Reflections

I was re-reading La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, published around 1665. He was a French soldier and a moralist. One of my favourite lines from it is this: "We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves."

Whether in personal life or at work, a person who wears one face in public and one in private will eventually lose track of which one is real. The person themselves will come to believe the pleasant version of themselves. For them, the unpleasant side of their personality is what they do, and they would think that it is not who they are.

Such a person would think they are perfectly reasonable even when they behave badly toward others. They are not lying to others. They have just succeeded in lying to themselves.

It is often said that the higher you rise in an organisation, the funnier your jokes become. Of course, it is meant lightly. Power changes the person who holds it and changes the people around them.

Our behaviour and judgement towards people holding power changes and we rarely notice that in ourselves. When someone holds power, people stop responding to them as an individual and start responding to their position. We tend to overvalue what powerful people say and undervalue what we ourselves think. The feedback powerful people get from others gets thinner and politer. This is dangerous.

Hence, it is important to create environments, be it in our families, our workplaces or in our public life where people can speak truth to power. Because if we do not then the person holding power loses an honest account of the world around them. Plus, we instil a little fear in them that we will not keep quiet and that is a strong signal to send.