Issue #28: On Being Surrounded By Yes-Men

I was going to title this article “On Being Surrounded By Yes-People”. Yes-people instead of yes-men because I don’t think rubber-stamping someone’s every action to ingratiate oneself with that person is something only men do. Then I remembered a passage from the Male-Warrior Hypothesis article I read on Monday morning as an airport bus ferried me from my hotel in Haarlem, past green fields and windmills, to Amsterdam Schipol Airport. 

Interestingly, men get along despite being more hierarchical than women, who tend to favor egalitarian relationships. One possible reason for this is that men often receive a romantic bonus from being friends with a higher-status individual whereas women often do not. Just by being a part of a male rock star’s entourage, a man will often find himself to be more appealing to women than he otherwise would be.

Men often gain more than women from being friends with higher-status individuals, so they are more incentivised to agree with everything their higher-status friend says, however egregious, so as not to ruffle his feathers. Whoever came up with the word yes-men must have observed men’s predisposition to obsequiousness and thought the word fitting. As such, I decided that yes-men was more fitting than yes-people in my title.

You may notice that it has been weeks since I published my last article. I had ideas and thoughts in my head that I wanted to expound on, but I couldn’t bring myself to write. I spent three weeks in Lagos, and the welter of noise produced by generators and the church close to my Airbnb filled my head and thwarted my every attempt at writing. Thankfully, I am now back in London and have since regained my ability to think. 

I have spent the last few days thinking about the series of decisions (and the reaction of Twittersphere to those decisions) Elon Musk has made since he completed his acquisition of Twitter. He has fired thousands of employees, appointed himself as CEO, dissolved the company’s board of directors, and made bizarre changes to the platform’s verification system. Some consider Elon the modern-day Thomas Edison, a genius who has all the answers and whose every decision is a coup de maître that will turn Twitter from an unprofitable wasteland into Eldorado. Others are less charitable; they see him as a snake oil salesman, a man with a massive ego who has surrounded himself with yes-men like Jason Calacanis, who co-signs his every decision. These people think Elon Musk’s decisions aren’t well-thought-out and will destroy Twitter. 

I don’t think Elon has all the answers, and neither do I think he’s a snake oil salesman. What I am convinced about, though, is that the man is out of his depths and needs to listen to more knowledgeable people if he doesn’t want to dig a hole deeper than the one he seems to be in currently. To do that, he needs to rid himself of the sycophants surrounding him, but that is easier said than done. Contrary to what some people assume, attracting sycophants isn’t a malady that is exclusive to billionaires. We are all susceptible to it. Humans love validation and hate criticism. It is easy to slowly and inadvertently push away people that dare to call out our bad behaviour, who challenge us, and be left surrounded by people who uphold our every action, whether good or bad. I know this because I witnessed it firsthand.

As I matured from childhood into early adulthood, I noticed that many of my dad’s friends, who acted as his voice of reason, had been replaced with people who told him only the things he liked to hear. Those that acted as counterbalances to his excesses were replaced by sycophants that encouraged those exact behaviours. Sadly, many of these sycophants are extended family members, people I trusted and respected, so I was bitterly disappointed and angry that they nudged him towards making terrible decisions he has since been seeking redemption from. I was angry at my dad for the longest time and blamed his ego for his decision to surround himself with yes-people. I judged him. I now realise that my judgment was because I thought I was resistant to people’s sycophancy. I thought I couldn’t possibly replace voices of reason with sycophantic noises. As I grow older and interact with people in my life, I realise those thoughts were fuelled by youthful hubris. I know now that I am as human as my father, and if I do not take active and deliberate steps, I will end up being destroyed by my very human desire to seek validation and shun criticism.

In my interactions with the people in my life, I realise that I prefer to hear them tell me about my greatness, kindness,  brilliance, conscientiousness, and resourcefulness. I savour those moments. I recoil, however, and sometimes shut down when they try to point out the sordid parts of my character. I don’t like hearing that I can sometimes be impatient, arrogant, selfish, and unreliable. I find it hard to stomach negative feedback. I also make it hard for the people I love to tell me these things by arguing and quarrelling with them. I noticed that some of them stopped giving me feedback because they’d rather avoid the back-and-forth that can sometimes come with it. It has taken therapy to recognise this negative trait in myself and to learn how to handle negative feedback from people whose opinions I value. I am learning to encourage feedback, ask for it, and to sit with the discomfort when it is shared. The journey isn’t easy, but I know the process will do me a whole world of good.

All told, I am happy I have access to professional help. I could have continued on the dangerous path I was on, turning down the voices of those who want the best for me and dialling up the voices of those who only want to tell me savoury things because they know I’d like it. On that path, it is not hard to imagine that I could end up like Elon, with sycophants singing my praise and egging me on to keep making stupid decisions.