Character Assassination and the Backstab

The best approach is indirect. Let others do your work for you. Say you are A, you detest C, and B is unwittingly a mediator for everyone. Don’t tell B about your fanatical observations about C, go to D, who will tell E, who will tell B, who will then mistrust C. In order to poison someone you need to highlight a truth which gives rise to a lie. Start with the truth, add the lie, and let it roll. Use gossip and patience, and watch your defamatory words spread, prosper and fester. Sometimes it can go completely out of hand and develop along lines that you could not anticipate, but this is part of the risk. Sometimes to implant a lie you need to halve it and tell one half to one person, the other half to another, knowing full well that they will exchange gossip and do something exciting and titillating – add your half and your other half together and get their one. Now they will think they are information superior and waste no time exploiting this for their own gain. But in reality, it is your gain.

If you suspect you are on the receiving end of such malice and you don’t know where it originated from, become an irresistible target. Play a bit naïve for a while, a bit silly, a bit deserving of a public thrashing, so that your enemies have the cheap and arrogant cheekiness to rise and go for an easy shot. Take the shot on the chin. Have something to strike immediately back at them.

When you suspect someone is digging the knife in your back but can’t be sure, be extra nice to them. If they have been extra nasty to you, they’ll be extra nice now to compensate. Because they know they have wronged you, it will make them feel uneasy to see that you really are not that bad, or a threat, after all. This is the calm in the eye of the storm and a defining moment: it is the declaration of civil office war. Once you know who and how nasty they really are, hold your tongue. Start your own campaign.

The tongue is like a sharp knife...
Kills without drawing blood – Buddha