The Perils of Insincere Flattery

Brian YS Wong October 22, 2024 22:21

I had the fortune of receiving an email, whose name shall not be specified. It was sent to me by a journal with a suspicious title and publisher, with three paragraphs of copious praise piled onto me – a few fragments were germane, “You are a philosopher”; the remainder of the text, however, was not, “You have spent years studying the mysteries of quantum physics and metaphysics” (I wish!).

I was later informed that it was, in fact predatory, so I harbour no qualms with disclosing the following. The email’s ask was extremely simple – it wanted me to file an article with the journal, at a modest price of several thousands of pounds. Straight into my dustbin it went. Indeed, in retrospect I have good reason to think that the complimentary praise was ChatGPT-generated – just type in a couple of instructions, insert a number of pseudo-specific details, and voila, there goes a seemingly tailored invitation to publish for an unsuspecting, eager academic.

The lesson I took from this, however, wasn’t so much that I needed a better firewall. Nor was it the perils of predatory presses in academic publishing, which have a tendency of exploiting the tenure-clock pressure to lure overworked researchers and scholars into paying them for… nothingburgers. Instead, it is the fact that we live in an era of insincere flattery. Flattery that is trivially untrue.

I have seen many an act of insincere flattery over the past few years. And it does inevitably beg the question – why is this happening? What is going on?

The most straightforward explanation – that flattery “gets one ahead” – is an underdetermining one. Presumably such rationale would have held throughout time; there is no reason to think that humans should become more or less predisposed to platitudes for the intention of grift. There were many a corrupt official in Tang and Song Dynasty China who climbed to the top by acting like stuck-up sycophants.

A more plausible explanation, concerns the increasing relativisation and subjectivisation of the truth. The post-structuralist deconstruction of orthodox discourses has also produced cannibalising, cantankerous hegemonic discourses of its own. To apply this to the context of flattery, we could safely conclude that we are living in an age with flattery of which exact contents and truth-values have become peripheral, tangential to the fundamental point – the performative objective of “sounding nice” and “making someone sound nice”.

And thus, experienced economists are showered with compliments for being “pioneering intellectuals”; mediocre politicians are praised for their resolve and leadership (I’m looking at Emmanuel Macron here – though do forgive me for being an erstwhile supporter and sympathiser to his centrist advocacy), and figures such as Joe Biden, as charismatic as he might once have been, was kept in the Presidential race until the debate revealed it was no longer tenable for him to stay on. We live in an age of deepfakes, AI simulations, and PR spin. This is an age of immateriality, impunity, and fundamental erasure of the truth, airbrushed over by those seeking to flatter with ease. Mendacity and duplicity are venerated as virtues.

Such trends are deeply disturbing. Not only does it risk deluding the susceptible and unsuspecting into thinking that they are in fact great – thus brewing hubris, confusion, and fundamental misjudgment; it also results in a fundamental paradigm shift, which renders individuals unwilling to listen to criticisms and less-than-effervescent praise. Ultimately, with enough folks noticing this shift in discursive patterns, we shall come to the disillusioned, jaded conclusion that nothing – really – could be trusted. No testimony, no word, no compliment can be deemed valuable and valid, for the simple fact that it could well be motivated by the most banal of considerations.

In a world where praise comes cheap, compliments ultimately mean very little. This is especially cruel for individuals in positions of power – who enjoy the adrenaline rush, the halcyon glow of being put on a pedestal – only to realise, upon losing the glow, that the gaudy gold cannot stay. Nothing so gaudily gold could ever stay – for all that glitters is not gold.

So to my young students and fellow comrades on the path to knowledge, on the quest for the truth, I say this: beware the perils of insincere flattery. There can never be too many honest critics; yet one insincere flatterer is one flatterer too many. Now, what of sincere flattery?

Brian YS Wong

Assistant Professor, HKU