MYTHOMANIA

 

Mythomania : 1. a tendency to elaborate, exaggerate, and tell lies, including reports of imagined experiences, often involving self-deception. See also factitious disorder; pathological lying. 2. an abnormal interest in myths, in which the individual may believe fantasy to be reality, and a tendency to fabricate incredible stories.

(OSTB : This morning I received the following from an ex AG (want to guess who). It is some opinion or comment written by one N S......moorthy. I have reproduced it in full here with my comments in blue. The pronoun refers to that fellow. I have a couple of stories of my own experiences, in blue).

 

"He does not know what he is talking about"  by N S....moorthy

For the second time in a row, he fumbled badly when dealing with a question related to the economy.

The first time, when he was asked about whether Malaysia could be a first-world nation by a female university student, he fumbled his way out of answering her question by flirting with her.

“If I was younger, I would have asked her for her phone number,” he quipped to sidestep the student’s question.

This time, thankfully, he did not decide to flirt with Mariko Silver, a former deputy assistant secretary of international policy under the Obama administration, when she posed him an economics-related question.

Instead, he decided to blabber on aimlessly for 5-10 minutes and befuddled his interviewer to the extent that she gave up on pursuing her line of question altogether.

I am not going to bother analyzing what he was mumbling about in the interview. All I will say is that when he was asked a question related to the economy, he decided to goreng an answer that spanned from Mandela to his time in prison to lavatories in schools, in a manner that reminded me how a clueless student would write about a topic that they have no understanding about in a SPM essay question. They would drone on and on as if they believed that just the sheer length of their answer would compensate for their lack of knowledge about the subject. If you are interested, you can watch the full interview here or the redacted version here.

By now, it really should be obvious to anyone with eyes, ears, and a reasonably functioning brain that he doesn’t know much about the economy. 

(OSTB : Notice he likes to recite "parts" of arabic verses in his speeches (to Malay audiences). He never explains what they mean. Most likely because he does not know either. Gotcha!)

 

He might have been the finance minister back in the 90s and he might be a finance minister today, he might have won the title of Best Finance Minister in the World once upon a time ago and he might be able to read a prepared text about the economy in a confident fashion, but by now, I am quite confident that he doesn't understand even the rudimentary things that you would expect somebody with the basic understanding of economy to know, like how raising the interest rate might affect GDP growth.

I am quite confident that he  doesn’t have even a basic understanding, because although we have known him for 30 years, none of us has ever seen him address an economic question in an impromptu and confidence-inspiring manner. 

(OSTB : Well I have known for a very long time. Circa 1995 I was a banker and he was the FM. He once began a speech to a room full of bankers (I was there) by declaring most excitedly 'Ladies and gentlemen there is no cashflow that cannot be discounted'. This is like saying, "Oil palm is the tree and palm oil is the oil" - Abdullah Badawi on another occasion - I was there as well. But I think Badawi knew what was a palm tree.)

The test of mastery of an intellectual discipline like economics is your ability to handle any question posed to you on the subject on an impromptu basis. If you can’t do that, it doesn’t matter what your position is or how many titles you have won, the fact of the matter is, you have no idea what you are talking about.

He, by the way, has a bad habit of not realizing the difference between addressing an issue and talking about an issue.

When you address an issue, you are supposed to put it to rest. When people urged him to address the DNAA in parliament a couple of weeks ago, for example, we didn’t just want him to talk about it in any which way he pleases. We wanted him to address it in a manner that would put the doubt in our minds to rest and inspire confidence in our hearts.

Any fool can talk about anything in an aimless fashion, but you have to be a person of substance and consequence to address something in a meaningful manner. This is where we find him lacking.

I am not even blaming him for not having the basic mastery of the economy.

• It is okay if he doesn’t understand the economy. Everybody cannot be expected to understand everything in this world. He is a politician after all, not an economist. The problem I have with him is that I don’t think he is aware that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.
• An educated person is not only a person who knows a great deal about something, they are also a person who knows what they don’t know.
• When you know what you don’t know, at least you will be intelligent enough to know that you have to find someone who knows about what you don’t know, in order to deal with it.
• What is worrisome about him is that he shows signs of presuming that he knows things that he doesn’t know about.
• That is why he struts confidently into interviews and question-and-answer sessions to take on subjects that he clearly has no competency in.
• That is why he confidently answers questions that he really shouldn’t be answering at all.
• That is probably why he took on the role of the Finance Minister.

(OSTB : In Malay this is called 'bodoh sombong'. A person who is actually bodoh but he does not know he is bodoh. Such a person DOES NOT pretend to be clever. He is convinced that he is really clever. The late Prof Syed Hussein Alatas expanded 'bodoh sombong' to include 'jadong'  which meant 'jahat, bodoh dan sombong').

If he could just honestly say, “Look, I don’t understand enough about the economy to be talking about it, but I got people who are smart enough to deal with it and break it down to me, so don’t worry, I am on top of it”, that is fine.

But if he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, this is dangerous, because when you have a person who assumes that they know about things that they they don’t know, the more they are lost, the faster they will go.

(OSTB : In the 90s I once went to his office at the MoF with some people. He was not there but we met his people. There was a fellow with a "Mat Botak" moniker who had piles of open books on his desk. Mat Botak's  job was to use coloured highlighters to highlight certain sentences in those books. Some of these highlights would then be included as his famous "quotes" in his speeches.  That was how he tried to sound well read and intelligent. I am sure there must have been a Shakespeare somewhere in that pile.

I once had a colleague (a co Director in our company) who knew his antics quite well. Ex Civil Service type whose job was to know things about people. He said that nothing was beyond this fellow. He could act out any part and play any part. He could sing, dance, pray, go to the temple, to the mosque, dress up, dress down, give fiery speeches on any subject under the sun, philosopher one minute, philanderer the next minute. A genuine mythomaniac. 

But here is the worst part. For 30 years he has fooled people. Including you.)

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.