most teenagers who have ever come across their mother’s copy of Vogue magazine know the Gucci name, perhaps not remembering that it is from a handbag, not a dress designer, but it is genuinely famous.

The wearer gained considerable prestige that night. The name doesn’t matter; it is the technique.

At business meetings, conferences or trade fairs, if asked your alma mater, and you take a calculated risk that no one there attended the one you pick, choose a slightly obscure brand name such as the National University of Singapore Business Analytics Centre. Sounds impressive. Who will check?

When it comes to intentions to deceive, there are other variants, such as the DDD (drip, drip drip) repetition and "They made sexual advances to me" tactics used to deceive in disciplinary matters at work for purposes of destroying competition. Look out for them. Malicious fraud exists.