Morning Comrades,
This was a dispatch I had sent out a few weeks ago to the patreons of this newsletter, not only did I want to revisit it now that some weeks have past but, mostly for the sake of transparency I wanted to share all this with everyone. If you want and can support this project, there’s a little button at the bottom of this essay.
I wrote this shortly after I had received the final, final confirmation that I was now indeed a Doctor of Philosophy. Truthfully, it really hasn’t sunk in just yet in all its entirety but so be it. I’ve been giving all the potential futures in relation to this damn title a lot of thought since and I am still unsure as to where any of these potential paths can / could lead. Professional Academia is not for me, the “game” is worse or equally as soul destroying as working in design / fashion. 90% Party and Bullshit and neither are interesting to me anymore. I am quite happy sharing my space with this outlet, cooking and working in / service and tentatively some new gear.
Today’s topic will deal with some thoughts, that whilst inherently personal, I do believe do relate to many of us who reads this newsletter: The Imposter Syndrome.
I experience and have experienced this for the majority of my working life and with the completion of this PhD it is rearing its ugly head in a most extreme case. Whilst the nature of this effect is deeply rooted in psychological research I am going to attempt to relate it to class status, for the sake of clarity and hopefully, creating awareness and thus mutuality. To be clear, this affects many of us and by raising awareness we can collectively aim to overcome it. Or so the theory goes.
What Is Imposter Syndrome?
Impostor syndrome, also known as impostor phenomenon or impostorism, is a psychological occurrence in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud. Despite external evidence of their competence, those experiencing this phenomenon do not believe they deserve their success or luck.
When impostor syndrome was first conceptualized, it was viewed as a phenomenon that was common among high-achieving female perceived people. Further research has shown that it affects all sexes and genders, in the collective sense that the proportion affected are more or less equally distributed among the genders.1 2
As far as I know the predominate research in this field is done along the lines of race, sex and gender, yet not of class, something I find hugely interesting. Before we truly get into it, a few words about Psychology:
I don’t know much about it, especially professionally. No matter how many years I have had therapy and have had the utmost privilege to be around and taught by accomplished psychologists I have only dabbled. The intersection between materialism ( read Marxism ) and psychology is huge yet often criticized, and I am one of those often doing the critique. Nonetheless, I do consider it not only a valid field of study, but one that is beneficial in the greater context of classism and materialism. My criticism is a mixed bag of subjectiveness and objectiveness. Personally, I have not found all that much value in identifying people and / or systems to “blame” for ones ill-being or destructive behaviour. For example, I grew up with parents that shouldn’t have been parents. Both suffered ( or rather still are as far as I know ) from massive neglect and abuse in their own respective childhoods that were carried forward in forms of neglect, narcissistic manipulation and downright abuse to me. Cool, I learned through therapy & psychology that this was the predominate reason for a lot of my own problems but then what? Making peace with that knowledge didn’t help overcome the pain, nor the results in my own destructive behaviour. Objectively, I know identifying problems “helps” in this regard, but if one were to attempt to scale this up, systematically, to help an entire class, I see only impossibility. Psychology as the root identifier and solution to systemic issues fails in its own subordination to the precise systemic issues at hand. To put simpler, material realities determine much, if not most, self and thus community destruction - give a comrade free housing, free healthcare and UBI and watch most “problems” disappear. That’s my take though and certainly debatable.
The kick-off point is this: I am dealing with a massive case of imposter syndrome these days. Actually, to be even clearer, I always have starting from around the age of 14 but its been accentuated heavily since getting this damn degree, and I am going to approach this from a class perspective.
Ironically, and despite all the efforts put into trying to prove that working classes around the world are the same, I would disagree. Similar, certainly, but definitely not the same. For once, the material realities, current and most definitely historically, are far too heavily shaped by culture and not materialism. Granted, one could argue that culture is shaped by materialism but that’s a whole other book we won’t open today.
My background is solid English peasant stock. English working class consciousness is very specific and equally destructive as well as supportive. Whilst always beating down on any feeling of self-worth and beating down even stronger on any attempt at social class mobility, it does place great pride and offers a great support system towards work. Especially, crafts-based work. For clarities sake, you will get rewarded a great deal for any manual labour, i.e. providing and crafting the material needs for yourself and your community but you will get a massive bollocking if you get into marketing. As I did, for a while in any case. In so far this differs to other European working class traits, puh, what a wonderful study that would be, but I can only comment on the non-existing working class ethos of Germany, one that was eradicated by the Nazis and kept under wraps by the Allied powers after they rebuild West Germany after WW2. Obviously, that was a whole different story in East / Communist Germany but I know so very little about that and thus won’t dare comment on it.
