But once we learn to see ourselves as already, and by nature, foolish, it really doesn’t matter so much if we do one more thing that might threaten us with a verdict of idiocy. The person we try to love could indeed think us ridiculous. The individual we asked directions from in a foreign city might regard us with contempt. But if these people did so, it wouldn’t be news to us; they would only be confirming what we had already gracefully accepted in our hearts long ago: that we, like them – and every other person on the earth – are on frequent occasions a nitwit. The risk of trying and failing would have its sting substantially removed. The fear of humiliation would no longer stalk us in the shadows of our minds. We would become free to give things a go by accepting that failure and idiocy were the norm. And every so often, amid the endless rebuffs we’d have factored in from the outset, it would work: we’d get a hug, we’d make a friend, we’d get a pay rise.
Pieter Bruegel, Dutch Proverbs, 1559.
The road to greater confidence begins with a ritual of telling oneself solemnly every morning, before embarking on the challenges of the day, that one is a muttonhead, a cretin, a dumb-bell and an imbecile. One or two more acts of folly should, thereafter, not feel so catastrophic after all.
IMPOSTOR SYNDROME
Faced with hurdles, we often leave the possibility of success to others, because we don’t seem to ourselves to be anything like the sorts of people who win. When we approach the idea of acquiring responsibility or prestige, we quickly become convinced that we are simply – as we see it – ‘impostors’, like an actor in the role of a pilot, wearing the uniform and delivering authoritative cabin announcements while being incapable of starting the engines.
The root cause of impostor syndrome is an unhelpful picture of what people at the top of society are really like. We feel like impostors not because we are uniquely flawed, but because we can’t imagine how equally flawed the elite must necessarily also be underneath their polished surfaces.
Impostor syndrome has its roots far back in childhood – specifically in the powerful sense children have that their parents are really very different from them. To a four-year-old, it is incomprehensible that their mother was once their age and unable to drive a car, call the plumber, decide other people’s bedtimes and go on trips with colleagues. The gulf in status appears absolute and unbridgeable. The child’s passionate loves – bouncing on the sofa, Pingu, Toblerone … – have nothing to do with those of adults, who like to sit at a table talking for hours (when they could be rushing about outside) and drink beer (which tastes of rusty metal). We start out in life with a very strong impression that competent and admirable people are really not like us at all.
This childhood experience dovetails with a basic feature of the human condition. We know ourselves from the inside, but others only from the outside. We’re constantly aware of all our anxieties and doubts from within, yet all we know of others is what they happen to do and tell us, a far narrower and more edited source of information. We are very often left to conclude that we must be at the more freakish, revolting end of human nature.
But really we’re just failing to imagine that others are every bit as fragile and strange as we are. Without knowing what it is that troubles or racks outwardly impressive people, we can be sure that it will be something. We might not know exactly what they regret, but they will have agonizing feelings of some kind. We won’t be able to say exactly what kind of unusual kink obsesses them, but there will be one. And we can know this because vulnerabilities and compulsions cannot be curses that have just descended upon us uniquely; they are universal features of the human mental condition.
The solution to the impostor syndrome lies in making a leap of faith and trusting that others’ minds work basically in much the same way as our own. Everyone is probably as anxious, uncertain and wayward as we are.
Traditionally, being a member of the aristocracy provided a fast-track to confidence-giving knowledge about the true characters of the elite. In eighteenth-century England, an admiral of the fleet would have looked deeply impressive to outsiders (meaning more or less everyone), with his splendid uniform (cockaded hat, abundant gold) and hundreds of subordinates to do his bidding. But to a young earl or marquess who had moved in the same social circles all his life, the admiral would appear in a very different light. He would have seen the admiral losing money at cards in their club the night before; he would know that the admiral’s pet name in the nursery was ‘Sticky’ because of his inept way of eating; his aunt would still tell the story of the ridiculous way the admiral tried to proposition her sister in the yew walk; he would know that the admiral was in debt to his grandfather, who regarded him as pretty dim. Through acquaintance, the aristocrat would have reached a wise awareness that being an admiral was not an elevated position reserved for gods; it was the sort of thing Sticky could do.
The other traditional release from under-confidence of this type came from the opposite end of the social spectrum: being a servant. ‘No man is a hero to his valet,’ remarked the sixteenth-century essayist Montaigne – a lack of respect which may at points prove deeply encouraging, given how much our awe can sap our will to rival or match our heroes. Great public figures aren’t ever so impressive to those who look after them, who see them drunk in the early hours, examine the stains on their underpants, hear their secret misgivings about matters on which they publicly hold firm views and witness them weeping with shame over strategic blunders they officially deny.
The valet and the aristocrat reasonably and automatically grasp the limitations of the authority of the elite. Fortunately, we don’t have to be either of them to liberate ourselves from inhibiting degrees of respect for the powerful; imagination will serve just as well. One of the tasks that works of art should ideally accomplish is to take us more reliably into the minds of people we are intimidated by and show us the more average, muddled and fretful experiences unfolding inside.
