Longing for More Diplomas in a World That Forgot Why

In my home country, Türkiye, a senior government official reportedly holds six bachelor's degrees, two master's, two doctorates, and over a dozen certificates an academic career so compressed it would require a distortion in the spacetime continuum to complete. He is a Doctor of Law, Doctor of Bioengineering, A Master of Telecoms, and also studied Business, Econ, PolSci, Int. Relations. Individually, no double or quadruple major there. But it’s not the absurdity that’s most telling, it’s how plausible it now feels (or it does not?). No one blinks. We’ve normalized the spectacular as a substitute for the substantial.

Meanwhile, a growing scandal has emerged. A ring of digital forgers, armed with cloned e-signatures, quietly issued official diplomas, professional licenses, and even state appointments. A drug dealer allegedly became head of narcotics. I kid you not. Engineers with no training were deployed to critical infrastructure. Some call it a breach of digital security. But it’s deeper than that. It’s the collapse of symbolic value.

We’re witnessing the inflation of authority. Titles are handed out like candy, because they offer optics. The performative replaces the personal. This isn’t isolated. It’s systemic.

But let's consider the whole thing from another angle. The proliferation of credentials often speaks to the same hunger: the desire to be seen as competent, trustworthy, and indispensable in systems that no longer organically confer meaning or status. In the absence of genuine institutional rites of passage, those slow, demanding processes that once transformed knowledge into wisdom both individuals and organizations have turned to credentials as proxies for substance. Beware, there is no false equivalence between earned and fraudulent qualifications. However, the line between them becomes psychologically blurred in The Age of Narcissus where appearance is rewarded more readily than depth. When institutions are perceived as indifferent to inner growth, the certificate real or forged becomes a desperate performance of value in a society that no longer knows how to measure it.

I’ll admit, I too fell into the trap of getting certifications during the pandemic. Faced with idle time and digital overexposure, I signed up for online course after course: Executive leadership, organizational design, artificial intelligence. By the third dose of Moderna, I had compiled a stack of certificates that could wallpaper a boardroom. OK no forgery there, all were earned properly and yet, none of them taught me what real silence means in a crisis. Or how to remain still when a decision claws at your conscience.

“When the world shut down, I opened Coursera.”

The real scandal is not that people forge documents. It’s that institutions have become so hollow that a forged document functions just like a real one. The system no longer distinguishes between appearance and reality, because it no longer knows how or cares at all.

An e-signature, by design, only verifies access. It does not verify soul. In a healthy system, the document is a consequence of mastery. Here, it becomes the shortcut. Why learn? Why train? Why be? Just purchase the illusion. No one checks. No one resigns. No shame. No consequence.

This is not just about digital failure. It’s about the age we live in. An era where leadership is reduced to image management. Where executive competence is measured by KPIs and dashboards. Where the performance of empathy can be certified, branded, and monetized. We train ourselves to appear trustworthy on camera, resilient in keynotes, visionary in bullet points. We chase aesthetics of virtue, not virtue itself.

And as artificial intelligence now generates diplomas, recommendations, and LinkedIn achievements with frightening believability, one must ask: What separates a credentialed leader from a counterfeit one? If everything is appearance, then nothing is authority.

Perhaps what’s needed is not more verification but more unverifiable qualities. Integrity. Courage. Discipline. These cannot be issued, signed, or timestamped. They leave no digital trail. They manifest in action, not presentation.

In older systems, admission to knowledge was not granted with a certificate but with a task. You proved yourself by how you bore the weight of responsibility, not how you dressed the part. There was no need to forge your way in, you either transformed, or you remained outside.

Just this morning, I encouraged a young woman considering a career in finance to pursue her CFA. And I meant it. You will still need your hard-earned certifications. They open doors, signal commitment, and in many fields, they’re the price of admission. But let’s not mistake the key for the castle. The title may get you in the room, but only character will keep you there. So earn the degree but also earn your silence, your judgment and your resilience.