Your addiction to flattery will cost you a lot.
An insatiable hunger for affirmation puts you on an endless quest for compliments. You’ll take approval from anyone who gives it and diabolical people will happily profit from your emotional weakness.
“John, you jerk!! Everyone needs encouragement!!! That is NOT EMOTIONAL WEAKNESS!!!”
Flattery is not encouragement. It is deceit designed to manipulate you. It is a tool employed by sinister characters to win your trust. Liars flatter you because they want something from you. They want you to buy their product, or read their book, or attend their church, or leave your church, or renounce religion completely, or champion their cause, or wage war against their enemies, or some combination of those things. When you’re addicted to flattery, the flatterer owns you.
Oh, before I forget, most of the people telling you that you’re oppressed, abused, victimized, or suffering from systemic injustice are just flattering you. Nothing puffs up the ego more than the sense that you’re getting shortchanged. Wicked people amass huge numbers of followers by simply repeating the phrase, “You are being mistreated.”
I’m encouraging you to kick the flattery addiction. Beware the stranger who speaks nicely about your virtues. The truth is often difficult to hear.
(Ecclesiastes 7:19) There is not a righteous man on earth who does what is right and never sins.