At another point in his Essays, Montaigne playfully informed his readers in plain French that ‘Kings and philosophers shit and so do ladies.’
Montaigne’s thesis is that for all the evidence that exists about this shitting, we might not guess that grand people ever had to squat over a toilet. We never see distinguished types doing this – while, of course, we are immensely well informed about our own digestive activities. And therefore we build up a sense that because we have crude and sometimes rather desperate bodies, we can’t be philosophers, kings or ladies; and that if we were to set ourselves up in these roles, we’d just be impostors.
With Montaigne’s guidance, we are invited to take on a saner sense of what powerful people are actually like. But the real target isn’t just an under-confidence about bodily functions; it is psychological timidity. Montaigne might have said that kings, philosophers and ladies are racked by self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy, sometimes bump into doors and have odd-sounding thoughts about members of their own families. Furthermore, instead of considering only the big figures of sixteenth-century France, we could update the example and refer to CEOs, corporate lawyers, news presenters and successful start-up entrepreneurs. They too can’t cope, feel they might buckle under pressure and look back on certain decisions with shame and regret. No less than shitting, such feelings belong to us all. Our inner frailties don’t cut us off from doing what they do. If we were in their roles, we’d not be impostors, we’d simply be normal.
Making a leap of faith around what other people are like helps to humanize the world. Whenever we encounter a stranger we’re not really encountering such a person, we’re encountering someone who is – in spite of surface evidence to the contrary – in basic ways very much like us, and therefore nothing fundamental stands between us and the possibility of responsibility, success and fulfilment.
FAME
Fame seems to offer very significant benefits. The fantasy unfolds like this: when you are famous, wherever you go, your good reputation will precede you. People will think well of you, because you
r merits have been impressively explained in advance. You will receive warm smiles from admiring strangers. You won’t need to make your own case laboriously on each occasion. When you are famous, you will be safe from rejection. You won’t have to win over every new person. Fame means that other people will be flattered and delighted even if you are only slightly interested in them. They will be amazed to see you in the flesh. They’ll ask to take a photo with you. They’ll sometimes laugh nervously with excitement. Furthermore, no one will be able to afford to upset you. When you’re not pleased with something, it will become a big problem for others. If you say your hotel room isn’t up to scratch, the management will panic. Your complaints will be taken very seriously. Your happiness will become the focus of everyone’s efforts. You will make or break other people’s reputations. You’ll be boss.
The desire for fame has its roots in the experience of neglect and injury. No one would want to be famous who hadn’t also, somewhere in the past, been made to feel extremely insignificant. We sense the need for a great deal of admiring attention when we have been painfully overexposed to deprivation. Perhaps our parents were hard to impress. They never noticed us much, as they were so busy with other things, focusing on other famous people, unable to have or express kind feelings, or just working too hard. There were no bedtime stories and our school reports weren’t the subject of praise and admiration. That’s why we dream that one day the world will pay attention. When we’re famous, our parents will have to admire us too (which throws up an insight into one of the great signs of good parenting: that a child has no desire to be famous).
But even if our parents were warm and full of praise, there might still be a problem. It might be that it was the buffeting and indifference of the wider world (starting in the school playground) that were intolerable after all the early years of adulation at home. We might have emerged from familial warmth and been mortally hurt that strangers were not as kind and understanding as we had come to expect. The crushing experience of humiliation might even have been vicarious: our mother being rudely dismissed by a waiter; our father standing awkwardly alone.
What is common to all dreams of fame is that being known to strangers will often be the solution to a hurt. It presents itself as the answer to a deep need to be appreciated and treated decently by other people.
And yet fame cannot, in truth, accomplish what is being asked of it. It does have advantages, which are evident. But it also introduces a new set of very serious disadvantages, which the modern world refuses to view as structural rather than incidental. Every new famous person who disintegrates, breaks down in public or loses their mind is judged in isolation, rather than being interpreted as a victim of an inevitable pattern within the pathology of fame.
One wants to be famous out of a desire for kindness. But the world isn’t generally kind to the famous for very long. The reason is basic: the success of any one person involves humiliation for lots of others. The celebrity of a few people will always contrast painfully with the obscurity of the many. Witnessing the famous upsets people. For a time, the resentment can be kept under control, but it is never somnolent for very long. When we imagine fame, we forget that it is inextricably connected to being too visible in the eyes of some, to bugging them unduly, to coming to be seen as the plausible cause of their humiliation: a symbol of how the world has treated them unfairly.
So, soon enough, the world will start to go through the old pronouncements of the famous, it will comment negatively on their appearance, it will pore over their setbacks, it will judge their relationships, it will mock their new ventures.
