Otium Den recap:
Why Britain needs a national day
My grandfather was confused when I told him I was going to be a consultant. He struggled to understand what wealth of wisdom a 22-year-old graduate had to impart on the world. Fortunately, my then-employer offered reassurance. At our induction week, combatting impostor syndrome was a key theme. Don’t doubt yourself in the face of external validation, was the message. Your authority is merited by virtue of it being imbued.
Which is all very well when authority is contingent upon objective criteria. A surgeon, for instance, has to know and do certain things. Even if I perfected the lingo and appearance, I couldn’t fool people into thinking I was one for long. Inner conviction would be insufficient in the face of dead patients.
Similarly, self-belief wouldn’t be enough to convince students I was a maths professor. Even if I forged qualifications beyond my actual GCSE, my grasp of basic arithmetic would let me down. There would be objective evidence of my incompetence.
Jason Arday
It brings me to Jason Arday. Strip out the furore around his fantastical claims, and there is little to suggest his students felt him exceptionally unqualified to teach sociology. Not because he was perfectly capable, but because it is hard to judge expertise in that field. Especially in its contemporary form, which is often more inclined towards nonsensical verbosity than study and interrogation.
Max Klinger writes about his experience studying sociology at Cambridge, where Arday was later a professor. Klinger recalls getting top marks for an essay “about how cultural products like kids’ cartoons and jazz songs serve as instruments of capitalist oppression.” He remembers the eminent anthropologist who suggested indigenous tribes “could literally fly because they believed they could fly.”
I’m familiar with the same absurdities, having taken a sociology paper as part of a Theology degree at the same university. It was coloured by cultural relativism that refused to judge or interrogate others’ beliefs (unless, of course, said group was deemed the oppressor). Given the subject permits speaking things into existence, it’s understandable the department was so affronted by questioning of Arday’s credentials. They said he was the world’s best. Case closed.
Different types of authority
I sympathise with the late Arday to the extent that he was a product of perverse incentives. We put conferred authority - “believe me because an institution has designated me an authority” - on a pedestal.
Instead, authority should be demonstrative - “believe me because I can show you” - or earned - “believe because my record makes it reasonable to defer to me”. Both examine content and evidence. Credentials should attest to that expertise, not constitute it.
I saw the same thing later in my career working for a speaking agency. There, we matched event organisers with paid speakers who promised to motivate and enlighten their audiences. Filtering candidates was difficult because everyone was “award-winning”. But what were these awards? For instance, several generous business publications tell me I am one of APAC’s greatest business leaders. Titles I can claim for just a few thousand dollars. These publications exist because there is enough demand for shortcuts to authority. Who are you to question the substance of my talks? I’m award-winning.
Impostor syndrome
Impostor syndrome exists insofar as self-doubt can plague impressive individuals. Expertise often brings greater awareness of what you don’t know. The opposite also occurs. Incompetence makes one oblivious to the scale of one’s ignorance. Confected authority simply encourages the latter’s delusions while doing little to assuage the former’s feelings of inadequacy. Particularly as such titles are so easily assumed.
Neither can the concept be entirely removed from a DEI context. At that same graduate induction, we were told about another nefarious affliction: the proliferation of the “pale, male and stale”. A privileged class hanging on to its right to rule mentality. Beating impostor syndrome means throwing off socio-historical hang-ups to believe that you too, as a woman or minority, are just as worthy of authority.
A Spy Among Friends
That criticism stung then, as I fulfilled at least two of the criteria. But I reconsidered it recently as a latecomer to Ben Macintyre’s brilliant book, A Spy Among Friends. It’s an account of the Cold War’s most famous double agent, Kim Philby. The British MI6 officer was eventually exposed as a Soviet spy, and fled to the Soviet Union in 1963. Macintyre describes Philby as consistently evading detection because his public schoolboy chums at MI6 couldn’t believe that one of us could do such a thing. Philby’s Westminster scarf remains a reassuring sign that he couldn’t possibly be an impostor. The state school lads at MI5 are dismissed as insolent plebs, even as they point to mounting evidence against Philby.
It’s an illustration of “pale, male and stale” engendering erroneous groupthink. It shows the dangers of any institutional certainty about what a credible person looks and sounds like. We have not escaped that error merely by changing the signals. Jettisoning an old boys’ club is no good if we replace it with new uncontestable expertise. Be it the 22-year-old consultant, the acclaimed sociologist, or the award-winning corporate educator.
Authority cannot be tautological - “I am this because I am this.” But that attitude is increasingly prevalent in the Western world. It’s why we see strong pushback against “elites” or “the lanyard class”. It’s not that we reject expertise. It’s that we resent the idea of a new priesthood, whose authority rests on recognition by other members of the priesthood.
My grandfather was right to ask what I was consulting on. And to be dissatisfied with a vague retreat into corporate jargon (“multiple swim lanes of opportunity around business” remains a personal favourite). In fixating upon impostor syndrome, we miss the actual impostors in our midst. A healthy culture needs people capable of asking themselves, “What if I’m an impostor?” And institutions willing to ask, “What if he is?”