In contemporary corporate life, we find ourselves all too often sitting in a meeting opposite somebody who has managed to cozy up to higher management, listening to him go through a collection of distortions and outright lies that we can't directly challenge, because we would be seen as hostile.   About the only effective options we have are to try to get in a few pleasant-sounding and seemingly offhand (but actually highly targeted) little digs at the underpinnings of his spiel, or to try and find a long-term way to cozy up to the power source better than he does. 

But if we resort to such tactics, who are we more closely patterning ourselves after:  classic hunter-warriors, or conniving women in a prime time soap opera?

Some of us flat-out can't operate in this manner, and end up being passed over.  Others manage to do what's called for, but feel very strange and uncomfortable about it. 

Probably the only ones who are truly in their element are our modern-day counterparts to the aristocratic era's courtiers.