Friday? Really?

[silveradept]

Well, today was a proper Spring day - it rained. Enough that the roast that was planned was cancelled. It may reschedule, though. I got some really good pizza for lunch, though. That'll also be dinner tomorrow, most likely. Mmm-mmm... at least it wasn't served by someone who was trying to get fired. That would have been interesting.

I also spent a good amount of time watching the second day of the Lightworks Festival. The last movie of the night was a zombie short. which is funny, because I was just reading about zombies this morning. Strange how the Synchronicity Drive works, isn't it?

And then I read a pair of articles - one about how in any conflict that has boundaries, the boundaries are fractal... there's a fuzzy zone in between the two camps where one is not entirely sure what side is in charge, if any side at all. That might describe my natural state. and perhaps in that uncertain state there exists the power to reshape reality, through the creation, manipulation, and re-casting of images. Controlling both images and their meanings allows someone to create reality. Depending on how you apply your images (if you apply them at all), you create the real. As Conforth would say, "Define Yourself."

On an unrelated tangent, my art skills were cheered by a visit to the museum, reminding me that I need not even think about drawing figures at all, and that I can simply apply a color uniformly to an otherwise unremarkable object and still have it be called art. Perhaps my limited drawing skills really are an improvement over what I could be. You'd be surprised what can be considered art, especially in the twentieth century.

Finally, I've been doing a dangerous thing - thinking. So once again I will assault your brains with my ideas. You are free to discard them, adopt them, or ignore them as you like. This current brain-pattern revolves around the idea of the Impostor Syndrome that I referenced in the previous post. While the link I gave probably didn't have much in the way of detailing the theory, it did make mention of some of the characteristics of the mindset - downplaying one's own intellect or skill, attributing successes to good fortune, et cetera. The more I think about it, the more I wonder why more people don't claim it, since it seems that our entire society is geared toward reinforcing the impostor's mindset.

It's coded in our maxims - "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." Why? To shut it up. That the wheel receives benefits is secondary. "Sticking out like a sore thumb" - obviously in need of some "healing" to bring it back to being normal. In the news, the stories play out that great successes get lucky, no matter how much planning or effort or expertise they put into their projects - all that does is minimize the chance that something goes wrong, really, at least according to them.

So where does this insidious bastard get his start? The school system, I suspect. In an environment where the slow are sequestered away and the quick are told, in no uncertain terms, to be like everybody else (or at least to make themselves useful by helping the slower kids stay on the wave), what signal does that send? In a place where the unique are actively targeted, how do you avoid being one of the victims if you've got an unpopular eccentricity, like intelligence? "George just lucky, I guess." "No, I'm not smart, I just happened to get the questions I had studied for on the test." "I'm normal, just like you... I just happened to have favorable circumstances."

This extends out into society... if you say, with honest conviction, that you're skilled at something, there will invariably be a backlash that says you're being arrogant, or proud, and that something must be done to remind you that you are only fortunate, not skilled. It may stem from jealousy (and I'll admit to being jealous of people more skilled at things than I, but I hope that I turn it into a motivation for me to improve my own skills, instead of wishing ill fate on someone because they're more skilled), but one of the first learned and most socially acceptable ways of avoiding being called an arrogant jerk is to downplay your achievements. Yes, I did save that girl from the burning building, but anybody could have done that. Sure, I climbed Kilimanjaro, but anyone else could, too.

Get my point? The Impostor Syndrome should be an epidemic! Perhaps it's just that nobody's put a name to it yet, and in future years, we'll see a giant spike in the number of people being treated for no self-confidence. (Or maybe it's already here and we just hide it well) Fixing the problem shouldn't be too hard - all we have to do is get people to stop holding up an arbitrary "normal" as the ideal state for a person to be in. Once we can accept eccentricities as integral parts of a person, rather than foreign material to be excised, we can cut the need for the Impostor. It's all part of the master plan, you see, to get people to look at other people as a whole greater than the sum of its parts, rather than as a collection of characteristics, all compartmentalized, some desirable, some not. Silly me, right? That idea's not normal.

So, in closing, I'll exercise another one of my eccentricities - my tendency to go to bed after finishing a journal entry.

Comments

[inspired-writer.livejournal.com]

Thank you for again providing such intersting brain food. I went to a bunch of other websites that explained about this phenomonon and with the bigger picture I realize that I suffer from this impostor syndrom quite severly.

Here is a link to my 'real' weblog, if you would like to take a gander. I will admit I talk mostly about myself though, just warning you in advance.

http://www.indigosky.modblog.com

that was high school...

[neoboy3000.livejournal.com]

i lived that. 'no, i'm not smart' because the smart kids get labeled and alienated (not like i didnt spend a bunch of time alone anyway as a nerd ^_^) incredibly thoughtful entry, my friend

[rimspace.livejournal.com]

Hrmm..

I suppose I was unusual at school (or maybe I really did get lucky) in that I never needed to do that - I was popular and the other kids got on with me and I was valued as someone to have on your side with both intellectual work and sports. My nickname back then was Prof but I wasn't excluded from things...

