The Diplomacy of Deference

A few days ago, over the lush green of Ubud, I sat down with my aunt and uncle from Jakarta. It had been years since we’d last seen each other, and the conversation flowed easily as we tried to bridge the gap.

Stefan Kiehn Rosell (CC BY 3.0)

Then, about twenty minutes in, came an unsolicited diagnosis. “Your problem,” my uncle declared out of the blue, “is a lack of diplomacy.”

The comment hung in the air.

For nearly fifteen years, I’ve built a career as a lawyer—first in India, then in the United States—navigating complex cases and advocating across cultures. My profession is diplomacy: reasoned, respectful, and adversarial in the best sense. But this wasn’t about that. The diplomacy of the courtroom invites dialogue; the diplomacy he meant demanded deference. It wasn’t a critique of my methods; it was a rebuke of my refusal to perform a certain kind of familial submission.

I brushed it off at first. But the thought lingered. It began to connect with other things he said, particularly when he held forth on competition being “human nature,” as though life were a permanent contest of winners and losers.

I pushed back. The belief has always struck me as a convenient fiction—the founding myth of a social order that depends on hierarchy. From childhood, we’re conditioned to fear and trained to view the world as a zero-sum game: the logic of markets, the ethos of sports, and the rhythm of our careers. We are taught that inequality is “natural” and that hierarchy is simply how the world works.

A pattern emerged. His certainty didn’t come from a place of universal truth, but from a lifetime spent building business and wealth—a worldview where hierarchy is the unquestioned organizing principle of life.

In that world, I realized, “diplomacy” meant something entirely different. It isn’t tact or empathy. It’s submission. It’s the art of knowing your place and, above all, of making those above you feel comfortable in theirs. It is the polite word for obedience.

I used to think wealth was neutral—an outcome of effort or luck. Now I see it as an architecture of deference: a web of patronage stretching from the family dinner table to the global economy.

Those at the top depend on the quiet loyalty of those below, who are trained to equate obedience with virtue. Power reproduces itself not through violence, but through manners and prudence.

We are told to be diplomatic. But how often is that just fear wearing a smile?

The great irony is that those who defend hierarchy believe they are preserving order. In reality, they are protecting an illusion—the illusion that stability requires submission, that comfort must rest on conformity.

Empires, fortunes, and families are often built on the same mistake: confusing obedience for virtue.

I say: no longer.