To cut a long story short, I have never felt comfortable existing, let alone thriving, in the realities of the petit-bourgeoisie let alone bourgeoisie world. This has always been extremely clear in work situations. Up until I was 25 I always worked classic working class jobs, retail, manual labour, bar & restaurant work. Always felt comfortable in the language, actions and enjoyed working with my hands. It felt “honest”. From 25 onwards I moved into design, marketing, branding, art and art shows - selling ideas and feelings rather than something I made with my hands that I felt was helpful ( i.e. food for example ) - and you know what, it pays so much better than making food, caring for people, building houses and so forth. That difference in material realities, i.e. no longer living from hand to mouth, but actually accumulating money (!!) was such an alien world to me that I didn’t realize that it truly was an alien world.
As I understand it, in the world of selling ideas you are required to speak a different language and most importantly be born with a level of self-confidence that predominately comes from the knowledge that there is a ( financial ) safety net. Plainly, knowing that if you fuck up, you won’t be evicted or have to go to jail. In my case, that’s always been my reality and still is. If I fuck up, and trust me, I have severely and often, the choices are: jail, eviction or crime to make up for it. That reality fucks with your self-confidence beyond repair as far as I am concerned and essentially keeps the working classes where they are. Amongst themselves, easily divided and pitted against one another. That, in turn allows all classes in the capitalist hierarchical system to not only exploit the wealth generating class but also and most importantly, stop upward social mobility, upon which their generational domination is built.
This is why I was never truly successful during my time in the world of design, music, fashion and what not. I still lack that confidence to bullshit my way through their world. I am equally worried about failing as well as struggling to truly accept the merit of the work involved. For example, I have worked for a number of clients whose core product was bullshit, but they paid well. I was hired to sell it, dress it up with good design, marketing, social media manipulation, you name it - and I more than often failed, as in, walked away after a few weeks, or got fired because I would self-sabotage. When I don’t see value in work, and working class “values” differ vastly from bourgeoisie “values”, my conditioning stops me from doing what I actually can.
This was true often enough during my PhD studies. I know I don’t belong in those circles, I am too poor to be an academic and whilst being able to “fake it till I make it” I self-sabotaged that work often enough as I still struggle with seeing the community relatable value of it. I mean, thank fuck for my therapist who kept me sane and focused during this time but again, what a luxury that most people don’t and will never have access to.
This is why I work as a cook. I am capable of running entire business’ but I don’t see any value in that. I see the value of making food, feeding and bringing together entire communities together and making a living from this. In this upside down world of capitalism this is valued little similar to other essential jobs such as care takers, teachers, garbage people, public transport workers and so on. Work that keeps us healthy and together is valued little while work that upholds the dictatorship of capital is. Add the social conditioning of maintain that system through psychological manipulation and generational damage- well, that is why I keep on rambling about class war.
Because this isn’t good. This isn’t sustainable. This isn’t healthy, moral, and it doesn’t and truly shouldn’t have to be this way.
Fuck feeling small, unvalued and having to exist in precarity to merely uphold and enrich our oppressors.
Enough is enough.
Yours, with love and hope for a better tomorrow,
V.
Langford, Joe; Clance, Pauline Rose (Fall 1993). "The impostor phenomenon: recent research findings regarding dynamics, personality and family patterns and their implications for treatment" (PDF). Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training. 30 (3): 495–501. doi:10.1037/0033-3204.30.3.495. Studies of college students (Harvey, 1981; Bussotti, 1990; Langford, 1990), college professors (Topping, 1983), and successful professionals (Dingman, 1987) have all failed, however, to reveal any sex differences in impostor feelings, suggesting that males in these populations are just as likely as females to have low expectations of success and to make attributions to non-ability related factors.
Lebowitz, Shana (12 January 2016). "Men are suffering from a psychological phenomenon that can undermine their success, but they're too ashamed to talk about it". businessinsider.com. Business Insider. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
Thank you Steven, for this beautiful layed out read about Imposter Syndrome. I know you got the power to live with this knowledge about yourself and I want you to know that you're definately not the only one ✊🏼 Actually I never read something about it, even never encountered it while I was in therapy years ago, so reading this gives me a thread to follow in my own live. A lot of 'aha Erlebnis' vibes I'm getting from reading. I'm kind of relieved to learn I'm not a crazy one that did all this learning and got a corporate job, while deep inside I'd rather make pizza's or working behind a dishwasher. The class analysis makes so much sense that I really want to thank you for this insight.
Much love ❤️
Coen
Agree with Coen below: so much of what you've said here rings so true for me too & is definitely something I've always struggled with. If I had had the confidence in my intrinsic self worth without the fear of failure & the consequences of that what could I have achieved with my life? I sabotaged every opportunity to progress to a comfortable salary because I just couldn't handle the bullshit I would have to be a part of, because crappy, low paying jobs like care, cleaning, cooking feel so much more honest.
The question is whether humans will ever recover from this obsession with status and wealth and bullshit and illusion & regain the value of what actually matters? Most people I know are so entrenched in their patterns of behaviour they simply don't question it let alone see a need to change anything on a larger scale. And I think this inertia can be seen at every level: we're all just too comfortable with things staying as they are, even if we're in pain.
Always enjoy your work, (and your jams!) thank you for making so much of it available to skint readers like me :) Much love to you.