OTOH, it is something I do a lot now. Not because of attempting to appear "normal" though, I couldn't give a wossname about that - I say I'm not that intelligent because I know there's so much I don't know. I know the boundaries of my achievements well enough that I am under no illusions about their true meaning. Some of it is pathological perfectionism, but some of it is the simple realisation of my true state.

[silveradept]

Well, in my theory about this, you had enough acceptable behaviors to be part of the group, and then people could ignore the bits that were eccentric. You were probably lucky, then.

As for the realizations that there's so much more to know, that's useful to have, but at the same time, playing down what you actually have achieved is a bit of the impostor. That sort of perfectionism is something I do too, and it always wants more. You feel like you're only getting there. Sometimes we need to appreciate what we've actually accomplished, even as we work towards even better things.

[fred-smith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, sure. All we have to do is make people understand that some people are going to be different from themselves and that doesnt make them bad. How hard can that be?

[silveradept]

Exactly. How hard can that be? I mean, our children's shows seem to have it down pat. Perhaps that's what they mean when they say "playing make-believe" - imagine a society where everybody thinks of everybody else as a person.

[fred-smith.livejournal.com]

The shows may have it down. But its one of these doctrines thats easier to accept in the clean, easy world where the issue is over PingPong liking the red ball and BoBo liking the blue one. Or, a bunch of multiethnic American kids singing happy sings about ethnic diversity with their parents.

Generally, nobody can apply this same set of values to the real world, where there are liable to be real cultural and life-style differences. Children don't treat people like people. Adults don't, either.

Just look at Kilroy and his hideous Veritas Party, they are not racist, of course, they don't mind people having different skin colours, they just hate it when people insist on having different cultures.

[silveradept]

Point made. The real world is always more complex than the world we learned our ABCs in. Still, how hard can it be to agree to disagree? Even if I think that my culture holds significant advantages over yours, we're still both people, and should treat each other as such, rather than as demons or things that are less-than-human. It is possible to condemn terrorism without any need to make a particular ethnic or cultural group into "The Great Satan" or anything like that.

I can love my country and give the finger to my government, and still think of people as people. How hard can it be?

[fred-smith.livejournal.com]

You'd have to get around people's usual reactions to finding out that people are different. What makes people disgusted in others? How don we prevent that reaction?

[silveradept]

Hmm... you do have a point. Difference, while claiming to be celebrated and protected and encouraged under the name of "Diversity", really gets undermined by several more subtle things, doesn't it? I suppose that I might not be normal, but it seems like the right reaction to difference should be curiosity - after gathering a substantial amount of information, then perhaps a decision as to whether or not you, as a person, like or dislike another person's differences, can be made. Obviously, liked differences aren't much of a problem.

Disliked differences, however, seem to be the crux of the problem. Well, most people deal with small differences by simply putting them against the large amount of things liked about a person and find them generaly not important enough in the grand scheme of things. There are probably a lot of what we consider to be larger issues that are really small issues and we're just blasting them out of proportion. Like my Charlie Brown/Piro indecisiveness and lack of confidence.

Bigger issues, ones detrimental to the functioning of the society (like religious intolerance, in my opinion) probably require the "love the sinner, hate the sin" approach, if someone's going to be gung-ho about trying to change differences. At some point, though, there has to be an understanding that someone may be obstinate, even in the face of superior conclusions and reasonings. About the only thing you can do then is to change how (and whether or not) you associate with them. If those views they have are backwards to the "inexorable march of progress", then those views will fade out.

At no point along this line should the person with differences be anything less than a person with differences. And I think the method I've detailed avoids making someone sub-human. Now, it's possibly a bit reductionist or simplistic, but it's adaptable to almost any situation that I can think of.

So the short answer is that disgust should be replaced with curiosity as the first reaction to difference.

[fred-smith.livejournal.com]

That sounds fair to me, homosexuality is a good example. Some people may get really worked up about homosexuals in general, but accept it as a minor character flaw in individuals who they like for other reasons.

However, to being this down to the level it started on, what about differences that don't relate to culture, seucal preference, etc? The big trick is to get people to accept that some people will be smarter, tougher, have different interests, etc.

[silveradept]

Well, once could use a reflective argument ("Would you like it if someone made fun of you because you were X?") but after childhood that doesn't seem to be effective. Hell, in childhood it doesn't seem to be effective. Pontification about the uniqueness of all peoples gets the same response... maybe I'm being a bit abstract.

Probably the most concrete way to do things would be to highlight the various strengths and weaknesses of many people - celebrities, historical figures, etc. to try and drive the pont home that everybody is different - and that's okay, because that's really what "normal" is.

[fred-smith.livejournal.com]

We can hope that it would work, but I think people are slightly more willing to accept difference in abstract historical figures than when its staring them in the face. Humans are not great creatures, in many ways.

[silveradept]

Agreed. Perhaps some sort of impressing activity in the formative schooling years would help, showing just how different the class is, perhaps a more expansive version later, to highlight just how far off "normal" is from reality. But all of that depends on the people realizing how arbitrary "normality" is.