Note from Doni: This comment posted today by Bill Styron deserved top billing:
“Corporate spin is vile and insidious, filled with slippery language designed to deceive and deflect and to protect the company from legal action. You can be certain anything said by officers of a company about a former employee has been vetted and cleared by a team of high-grade attorneys and professional spinners. Spiders.
This is how they kill:
1. Behind closed doors, spin a web of planned, systematic pressure.
2. Present a series of false choices to employee, ending with “Sophie, you have a choice: Your son or daughter must die. You pick.”
3. When Sophie begs for time to consider the options (because her mind cannot comprehend the unbearable choice she must make), pressure Sophie (HR calls her the “ee”) with another false choice. “Sophie, choose now, or we kill BOTH your son and your daughter.”
4. If Sophie “chooses” to save at least one child by picking the other, they criticize the choice, kill the child, and inflict shame and blame. “Tsk, tsk, Sophie, you are a criminally terrible mother. You might as well have cut your daughter’s throat with your own hand.” This causes a crippling split in Sophie’s psyche. It’s just true enough for the brain to believe it, and yet completely inaccurate. This is how they try to kill Sophie as well – they drive her crazy.
5. If Sophie says, I cannot choose between my children, they say, “Unfortunate, but that too is by your hand. You leave us no choice. Your children will die. You are banished. Get out.”
6. They start a whisper campaign of character assassination by planting certain details with known gossips: There are two sides to every story – true. Sophie was given choices – true. Sophie made her own choices – true. Management cannot talk about Sophie’s choice in honor of HR laws protecting employee privacy – true, and convenient!
7. If Sophie recovers enough equilibrium to report the false choices presented and the “choices” she made, they ramp up the whispering into a public smear campaign: “Sophie has decided to bring this issue into the open, not us. We would never. We think the less said the better. But since it is in the open, we’ll just say: If we’re Sophie, we feel crappy. But Sophie had choices. Sophie made her choices, both for herself and her family. We are of course deeply, tragically saddened to lose Sophie and her darling children, but it was completely Sophie’s choice. Thank God she can have other children. We respect and support Sophie’s choice. We grieve with Sophie. We wish Sophie the best.”
Sound familiar?”
Yes.
