Impostor Syndrome

“Impostor Syndrome” is a phrase that has seemingly popped up more and more in recent years. I don’t remember hearing it much in the past, but now it’s in the air. What is it? It’s basically the feeling that people get that they don’t belong in their position, or they don’t deserve it—that they are an impostor, a fraud, and will be discovered as such, and have their status/success taken from them.

When it is discussed in liberal media outlets, it is usually to assure their readers that it is just their mind playing tricks on them—that of course you are fantastic and deserve your success! Don’t listen to those doubting voices! You deserve your success, you earned it! That’s usually how Impostor Syndrome is discussed.

Real estate mogul and Shark Tank star Barbara Corcoran recently said that Impostor Syndrome is the most common trait she encounters in successful people. She spins it as evidence that you’re doing something challenging and that you should use it as fuel for your entrepreneurship or whatever the fuck.

But I want to take a different angle on this. Impostor Syndrome is something that successful people should feel, because success in a capitalist system is based mostly just on being in the right place at the right time. It is based on luck, not hard work, or even skill. Why did Bill Gates get so rich? Because nobody had ever created a software company before he did. Now there are thousands of software companies. He also had early access to a computer in high school, because he went to an elite private school that had computers—which was rare in the 1960s! He said that he can trace the success of Microsoft directly to his early access to that computer in high school. It’s all about being in the right place at the right time—fate chooses you, and it could well have chosen someone else. That is why successful people feel like impostors—and they should!

Psychologists play their role of assuring the bourgeoisie that they deserve what they have, that they aren’t impostors, and so on. This has become more pressing in recent years as class consciousness has risen just a bit—as the nature of capitalism has become discussed just a bit more openly.

Impostor Syndrome is the way that the bourgeois mind has developed to tell itself that it does deserve its ill-gotten gains, and that they truly are better and different than the toiling suffering masses who work their asses off and have nothing. The reality that luck and privilege are the only reasons why the rich have their status is too real to be faced—instead, they assure themselves that they are just suffering from a bit of psychology.