Fame makes people more, not less, vulnerable, because it leaves them open to unlimited judgement. Everyone is wounded by a cruel assessment of their character or merit. But the famous have an added challenge in store. The assessments will flood in from legions of people who would never dare to say to their faces what they can now express from the safety of the newspaper office or screen. We know from our own lives that a nasty remark can take a day or two to recover from.
Psychologically, the famous are of course the very last people on earth to be well equipped to deal with what they’re going through. After all, they only became famous because they were wounded, because they had thin skin; because they were in some respects mentally unwell. And now, far from compensating them adequately for their disease, fame aggravates it exponentially. Strangers will voice their negative opinions in detail, unable or simply unwilling to imagine that famous people bleed far more quickly than anyone else. They might even think that the famous aren’t listening (though one wouldn’t become famous if one didn’t suffer from a compulsion to listen too much).
Every worst fear about themselves (that they are stupid, ugly, not worthy of existence) will daily be actively confirmed by strangers. They will be exposed to the fact that people they have never met, people for whom they have nothing but goodwill, actively loathe them. They will learn that detestation of their personality is – in some quarters – a badge of honour. Sometimes the attacks will be horribly insightful. At other times they’ll make no sense to anyone who really knows the situation. But the criticisms will lodge in people’s minds nevertheless, and no lawyer, court case or magician will ever be able to delete them.
Needless to say, a hurt celebrity won’t be eligible for sympathy. The very concept of a deserving celebrity is a joke, about as moving for the average person as the sadness of a tyrant.
To sum up, fame really just means that someone gets noticed a great deal, not that they are more intensely understood, appreciated or loved.
At an individual level, the only mature strategy is to give up on fame. The aim that lay behind the desire for fame remains important. One does still want to be appreciated and understood. But the wise person accepts that celebrity does not actually provide these things. Appreciation and understanding are only available through individuals one knows and cares about, not via groups of a thousand or a million strangers. There is no short cut to friendship – which is what the famous person is in effect seeking.
For those who are already famous, the only way to retain a hold on a measure of sanity is to stop listening to what the wider world is saying. This applies to the good things as much as to the bad. It is best not to know. The wise person knows that their products require attention. But they make a clear distinction between the purely practical needs of marketing and advocacy and the intimate desire to be liked and treated with justice and kindness by people they don’t know.
At a collective, political level we should pay great attention to the fact that so many people (particularly young ones) today want to be famous – and even see fame as a necessary condition for a successful life. Rather than dismiss this wish, we should grasp its underlying and worrying meaning: they want to be famous because they do not feel respected, because citizens have forgotten how to accord one another the degree of civility, appreciation and decency that everyone craves and deserves. The desire for fame is a sign that an ordinary life has ceased to be good enough.
The solution is not to encourage ever more people to become famous, but to put greater efforts into encouraging a higher level of politeness and consideration for everyone, in families and communities, in workplaces, in politics, in the media, at all income levels, especially modest ones. A healthy society will give up on the understandable but erroneous belief that fame might guarantee that truly valuable goal: the kindness of strangers.
SPECIALIZATION
One of the greatest sorrows of work stems from a sense that only a small portion of our talents is taken up and engaged by the job we are paid to do every day. We are likely to be so much more than our labour allows us to be. The title on our business card is only one of thousands of titles we theoretically possess.
In his ‘Song of Myself’, published in 1855, the American poet Walt Whitman gave our multiplicity memorable expression: ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’ By this he meant that there are always so many interesting, attra
ctive and viable versions of oneself, so many good ways one could potentially live and work, and yet very few of these ever get properly enacted in the course of the single life we have. No wonder that we’re quietly and painfully conscious of our unfulfilled destinies, and at times recognize with a legitimate sense of agony that we really could well have been something and someone else.
The big economic reason why we can’t explore our potential as we might is that it is hugely more productive for us not to do so. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith first explained how what he termed the ‘division of labour’ was at the heart of the increased productivity of capitalism. Smith zeroed in on the dazzling efficiency that could be achieved in pin manufacturing, if everyone focused on one narrow task (and stopped, as it were, exploring their Whitman-esque ‘multitudes’):
One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, all performed by distinct hands. I have seen a small manufactory where they could make upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they could have made perhaps not one pin in a day.
Adam Smith was astonishingly prescient. Doing one job, preferably for most of one’s life, makes perfect economic sense. It is a tribute to the world Smith foresaw – and helped to bring into being – that we have all ended up doing such specific jobs and carry such puzzling titles as Senior Packaging & Branding Designer, Intake and Triage Clinician, Research Centre Manager, Risk and Internal Audit Controller and Transport Policy Consultant. We have become tiny, relatively wealthy cogs in giant, efficient machines. And yet, in our quiet moments, we reverberate with private longings to give our multitudinous selves expression.
The School of Life Page 21