The Spy in the Sandwich

Sunday, February 16, 2025

9:00 AM | The Other Kind of Inflation

At the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, I was one of several people commissioned by the Cultural Center of the Philippines to write the obituaries of artists who had passed on between the pandemic years of 2020 and 2023. It was a grim task, but the rationale was noble: to commemorate the lives of these Filipino artists for their contribution to Philippine culture—big or small—in a time when we were surrounded by so much death, and so much uncertainties. I readily said yes to the task, since I had always been a fan of how The New York Times did their obituaries [in fact, one of my favorite documentaries is Obit, directed by Vanessa Gould and released in 2016, which chronicled the work of these writers and the choice of their peculiar genre of writing]. And for some reason, then and now, I have always felt the need to write the obituaries of Filipino writers when they pass on, because I am often frustrated by how meager the writeups about them often are in mainstream media.

Writing those obituaries for the CCP felt like a necessity. By then, I had developed a system of research that enabled me to write a considerable tribute—scraping all corners of the Internet to find information, and approaching willing members of grieving families for a little bit more I cannot find online. [When is their birthday? Where is their birthplace? Where did they study, and what degree did they earn? Questions like that.] Part of the exercise was, of course, verifying the information I’d get—and this was where I usually found myself chuckling. Because, with all due respect to the dead, a number of them do inflate their accomplishments. I still remember writing one such obituary for a musician. In his bio, he mentioned having studied in the U.S., and tutored by such and such teacher. This is par for the course of musicians. When they release their biodata for writeups in concert programs, they do mention the music schools they studied in, and the music masters they studied under. This gives credibility to their training, especially if those teachers are world-renowned musicians themselves, or their schools are sacred training grounds for music. I took this dead musician’s biodata, and inputted his claims in my prospective writeup—and then came the verification: it turned out the school he mentioned was not a music school but a high school he attended for one year in an exchange program, and the teachers he mentioned were not musicians but his high school music teachers. Far from my immediate assumption of him studying under masters in an incredible music school! I did not include these details in the final obit I made of him. The rest of what he did in the Philippines was enough.

So, yes, there is such a thing as inflating one’s accomplishments.

Over the past year, I caught two news stories—splashed with congratulatory headlines and with such drama on the media outlets they were published in—that are examples of this kind of inflation.

I remember reading about an author being celebrated for the fact that he was being published by Barnes and Noble! It sounded incredible, and to the uninitiated, truly worthy of praise. But I immediately thought: Barnes and Noble is not a publisher, it’s a bookstore, so how could this be? It turned out, the author being extolled had merely released an e-book, and it was being offered for sale on NOOK, Barnes and Noble’s own version of the Kindle. This is not the same as being published by a major publisher.

I remember reading about a visual artist being celebrated for the fact that she was being exhibited at the Louvre Museum in Paris! It sounded incredible, and to the uninitiated, truly enviable. But I immediately thought: the Louvre is not a commercial gallery, it is a repository of fine arts as collected by France, so how could this be? It turned out, the artist was being exhibited at the Carrousel du Louvre, an underground shopping mall that had direct access to the famed museum. This is not the same as being exhibited by the finest fine arts institution in Paris.

This essay was actually occasioned by a tweet from film critic Jason Tan Liwag, who posted on X [formerly Twitter] last February 9: “There's a difference between the Cannes Film Festival and other film festivals simply held in Cannes.” I was intrigued.

It turned out there is a filmmaker that media is currently crowing about, regarding his being “invited” to the Cannes Film Festival—which is truly an honor for any film artist. One headline reads: “How a late-blooming director conquered the international film scene.” The article describes his film as “becoming a finalist at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.”

Nice.

It turned out he was not at all invited by Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux to be part of the main competition, or even in any of Cannes’ official parallel competitions every May, such as the Un Certain Regard or the Directors' Fortnight or the Tous les Cinémas du Mond. But his film actually participated at the Cannes World Film Festival—which is a totally different festival, also held at Cannes every June, with no ties to the official Festival de Cannes. [I also remember another filmmaker crowing about participating in Cannes. It turned out his film was merely hawked at one of those exhibitor markets that are corollary to festivals such as Cannes, and which anyone with a film to sell can join.]

There is a certain species of person who cannot resist the impulse to inflate their accomplishments. You know them. You have seen them. Perhaps you have even, in a moment of weakness, succumbed to this temptation yourself. In faculty lounges, in alumni reunions, in the halcyon corners of cocktail parties, they hold court with grand pronouncements of triumphs often unverifiable. And yet, their audience nods along, some in admiration, others in veiled amusement. The Bisaya word for this is “hambog,” a label so easily affixed to anyone whose self-confidence tips, ever so slightly, into boastfulness. But what compels people to do this? What primal need is satisfied by exaggeration?

Psychologists might tell us that this tendency stems from a deep-seated insecurity. Alfred Adler, that old rival of Freud, would perhaps explain this as a classic case of overcompensation—a defense mechanism meant to mask one’s private feelings of inadequacy. A struggling writer, unpublished but desperate for literary recognition, might inflate the significance of a rejected manuscript by calling it “highly praised” by editors who merely sent a polite rejection letter. A businessman, teetering on the edge of financial ruin, might exaggerate his recent successes to maintain an air of affluence. It is a survival tactic, a way of keeping up appearances, because in a society that equates achievement with worth, to be seen as ordinary is to be invisible.

And yet, there is also something deeper, something almost cultural at play. The Filipino psyche, shaped by centuries of colonial rule and the relentless pursuit of social mobility, is uniquely susceptible to the need for validation. Our histories are punctuated by stories of social climbing—by ilustrados who flaunted their European education, by politicians whose surnames become brands, by socialites who name-drop the hacenderos of old, or by so-called historians who has no published historiography but whose claim to fame is alleged kinship to every single important family in the province. To declare one’s success, even in embellished form, is to assert one’s place in the hierarchy, to ward off the creeping dread of being relegated to irrelevance.

There is, too, the simple seduction of storytelling. The line between truth and embellishment is often blurred, especially in a culture that values wit and oratory. To tell a good story—one that elicits gasps of admiration or knowing chuckles—is often more important than strict adherence to fact. This is why a provincial mayor’s minor government project might be presented as “nationwide reform,” or why an academic’s modest conference paper might be rebranded as “groundbreaking research.” The mythologizing of the self is an art form, honed over years of careful curation. And in the age of social media, where the highlight reel of one’s life is curated for public consumption, the temptation to embellish becomes all the more irresistible.

But what does this do to the people who practice it? If a lie is told often enough, does it not become a kind of truth? There is an inherent danger in believing one’s own exaggerations. To convince oneself that an exaggerated accomplishment is real is to become complacent, to cease striving for genuine achievement. This is why a society that rewards the illusion of success often stagnates. When merit is measured not by substance but by perception, we create a culture of empty accolades, of self-proclaimed experts who have mastered the art of self-promotion but lack the depth of true expertise.

The antidote to this, I think, is a return to quiet competence, to an ethic of humility that values work over recognition. Some of the greatest minds in history have been those who labored in obscurity, more concerned with the quality of their work than with the applause it might garner. The true measure of one’s worth is not found in how loudly one declares one’s success, but in the silent impact one leaves in the wake of genuine accomplishment.

Labels: life, psychology