Brief discourse on impostor syndrome
An infantile disorder
There was a lot of talk about “impostor syndrome” at the Leland Stanford Junior University in the mid-2010s, a term that refers to the creeping impression that you don’t belong at an institution of such “high caliber,” that there must have been some mistake, that everyone has noticed your manifest inadequacies and is simply being too polite to talk about them to your face, though they certainly are talking about them behind your back, and so on.
It was almost as frequently talked on campus about as another endemic psychological ailment, “duck syndrome,” which is when you wear a serene expression as you move gracefully across the water’s surface, while below it you are paddling frantically.
At freshman orientation, they even dedicated programming to “impostor syndrome,” intending to dispel it in a manner that, on the contrary, and I think in a certain way intentionally, supercharged the Protestant Work Ethic mindset that animates it. “We don’t make mistakes,” they said. “If you’re here, it’s because you were meant to be here.”
Not to go full Ross Douthat here and say that our elite institutions instill an insidious form of secularized Protestantism in the young people they educate … but come on. There we were, the Elect … er, the Class of 2018 … there in the academic Isle of the Blessed, this jewel of a California campus … wondering if we deserved to be there.
We couldn’t be qualified by our listed accomplishments alone, the transcripts and standardized-test scores and extracurricular achievements and so on … that was important, but not sufficient, for admission under the famous holistic American system … there was some other, inner thing that qualified us to be here … and God, or rather His messengers on Earth in the Stanford admissions office, didn’t make mistakes, so our outward success was surely the sign of inward righteousness.
But you could never be quite sure … so you had better work very hard to make sure that you were worthy. Hence the prevalence of impostor syndrome—and its cure, hard work, led to the other thing, duck syndrome. Duck syndrome was a compromise between the openly competitive, cutthroat culture of the East Coast elite universities, and the chill California ethos. It was the Protestant Work Ethic with sunglasses and a tan.
I spent my time as an undergraduate embedded in Stanford’s humanities-student subculture—a loose group of intelligent but lazy eccentrics opposed to the dominant pre-professional and engineering-oriented student culture—which I would later cite as one reason I never found myself particularly susceptible to either of these maladies.
But I would venture further and say that if you have impostor syndrome, at a certain level you’re a sucker. Just think what you’re assuming if you spent a lot of time worrying about whether you deserve to be wherever you are. You think these institutions get to decide questions of moral desert? That’s between you and your conscience. The Stanford admissions office is not, after all, God … in fact on one relatively recent occasion the behavior of one of its officers was significantly less than godly.
It’s especially embarrassing to have one’s self-worth so caught up in these questions in a country—like this one—that is so chock-full of utterly shameless hucksters who breeze through the doors of whatever institutions they can, grab what they want and generally do as they please, never pausing for a moment to wonder if they deserve to be where they are. So go ahead and get that bag! But I think we’re often, as Americans, trapped in this dialectic … between the huckster and the sufferer of impostor syndrome, between the subject consumed by self-doubt and pure scammer jouissance.
It’s a very Protestant dialectic. The construction of a community of the specifically deserving—as opposed to the Catholic idea of a faith that’s capacious enough to encompass all of society—requires, and often generates through its own inhuman demands, a Scarlet Letter-type scapegoat, who becomes an object of moral scorn and jealousy at the same time. That’s how we feel about Elizabeth Holmes and about George Santos. How wrong they were, to fake it all like that … and yet, how wonderful it must have felt—and don’t the institutions that harbored them deserve to be taken down a peg?
There was an element of this to the Varsity Blues scandal, too, that episode with the parents who bribed their kids’ way into elite schools, in many cases through a particular weak link in the admissions armor: sports, especially rich-kid sports like sailing. We knew the girl at Stanford who got expelled after reports came out claiming her wealthy family had paid millions to get her in through the “side door.” Torrents of opprobrium were heaped on her when the press released her name. She was dating a friend of ours, and by all appearances was a nice person, didn’t seem essentially different from other students who were children of great wealth. It was clear the furious reaction wanted to make her into the exception that proved the sacred rule—that the Stanford admissions office does not make mistakes. (This myth exists as much to discipline those who get in as it does to reassure those who don’t.)
In this manner, the two extremes of the dialectic are mutually reinforcing. It’s best to avoid both. No one should get down on their knees and genuflect at the altar of a university. No educational or professional institution deserves to be invested with this level of moral authority. The methodical manner in which Stanford has lately gone about eradicating the last remains of the counterculture, and independent student life generally, on its campus should be enough to convince anyone that it in particular hardly deserves to be arbiter of anyone’s self-worth. Take what you can and run! From the sandstone arcades of the grand old Main Quad, done in that ill-advised combination of Richardsonian Romanesque and Spanish Colonial Revival that a friend of mine once called “Oversized Taco Bell.”
A much more effective and honest way for elite universities to dispel their students’ concerns would be to tell them during freshman orientation: Look, who cares if you deserve it or not, that’s an idiotic way of thinking, even we aren’t that full of ourselves, just enjoy the next four years, take some good classes, make some friends, don’t do anything drastic, you’ll come out of here with a piece of paper that will serve you well in life and hopefully some nice memories, that part is really up to you, but if I hear one more whiny remark about “whether I deserve to be here” I’m going to instruct the marching band specifically to haze you within an inch of your life.
But they’ll never do that. So much the worse for them.