Sucking up to people is a who should rule mistake

Recently I was thinking about the who should rule mistake and sucking up and noticed a connection between them.

Sucking up to people is for the purpose of get approval/engagement from the target people being sucked up to.

I think sucking up to people is a “who should rule” mistake. The “who should rule” mistake lacks focus on ideas (methods for selecting people) and instead focusses on people.

The mindset that results in personA sucking up to personB is one that treats the choice of personB as an infallible choice. Like even if the choice to select personB was bad, sucking up to personB is a way to ignore that choice and just treat it as automatically true.

If instead personA prioritized using good methods, he wouldn’t suck up to personB and instead he’d do good actions with the hope that those good actions will result in a good outcome from the exchange with personB. What good outcomes? (1) productive engagement with personB because personB is worthy, or (2) no engagement with personB because personB is not worthy.

So like the suckup method is bad because it doesn’t factor in the possibility that personB is not worthy of personA’s attention.