Op-Ed: Global sycophancy – The culture of total failure

Donald Trump built a public profile as a property developer and businessman in New York before entering politics – Copyright AFP RONALDO SCHEMIDT

Sycophancy is an interesting career choice and an exciting global phenomenon. Well, something about this idiotic world must be exciting, surely? No? You don’t say?

It’s also a highly competitive sector with so many highly trained professionals. It’s demanding. You may have to prove your spinelessness at any moment. The wrong word or a slow response can be fatal.

The tradition of sycophancy dates back to the beginning of history and beyond. Then as now, it was based largely on the ability to graft oneself onto affluent and ridiculously trusting morons.

A culture inevitably evolved. If a scout is honest, trustworthy, loyal, etc. a sycophant has a much more complex range of characteristics.

Being an inferior little twerp is a good start. You must be inept, meaningless, despised, futile, talentless, untrustworthy, and mindless. You need the social skills of a sewer. That’s kindergarten level.

You have to be tactically aware as a sycophant. You have to be sycophantic to other sycophants to rise through the ranks and stab them in the back.

You do get to network with other unreliable useless nobodies, too. This can be priceless, getting you political and corporate jobs that vertebrates could never dream of having.

You can have many different jobs and never have to do the actual work. All you have to do is sit in meetings and prove you think you know how to use furniture. That’s always entertaining.

The big picture of global sycophancy is inspiring, particularly for people moving to another reality. Unheard-of levels of incompetence have made this world what it is today. Egos are built like vast mansions in deserts.

There are also personal upsides. You can be the nonentity in the picture with someone. You can be the nodding ignoramus public relations can’t live without. You can run ideological masturbation seminars.

It all crafts an image of being a faithful idiot ready to do anything, however demeaning, to make a few bucks. An odd coincidence.

A little further up the scale, you can do media for the bitchy and famous. You can spin the news almost as though you knew something about it.

For example:

“It’s not flatulence. He’s deflating out of sheer modesty.”

“What he meant was that one plus one equals three. Really, it’s obvious.”

“We’re selling subscriptions for World War 27 right now.”

“So 1.6 million Americans died in a pandemic we called a hoax and then hopelessly mismanaged. So what?”

At this point, we need to emphasize that sycophancy is also an effective existential insult. Only the most abject need sycophants, and they’re easily as dumb as any number of short planks. Your mere presence in a room, or even in a building, indicates that someone has taken the bait. Your idiot sponsor will never know.  

The psychology of sycophancy is interesting.

Consider:

Who needs sycophants?

Why do they need them?

If you said, “A collection of absurd cretins compensating for their total lack of ability and underachievement”, you’re right, but you’ll never make a good sycophant. Realism doesn’t go too well with sycophancy.

You have to convince yourself that you’re smarter than the absurd cretins. That’s not too difficult.

You realize that:

You’re much too clever for anyone to guess you’re clever.

You alone have the stamina to grovel for decades where others don’t.

You really and truly like being a toilet roll to people you despise.

You like throwing other sycophants to the dogs. It couldn’t happen to you, of course.

You can mate with common household appliances and fittings, too.

This rosy picture of sycophancy at the organizational level isn’t the whole story, though. The people who hire sycophants have been getting fussier over the years. They now expect constant pathological sycophancy at all times.

You may at some point need to be conscious.

The need for sycophancy translates to the need to compensate for failure. It’s a sort of commodities market in some ways. A sycophancy futures market would show dazzling contracts for even more mediocrity on all levels of society. You’ll be overjoyed to know that sycophancy is even becoming fashionable in artificial intelligence.

(Readers may swoon, if necessary, at this point in the narrative to restart organic functions and other hobbies.)

Sniveling weaklings of the world, rejoice! The future is sycophantic. The whole anticipated 5 seconds of it.