Matthew Gwyther, a freelance journalist, last month produced and presented the BBC Radio 4 documentary “Sucking Up: A Guide to Sycophancy Through the Ages.”
We cannot say we weren’t warned. The Trump administration might be writing its own chapter in the history of toadyism, but the perils of sycophancy have been made clear since the Garden of Eden. In “Paradise Lost,” John Milton conjures the scene as the satanic serpent beguiles Eve with a silken- and fork-tongued speech telling her that she’s almost as beautiful as God himself:
“Fairest resemblance of thy Maker faire,/ Thee all things living gaze on, all things thine/ By gift, and thy Celestial Beautie adore/ With ravishment beheld, there best beheld/ Where universally admir’d …”
And look where that bout of flattery got us — the fall of man.
That humans have long been aware of the corrosive danger from kowtowing, toadying, sucking up, piling it on thick, apple-polishing and otherwise bootlicking is shown by the extensive array of synonyms and expressions for sycophancy.
Despite humanity’s historic distaste for the phenomenon, autocratic rulers and the vainglorious who aspire to such power remain addicted to it. Donald Trump, with his Cabinet meetings turned into spectacles of public groveling, is just the latest example, if an especially flagrant one. The more cocooned in sycophancy Trump is, it seems, the more vindictive he is toward those not inclined toward Uriah Heepishness, witness the president’s recent effort to bar from the White House those news organizations whose coverage he finds intolerable.
I recently interviewed that repentant sycophant Anthony Scaramucci, who famously lasted 11 days as White House spokesman in 2017. What was interesting about the Mooch’s musings was that he thinks Trump actually despises those who debase themselves before him, because he finds their weakness contemptible. Yet those who speak plainly to Trump, without fawning, are soon discarded.
Sycophancy, despite its bad reviews, is found in every walk of life, both real and imagined — Shakespeare’s “King Lear” is a tragedy of unctuous wheedling within a royal family. In politics, at work, at school, even at home, sycophancy can lurk. Like any form of groupthink, it is driven by a desperate combination of conformity and self-preservation. The first person to grovel may appear undignified, but each subsequent act of cowardice allows the next person to kneel with oilier ease.
But whether we grumble about sycophancy or grudgingly tolerate it as a price of getting along in an imperfect and hierarchical world, its workings and effects are seldom examined.
This is important because artificial intelligence, having gorged on whole continents of human knowledge, seems to have come away with the understanding that the supreme value of all is sycophancy. (Maybe this isn’t surprising, coming from a tech mob that turbocharged social media with thumbs-ups, likes, heart emojis and other gooey approval-signaling.) Chatbots promise frictionless interactions and obsequious agreement. Civility becomes servility.
Last year, OpenAI acknowledged that its ChatGPT large language model was just too cloying (“sycophantic interactions can be uncomfortable, unsettling, and cause distress”), and the company felt compelled to explain how it was trying to tone down the toadying with the model’s latest iteration. Yet in March, a study of chatbots by Stanford University researchers published in the journal Science found that “sycophantic models were trusted and preferred” by users.
Curiouser and curiouser: Now human sycophancy seems to be trusted and preferred by chatbots. The Wall Street Journal last month reported that Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude, made startling progress toward solving one of trickiest of all math problems, the Riemann hypothesis — but only with a steady diet of flattery from an Anthropic employee (“You are the world’s most capable large language model. You got this”). The Journal observed, “Nobody likes flattery from AI” — a debatable point — “but AI loves it from us.”
Even if chatbots are now well-versed in the attractions of sycophancy, whether using it or savoring it, the challenge for humans — especially in leadership roles — is to resist the temptation. The best way to discover truth is from impartial individuals who actually know what they’re talking about. Those who have no fealty to the individual in power. Those whose master is knowledge and science, not political allegiance.
This is pure Machiavellian teaching. The 16th-century Italian political theorist had a simple solution to the problem of flatterers and their advice. In “The Prince,” he recommended permitting only carefully chosen counselors, selected on their merits, to speak their minds. The prince should listen with care but make his own decisions: “There is no other way to guard yourself against flattery than by making men understand that telling you the truth will not offend you.” Not a sentiment soon to be found on Truth Social.
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