AMAZING! All I have to do is leave the country for a weekend and all sorts of things happen! What an exciting country ours is.

This time I come home to find an uproar about some secret army that’s been quietly establishing itself.

Over a thousand people signed up for it and some paid thousands of ringgit to obtain ranks like brigadier-general and the like. Actually it sounded like there were more officers than foot soldiers.

The police said they are perplexed as to how Malaysians can be so gullible as to pay money to obtain titles. I’m not perplexed at all. Malaysians are perpetually gullible; it’s our middle name.

After all, many of us have believed that black stones could cure illnesses, one-dollar bills can turn into thousand-dollar notes and that people will send us millions of dollars if we send them a few hundred. So why can’t we believe that we can buy army ranks?

I don’t know what sinister motives we should attribute to the people who sold these ranks and formed this “army”.

But to me, the whole scam of selling titles only taps into a peculiar Malaysian belief, that in this country, one always needs some title or other to get ahead in life.

So if you can’t get it for anything worthwhile you might have done, you might as well buy it.

The trouble is, people do treat titled persons differently. One day they have no qualms about ignoring you, the next they’re bowing and grovelling just because someone gave you a title.

Nowadays people with titles seem to be dime a dozen. You have to wonder what they got them for.

I think instead of just publishing lists of people getting titles, newspapers should publish their CVs so that we know why they’ve been honoured. It would make us all appreciate their contributions more, I’m sure.

Of course, nobody ever thinks of the disadvantages of having titles.

For one thing, there is this other Malaysian habit of upward delegation. Meaning, in a meeting or some other important event, everyone will almost automatically give the most responsibility to the person with the highest-ranking title.

I have been in meetings where in electing a chair, the most-titled person, regardless of ability, is invariably nominated.

It can be tiresome if you happen to be the highest-ranking person there as it also means that you have to take responsibility and work. Imagine if the titled person was an incompetent nitwit, it almost guarantees that nothing will ever happen.

But people really think titles matter; hence the rush to get titles even from dubious foreign sources.

I even heard of one person who asked to be rewarded with a foreign title after doing a personal good deed.

Yet there are lots of people labouring away who are never rewarded for what they do.

I can think of lots of people who are really hands-on helping people less fortunate than them who really could do with some recognition.

They don’t really need titles but recognition of their efforts would spur them on even more. We give titles to people who sit in offices all day but never to those who walk the streets ministering to the ill and the unwanted. Seems odd really.

On the other hand, perhaps we should review this title business altogether.

Perhaps we should make it not only a more exclusive club but be more stringent about who gets it.

If the public sees undeserving people getting titles, it only reinforces the idea that you don’t have to do any real public service to get a title, but that titles get you places.

So, small wonder that people think buying titles is the thing to do. Also, those who do actually deserve such honours also get tainted with the perception that they didn’t really deserve it. In the end, the credibility of the honour system is blown.

Meantime, with this “army” being uncovered, we have to look at everyone who introduces himself as a General with some suspicion. Which is rather unfair on real Generals.

We should however, as one academic has suggested, really look into why people bought this idea of a bogus army so easily. Is our gullibility inherent or just a product of an education and social system that does not allow scepticism or any form of questioning?

This column first appeared in The Star Malaysia on Wednesday, August 06, 2003.