Frank Friend or Fawning Foe?

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Typically, most of us think of friends as those who will stand by you through thick and thin. Sometimes, this means that they’re willing to encourage you when you’re down.

Two Golden Doodle Dogs cuddling on the couch

To me, a friend is also someone who is willing to give you frank feedback when you’re failing or making a mistake. If I’m doing something counter-productive or wrong, I’d generally like to know. A complement is okay, but I prefer sincere ones. To me, it would be demeaning for someone to lie about my accomplishments or abilities—demeaning to the person who gives such a false complement and demeaning to me as well.

It’s always struck me as an extremely nasty thing to give someone falsely flattering feedback. Of course, if you’re teaching a two year old to bat a ball—or, as I was doing a short time ago—encouraging our puppy to learn to swim—then you set your criterion for “success” fairly low. You don’t expect a two year old to grab a 38” bat, face a major league pitcher and hit a home run into the third deck of Yankee Stadium. You don’t expect a puppy to swim across the English Channel. You have to shape exceptional skill by rewarding behavior. You do it by beginning to reward any behavior that is “in the right direction.” At first, any contact a toddler makes when swinging a bat at a ball is rewarded. A puppy just learning to swim is initially rewarded even for going a few feet.

As a child matures physically and intellectually and learns a skill, you can give more instructive and more measured feedback. For instance, if a kid is learning to hit a baseball, you might give feedback about how solidly they’ve hit the ball. Soon, they’ll be capable of knowing that for themselves. They will see their hit pop up or trickle along the ground or instead streak away in a line drive. Eventually, after seeing many grounders, pop-ups, and line drives, they will know from the “feel” of the bat whether they’ve made solid contact.

Generally, if a person gets accurate feedback from others, they will learn to provide accurate feedback to themselves. If someone keeps doing badly but getting a “pass” constantly, or worse, having people flatter them when they’re doing badly, they’ll become disconnected from reality. This can happen, for instance, to a rich or influential person. The flatterers don’t do it to be kind. They do it to “get on the good side” of someone who is susceptible to such false feedback.

To me, telling an adult their performance is stellar when it actually stinks is typically not a kindness but an evil deed. Understand: I’m not using the word ‘evil’ to mean ‘counter-productive’ or ‘sub-optimal.’ I using the word ‘evil’ because I mean ‘evil.’

One result is that the person’s performance may not improve. Someone who might have become a decent hitter, or tennis player, or swimmer instead stays forever mediocre. What’s worse is that the person may decide to attempt to become a professional baseball player or tennis player when that will be a costly error.

If the flattered person is in some kind of position of authority, the result may be even worse. A police officer, manager, executive, teacher, or political figure who is doing a terrible job but being told they’re doing a great job is not only preventing them from reaching their own potential. They are harming others as well. And, the person giving such false feedback is also harming themselves, their friends, and their families. If they do it enough, they will not learn to look carefully at the behavior or others and give useful feedback. Eventually, they too become disconnected from reality.

Flattery is evil in business in that it’s a misdirection of effort based on lies. Flattery is evil in sports for the same reason. Art? Same. Music? Same. Parents flattering their kids does not build self-confidence. It builds false confidence, making them believe they can do more than they can; that they are expected to do more than they can. Eventually, when the child receives honest feedback from physical reality or from folks that don’t have any reason to flatter, they’ll feel worse than if they had had more honest feedback all along.

The most egregious form of fake flattery, however, occurs in dick-tater-$hits. When the autocrat takes cruel, destructive, or stupid actions, that autocrat is told by a circle of sycophants that his evil actions are wonderful, brilliant, magnanimous, etc. This devalues the person who says it; they lose all credibility. It is also a disservice to the person whose a$$ they are kissing. They are training him up to be even more evil and stupid. It is also a disservice to the very nature of humanity. The one thing we humans have going for us is our ability to coordinate and cooperate on very large scale projects. In order for that to work, we need to communicate. We need to communicate our wishes, our plans, the current state of progress, mistakes, ideas for how to fix them, and what we have learned. If everything we say is a lie, we create nothing. We provide no value. None.

True enough, parasites can live for a time off of the value that previous generations built. But once trust and honesty are destroyed, and the truth means nothing, we are no better than beasts except that we’re less hardy. A tribe of humans used to take down a mammoth. But even a much larger horde of humans, lying about what they are doing and looking out only for themselves? If our ancestors had acted like modern day dick-taters, humanity would not have survived.

Flattering your friend and fawning over them is not, in fact, friendship. It is freaky and frankly disgusting. It’s disgusting that anyone would find such behavior pleasurable. It’s disgusting that anyone would demand it. And it’s disgusting that anyone would engage in such false flattery.

Whatever your sensibilities of the aesthetics of human relations, however, such behavior is economically ruinous. It is antithetical to learning, to science, to progress, to improvement in the human condition.

In a word, it is evil.

In a word, it is cancer.