People have had several thousand years to develop immunity to flattery and yet here we are with a President where aides have to put his name in every paragraph of a memo to get him to read it.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-tru...

At an individual level, we have a lot of psychological plasticity and can work to overcome our limitations. At societal scale, though, we are social primates and any system that takes advantage of natural social primate behavior is likely to succeed indefinitely.