Flattery Gets You Nowhere

"The secret to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made." --proverb, attributed to George Burns

That's twice in three French classes that we've taken something which stuck in my craw.
The first time, in the Love and Friendship unit, this quote came up:

L'amour, sans la jealousie, n'est pas l'amour.--Paul Léataud
Love without jealousy isn't love.

Needless to say, I disagreed with this one quite vociferously...and made a point of rebutting it in my first essay. I got the highest mark on that essay that I've ever received on an essay, so I guess I made my point.

(No, rest easy, this isn't going to be another anti-jealousy screed.)

Two weeks later, we're studying Le Corbeau et le Renard, and again...stuck in my craw. Or maybe my caw. Here's an English rendition:

A MASTER crow, perched on a tree one day,
Was holding in his beak a piece of cheese.
A master fox, by th’ odor drawn that way,
Spake unto him in words like these:
“Good-morning, my Lord Crow!	5
How well you look, how handsome you do grow!
Upon my honor, if your note
Bears a resemblance to your coat,
You are the phœnix of the dwellers in these woods.”
At these words does the crow exceedingly rejoice;	10
And, to display his beauteous voice,
He opens a wide beak, lets fall his stolen goods.
The fox seized on’t, and said, “My dear good sir,
Learn you that every flatterer
Lives at the expense of him who hears him out.	15
This lesson is well worth some cheese, no doubt.”
The crow, ashamed, and much in pain,
Swore, but a little late, they’d not catch him again.

The French version is by Jean de la Fontaine (1621-1695), and as you may recognize, it's much older than that: it's one of Aesop's fables. Aesop lived from 620-564 BCE--which makes this the second oldest thing I've studied in school after Antigone.
Before I get to the fable itself, can I express a bit of awe at just how old it is? It's hard to fathom. Here's something that was written down over two and a half millennia ago, and we can still read it. I consider that to be one of life's little miracles.

That this little fable is so ancient suggests its moral--flatterers thrive on fools' credulity--is a great truth of human nature...just as jealousy is assumed to be.

Actually, upon looking up flattery, I discover that insincerity is part of its very definition. Which is all well and good, and  which makes the moral tautologically true: a flatterer is insincere because, well, a flatterer is insincere.

But how do you distinguish flattery from sincere praise? Especially in light of the fact you have to give to get--and everyone likes to get?

I'm not sure I have an actual answer to this. I only know that my "flattery" is truth. I never look for a reply to it (beyond, I'll admit, acknowledgement--it hurts to put some praise out there which is ignored). It feels good to make other people feel good about themselves. There are an awful lot of people out there who feel bad about themselves, after all--almost as many people as there are people.

I find it quite maddening that people don't know how to take a compliment. It bothers me immensely that something designed to give comfort instead makes someone uncomfortable. I mean, I get that somebody might question my motives in giving that compliment. Take something like "you're beautiful", spoken to a woman who is, in fact, beautiful. How many women actually believe they are beautiful? Damned few of them. And so any assertion that way must have ulterior motives attached to it, right?

Well, yes.

My ulterior motive is this: I want you to believe you're beautiful. Because you are.

That's it.

"I don't know if you've noticed," one woman said to me recently, "but I never take pictures of myself." The few photos of her that make it on to Facebook elicit a whole lot of attention, and not just from me: she's lovely. All the way through, too.  It might sound cheesy...but I'm not saying it to get cheese.

Aesop's Fox and the Crow derives from a Buddhist fable much older--at least a millennium older. I like the Buddhist version much better. In it, the crow is perched on its branch with some fruit. A jackal flatters the crow, as in Aesop--but the crow replies that it requires nobility to see the same in others, and shakes down some fruit for the jackal to share.

That, to me, is how things should be.