I’m part of a supper club that meets monthly. It was founded at the height of the lockdowns when everyone was being forced into masks and being muscled into getting the shot. This group resisted both, despite the imposing certainty of the mandates.
All these years later, the community is still bonded. Friendships formed and lasted. The culture is one of deep questioning. Each meeting is replete with incredulity toward official pronouncement, a shared perception that elite opinion and elite institutions were simply wrong. And not just about COVID but about everything.
It’s not a political group at all. Its central theme concerns the failure of conventional wisdom and all the ways in which legacy institutions preached error over several years. These days, as all polls have revealed, this view is widely held. Many of the most pressing trends of our time are about dislodging an old elite (in media, corporate life, government) and replacing them with people interested in new ways.
I’ve noticed a common feature among many of the rising stars that are displacing the falling stars of the old elites. They are much more humble about what they know and what they do not know. They are happy to admit it. The days of “I am the science” and “We are your source of truth” seem to be ending. The guru scientist and soothsaying academic have fallen from their perches of influence.
Replacing them is a new generation of thinkers who are happy to admit what they do not know. The other day, for example, Tucker Carlson said he often feels what is called imposter syndrome. This is the belief that every achievement is really just a lucky break, a sneaky feeling that we have temporarily pulled the wool over people’s eyes.
It’s a humble admission, one we should all appreciate. It’s a common feeling among anyone commonly described as a genius. Even Elon Musk must feel this. Ironically, the person who believes that the moniker of genius is unjust is the person most likely to deserve it.
The problem of constantly deciding whether we are great or terrible at what we do, toying with the belief that we are geniuses just before worrying that we will be exposed as frauds, is just part of life and a real sign of humility.
“I haven’t felt this nervous before any recital and tell myself that I should be confident, having already made it through the previous rounds. But I can’t shake the fear that I’m a fraud who lucked into the finals while all the other finalists are pros, even if they’re called amateurs. An extra degree of scrutiny directed at me is attributable to the conspicuous nature of my profession [journalist], which is no consolation at the moment. Reverse psychology—I’m not a fraud, I’m a star—doesn’t help, either. Star, fraud—the only thing I conclude is that I should be focusing on the music.”
That article appeared in 1999, and the passage above is the one that stood out to me. It signifies that search that all of us make to define a sense of precisely who we are based on our skill level and, in turn, what to expect from others in their treatment of us. Mostly, however, it works in the opposite direction. We extract information from what others around us say about us and infuse that sense into our self-perceptions.
From little league baseball through one’s school years and all the way to professional life, the following happens to everyone. You do something amazing, and everyone sings your praises. But now you have a new problem: expectations are newly high for your performance. This is especially true if you have won or received a promotion or raise: Now you have to get out there and kill it every time, else you will be seen as undeserving.
There’s an added problem to being perceived as a genius. Others will want to tear you down and revel in your fall. Envy is the most hidden, but most deeply dangerous of the deadly sins. Those who envy victims are almost always surprised because they were expecting their achievement to be followed by accolades and promotion, not resentment and nefarious plots. But the only way to avoid envy is intolerable: never be excellent.
Elon faces this daily of course. But so do insurgent political candidates and newly popular media figures. The forces trying to tear them down are everywhere.
In poor societies, this is the common and tragic response. It’s also a feature of declining societies in which ever more people have money, power, and influence who have done nothing to merit either. They owe their status to legacy and inertia, and cling to it against all winds of change.
Today such entrenched elites exist in all sectors: the corporate world, government, academia, media, politics, nonprofits, and more. Everyone has encountered them. They are everywhere. There is a word to describe them: fakers.
The number one fear of a faker is being found out, so every day is spent in scheming and plotting to prevent that. This is why fakers surround themselves with people who are willing to be complicit in the coverup of incompetence, i.e. “Yes men” whose main skill is nodding in agreement. For this reason, fakers breed other fakers and promote them to flood the zone of fakes in hopes of hiding for longer.
They all develop what today is being called “testy” personalities which they deploy as tactics of intimidation, always with this habit of resenting anyone who questions their words and judgment. They are prickly because they have a grim truth to hide always: namely that they have not merited their status, title, power, or income, and possess a fraction of the abilities of the people over whom they rule.
In the corporate world, they love calling staff meetings because fakers have learned the art of time-killing blather to cover up for their fundamental incompetence. They have nothing better to do so they call many and make them last as long as possible.
Fakers loathe competence and punish it. They drip poison in people’s ears to stop the social and professional advancement of their betters. They drive out those with skill in an effort to avoid being shown up. In doing so, they are a source of quiet chaos all around them.
There is really no cure for this problem. Once a professional is promoted beyond his or her competence—due to family connections, personal relationships, identity visuals, indulging and exploiting undeserved credit and praise, or whatever—there is no going back. The only possible solution, and it is ultimately a compassionate one, is full professional termination. This is because they cannot be dialed back lest they seethe with resentment and plot retribution.
Of course that solution requires competent leadership in a position to make hard decisions, which is precisely what the fakers are working to prevent.
In the credit-soaked, bloated, and credential-obsessed economic structures of the 21st century, fakers are everywhere. They demoralize competent employees, demotivate hard work and improvement, foment distrust within and without, and ultimately wreck and discredit whole institutions.
The imposter syndrome, in contrast, is something felt by every truly competent person. To some extent, all reputations of geniuses are exaggerated. Despite the high reputations of the Wright Brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, and Eli Whitney, there is in fact an ongoing dispute about who was first in flight, who invented the telephone, and whether the cotton gin was actually improved much at all by Whitney’s machine.
F.A. Hayek showed that the highest forms of intelligence do not live so much in individuals’ minds but in social processes and institutions that no single human mind can fully conceptualize. The result is an order that no man can accurately comprehend or describe, much less design. This is precisely the core of his defense of freedom in speech and action: we need this process to be adaptable to become ever smarter and more reflective of a multitude of intelligences that emerge from human action.
Where does that leave us as individuals? All we can hope to do is precisely what the pianist quoted above says: “I should be focusing on the music.” That is to say, do the best we can on the task in which we are engaged. You will have moments of genius and moments of failure, sometimes home runs and sometimes strikeouts, good performances and bad. Knowing this is neither a complex nor a syndrome; it is the stuff of life.
It is perfectly normal to worry that the plaudits one receives are not truly merited. The most successful musicians I’ve known are not the best; it’s just that they work harder to become successful. It’s the same with writers, scientists, engineers, or entrepreneurs. They are great because they focus on constant improvement.
The “natural talents” among us rarely blossom because they don’t have to work at it. At the same time, seeming disabilities become abilities because they motivate us to overcome them.
History will surely record that elite arrogance over the last four years has proven to be their undoing. In contrast, we might be watching the rise of a new generation of leaders in many fields who approach their craft with a different ethos: the humility to recognize one’s limits, a dedication to authenticity, and a passion for genuine excellence in the service of others. We can hope.
