Continued from Our Society of Overachievers.
I saw this in Robert Shiller’s latest Economic View piece for the New York Times:
In short, Mr. Janis’s insights seem right on the mark. People compete for stature, and the ideas often just tag along. Presidential campaigns are no different. Candidates cannot try interesting and controversial new ideas during a campaign whose main purpose is to establish that the candidate has the stature to be president. Unless Mr. Greenspan was exceptionally insightful about social psychology, he may not have perceived that experts around him could have been subject to the same traps. [NYT, via Mankiw]
Leaving the political aspect of that aside for now, the notion that “ideas often just tag along” is something I’ve been complaining about forever. It has literally made me want to kill myself. I don’t understand careerism… I mean, I know about it, I know it exists, I recognize it everywhere, but I just don’t get it.
It took me a long time to realize that the genuine quality of work and ideas is secondary to the way their results look on a resume or recommendation letter – or how they might threaten other people’s sense of stability.
Recognizing this realilty is one thing; that was hard enough. Learning to deal with it is harder. Actually being happy about it is yet another thing — impossible from where I’m at.
I love to learn and think. I live to discover and create. The fact that discovery and creation may lead to higher stature is secondary for me. But our society has evolved in a way that talking about discovery and creation merely signals one’s intentions for stature — so if you genuinely love new ideas and try to share that love, people tend to take that as a direct threat and treat you as if your primary intention is to threaten – as if you first decided to send that threatening message and then went to the drawing board to come up with ideas for communicating it.
I’m intellectually mature enough to know this is ”the way things are” – if not deeper than that. I have a pretty good sense of how things got this way through a kind of cultural Darwinism (i.e. it’s better to assume nobody is genuinely committed to discovery and creation than to be fooled by one person who is not). I’m also mature enough to appreciate that trying to design a better way of working, learning, and living is just a dream at this point — and a rather fanciful one, to be honest.
But while it’s an ideological fantasy to talk about dreams of a better way, it’s perfectly pragmatic to simply stop buying into the existing way. I know there are a lot of people like me who either work and live just outside the fringe or grudgingly (and miserably) go along with incentive-driven career conventions. There are also plenty of people who would be more or less happy to go either way but lack an alternative…
It’s way too early to talk about “changing the system,” but it’s never too early (nor too late) to start taking personal responsibility for learning to recognize genuine quality rather than relying on metrics and credentials (that can be gamed and abused).
At the very least we should be able to have an open conversation about our system from the outside looking in, rather than being bound by the same possible flaws and weaknesses that might be causing harm to it. (And yes, there are ways to get outside – even if we just barely surf across the surface for fleeting moments.)
This conversation is too important to merely let ideas tag along. We need to make sure there’s always a venue where ideas, learning, genuine discovery and creativity are what really matters, first and last.
Continued from Our Society of Overachievers.
