A Reputation

Dear reader, word has reached me that somebody is terribly upset about the possible loss of their reputation, or, shall we say, its modification.

So before we get to anything else, let us talk about reputation. It seems to be a subject people understand rather poorly.

Socrates is credited with the observation that the surest way to earn a good reputation is to endeavour to be what you wish to appear. Simple advice, with a catch: reputation is the one asset you do not own. It lives in other people's heads, and it is assembled from whatever those people happen to learn about your conduct.

Hence its defining property. Warren Buffett put it neatly: twenty years to build, five minutes to destroy. Lovely. But hidden inside those five minutes is a question that is usually asked the wrong way round: who, exactly, did the destroying?

After that, the work is done not by him but by the reader. The reader takes the new, verified information, holds it up against whatever they previously thought of the person in question, and recalculates. Sometimes the result changes dramatically; sometimes it does not change at all, because everyone carries their own moral compass and their own threshold for surprise. The same documents will horrify one reader, leave another indifferent, and prompt a third to remark that everybody does it. The author did not ruin anyone's reputation. The facts simply met their audience.

It is a different story altogether when lies and the deliberate distortion of facts enter the picture. And at that point the conversation shifts to rather different territory, some of it legal.

I do not claim to be dispassionate, naturally. I am a writer, and the tone of these dispatches is mine. But tone does not create facts; it merely keeps them company. The facts were created by the characters themselves. And by their own past.

Which leaves me with just one practical piece of advice: try to be what you wish to appear, and do not do anything you would one day rather not read about in the newspaper.

Everything else, this dispatch included, is merely a consequence.