Epictetus, The Handbook 24: The Diversion of Influence

If it ever happens to you to be diverted to things outside, so that you desire to please another, know that you have lost your life's plan.

Be content then always to be a philosopher; if you wish to be regarded as one too, show yourself that you are one and you will be able to achieve it.

—Epictetus, The Handbook, Chapter 23 (tr Matheson)

I still remember quite a few of my elders, many of them with all the trappings of success, telling me that I had to read Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people if I ever wanted to amount to anything. Many people no longer know of this book, but for decades it was the best-selling primer for rising in the business and social world, and the beginning of so much of the modern self-help movement, which offers us various fixes, formulas, and lists for making it in this life.

Even at a tender age, the proto-Stoic within me was troubled just by the title. Are friends really things we “win”? And is “influencing” people really the right way to approach any relationship? I would have been more comfortable with a title along the lines of How to love your friends and respect people.

But I read the book, mainly out of curiosity, and as much as I tried to give Carnegie every chance, it confirmed that this was coming from a completely different view of the human good, and therefore of how we should relate to others. As the years went by, I began to see how entrenched Carnegie's approach actually was, both on a professional and personal level.

Carnegie suggested that we should change our own behavior to change the behavior of others, and by doing so we can win influence and benefits for ourselves. This seemed to me to be nothing more than manipulation, and later I understood Sinclair Lewis’ critique of the whole model: "smile and bob and pretend to be interested in other people's hobbies precisely so that you may screw things out of them.”

Despite all of my reservations, I still managed to misdirect years of my work life to this way of thinking. If I could find a way to please others, I thought this would circle back to me, and I would find all that professional security everyone was telling me was the end goal. I was warned that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down, that I should appear willing to please, and I then would one day end up with people willing to please me.

I fell for a similar trap personally. I was in love with a girl, who it so happens ended up becoming a master of the Carnegie Method, and I found myself always trying to find ways to please her. I think I saw other people thinking this was love, so I did much the same.

The dilemma was that if I thought or acted for myself, I was shunned, and would sheepishly return straight back to obedience. If I was obedient, I was met with a whole new and more demanding set of requirements. It never seemed to end, though I now realize I was expected to be doing my own manipulation while being manipulated, and the best manipulation would win.

I, for one, will stick with Epictetus. I should concern myself with being a good man, and I should never seek to define myself by how well I have won the respect of others. Such living is hardly selfish if I think of the good man as one dedicated to justice and service, and not to manipulation and profit. I need to prove this only to myself, in good conscience, and not to others.

As soon as I am concerned with impressing another, I will gladly sacrifice the actual reality of merit with the mere perception, and simply the appearance will be enough to get me what I selfishly want.

I remember a photograph from graduate school, where a number of my fellow students were gathered around an esteemed visiting scholar, and they were all laughing at one of his clever intellectual jokes. I was there that day, and I also remember how many of those same students in the photograph spoke freely about how much they disliked the professor, though they were willing to flatter him for their professional benefits. That same image was used for many years in university promotional materials, and it always made me sad.

I kept only one photograph of the lost love of my life, not as an object of adoration but as a warning reminder. My father and I were playing the traditional game of holiday chess on Easter Sunday, and the picture showed us duking it out as my beloved looked on with great interest. It was only years later that I realized how feigned that interest was, and that she was deliberately posing for the camera and for the record here in private, in exactly the same way she did at public events. I had foolishly ignored all the signs.

I have slowly learned not to resent my former colleagues or my lost friend, and only because I have had to struggle with exactly the same temptations in my own choices and actions.

Both these occasions remind me how easily drawn we all are to playing others to bolster ourselves. Like those old, successful men who told me I had to read Carnegie or perish, there was much to be found there in the world of wealth, influence, and appearance.

But I did have to learn the hard way that this will leave the mind and heart empty and cold. There can never be happiness and virtue when truth is compromised for appearance, or when love is sacrificed for convenience.

Written in 3/2007

Image: Jacques de L'Ange, Allegory of Pride (1642)