Look at the structure of the relationships closest to you.
Who in your life challenges your thinking rather than confirming it? Who disagrees with you from a position of genuine equal standing rather than managed deference? Who is not, in some way, dependent on you — financially, professionally, emotionally — for something significant?
For many people in positions of significant authority, the honest answer to this question reveals a surrounding ecosystem of people who need something from them — and a corresponding absence of people who need nothing from them and can therefore be genuinely honest with them.
This is not always the result of conscious choice. Authority attracts dependence structurally — people with less power orient toward people with more power, and the dynamic organises itself around the resource differential. But the capable, high-authority person also tends to subtly select for it: relationships where you are the most capable person in the room are more comfortable than relationships where you are not. Relationships where your judgment is sought are more familiar than relationships where your judgment is questioned.
Chanakya in the Arthashastra is direct on this: the king who is surrounded only by those who agree with him has, in effect, no counsel. The dependent court mirrors the king's wishes back to him as wisdom. The king who believes the mirror is governing from a construction of reality rather than reality itself. The one person in the court who tells the king what he does not want to hear — and is protected rather than punished for it — is the most valuable person in the kingdom. Not because dissent is virtuous in the abstract but because the king's decisions, made without genuine challenge, will consistently miss what only an equal can see.
Jung's account of the dynamics of power in relationships identifies the same structural problem from a psychological direction. The person who unconsciously selects for dependence is often protecting themselves from the specific anxiety of genuine equality — the anxiety of being seen fully by someone who has nothing to gain from seeing you favourably. Dependence is manageable. An equal is not.
The question worth sitting with: where in your life are you genuinely challenged by someone who does not need anything from you? And if the honest answer is nowhere — what does that say about what your relationships are structured to provide, and what they are structured to prevent?