Imposter Syndrome

Do you remember when you knew things? You know, when you understood how to use the English language, how to play nicely with others, and when science seemed to have some real answers that had stood the test of time? Time itself had meaning, implying order, punctuality and a sense that you had to get things done. Do you remember when, as you matured, you gained a certain sense of certainty and even wisdom?

Well, don’t you just feel like a fraud these days? No sir, that’s a ma’am, bad means better than good, and grammar? Dey fo’ de ol’ folk, boomer. Everything is inverted; science is upended to be less meaningful than belief. Money is magic; it has its own life cycle, almost always ending up in the bank accounts of those who have no need for it. The law protects the criminal more than it protects the victims, and those girls in Rotherham, why they pretty much raped themselves.

Language, probably more than any other human construct, has been subverted and now words are routinely twisted to mean the opposite of what any speaker intended. No wonder government is so powerless – anything they say will be taken down and used in evidence against them. Long before the announcement of new funding for industry can be welcomed somebody will have applied the perverse logic of the age to denounce it as racist.

Being voluntarily unemployed and living on the largesse of the state is today the moral equivalent of being in productive employment and paying your own way. Are you a lazy fucker? No problem, we will dose you up with pills, give your condition a name to absolve you of all responsibility and if we could just harvest your vote, that would be lovely. Annoying little brat? Good, a client for life; ADHD and autism and you need never apply an ounce of effort ever again. Welcome to the Brave New World.

It is getting so that if you apply the logic of your upbringing – if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck – you will be denounced as some genre-specific bigot, labelled as such on social media, be doxed and end up losing your job. And then become a social pariah, shunned by your community, forced to sell up and leave home and end up going to the bottom of the snakes and ladders game of life to begin at square one.

On the one hand all of this is hilariously funny, if it was on screen as a satirical comedy of the times, but it’s real (unreal) enough. And for every glimmer of common sense, every sense that there is resistance, hope is quashed when the authorities support the same types of insanity which drive an increasing minority to insist we acquiesce to their noisy demands.

"But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."

It is little wonder, then, that many older workers – the ones who have all the knowledge and experience – have decided to leave workplaces that no longer recognise what they bring to the job. Literacy, numeracy and plain common decency then become lost skills and what rises up are the entitlement cultures and the wars between their competing needs. And the new truth emerges: War is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance, finally, is strength… comrades.