Why are elites so hostile to merit-based hiring?
Simple: imposter syndrome
When’s the last time you heard about an anxiety-wracked blue-collar laborer (such as a plumber or a mechanic) who fretted that he wasn’t actually qualified to do his job—e.g., fix a backed-up toilet or rebuild a transmission?
My guess is never—and it’s not just because blue-collar tradesmen typically don’t use blogs as diaries.
But our society’s elites do this all the time. It’s now a whole cottage industry. There’s even a fancy term for it: imposter syndrome. Sinister!
The American Psychological Association defines imposter syndrome as an inability “to internalize and accept [one’s] success.” Those who suffer from it “attribute their accomplishments to luck rather than to ability, and fear that others will eventually unmask them as a fraud.”
This phenomenon, I submit, has a predictable result: an obsession with diversity-focused hiring rather than a commitment, even if imperfectly honored, to a merit-based approach.
I’ll first offer a theory of why elites are plagued by imposterism; next, I’ll explain why it strongly tends toward the diversity-equity-inclusion (DEI) craze, especially in the realm of employment; and, finally, I’ll respond to objections and then suggest a path forward.
Why is our elite the way that it is?
Charles Murray’s recent review, for the Claremont Review of Books, of Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s book, The Tyranny of Merit, provides some perspective. In the pre-meritocratic world, those at the top of the heap tended to believe that they belonged there as a matter of nature or of right—that is, they thought of themselves as innately superior to the plebs. (The Declaration of Independence’s teaching that “all men are created equal” struck a severe blow against that worldview, even as it leaves space to acknowledge the obvious: that there are real differences in ability between people.) Regular folks, for their part, were able to tell themselves that they might have been more, but, alas, they were born a farmer or a cobbler.
However, “[t]he shift to a meritocratic society relieved those on top of any doubts of their native superiority and stripped those on the bottom of excuses.” This had the effect of spurring the masses to give it their all, if they were so inclined, because they knew they had a real shot of making it. The SAT is the quintessential meritocratic tool. Once upon a time, the SAT was the key to entering the upper echelons of society; your geographic, familial, socioeconomic, and/or racial background didn’t matter. (The SAT has its problems, of course. One is that it’s an engine of “brain drain,” plucking gifted students from the hinterlands and drawing them into big cities, where they often stay. Others think it’s racist. But those are topics for another day.)
Elites are strivers by nature; they always want more. They’re not content with being employed by the Wall Street Journal. No sooner have they arrived than they are eyeing greener pastures—the New York Times, of course. The same goes for academia and business. And when the lines of ascent are open to all, their position is insecure. For one thing, there’s more competition as a matter of raw numbers. For another, because of globalization, people who realistically would never have been in competition with them now are.
Imposter syndrome, then, is a weird—but understandable—result of status insecurity, inaugurated by a meritocratic ethos and turbocharged by accelerating globalization. We’d expect it to have real-world effects, not least because it afflicts the elites, who, for better or worse, drive and set the tone for society.
I think it does.
Why does imposter syndrome result in DEI/affirmative-action hiring?
Diversity-inflected hiring exists in large measure to ease the emotional turmoil brought on by imposter syndrome, which exists because of our society’s (at least rhetorical) commitment to meritocracy. It provides two benefits.
The first is psychic. The logic of diversity hiring serves to deemphasize merit in the process of talent acquisition; at the limit, it completely obliterates merit as a decision-making factor. A DEI regime is one in which whatever the dispositive factor for getting hired is, it’s certainly not merit. In that world, an anguished elite’s perceived (or perhaps even actual) lack of merit as, say, a lawyer, becomes much less important in terms of his ability to keep his job. Safe.
But the logic of diversity hiring also has a second, practical benefit. If, in reality, fewer truly qualified people are hired strictly as a matter of merit—i.e., because the people who are hired wouldn’t have been hired but for these affirmative-action/diversity policies—then our insecure “imposter” is, relatively speaking, better off in his role. Think about it. In a DEI regime, our anxious lawyer turns out to be more qualified than he perhaps would be in a meritocracy. In “Meritocracy World,” he would have to compete with truly qualified persons (who might turn out to be his equals or even his superiors). But in “DEI World,” he winds up comparing quite favorably (or, at least, he has a much better chance of coming out ahead).
Upon reflection, diversity-focused hiring turns out to be an elaborate elite-coddling scheme; it helps them both feel less inadequate amidst their affluence and also protects their position in society.
Responding to the haters
DEI/affirmative action is about making the workplace “look more like America,” not about, intentionally or not, diluting the quality of our elites.
This is clearly false. DEI/affirmative action is obviously about bringing certain people aboard who otherwise wouldn’t make it in. If you don’t think that’s what it’s doing, then what was the point of affirmative action in university admissions beginning in the 1960s? Anyone who’s not an ideologue knows that the purpose was to “boost” minorities into coveted positions. President Johnson put it about as plainly as one can in a commencement speech at Howard University in 1965: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
Not only that, but, soaring rhetoric aside, these policies don’t even help those who need it most. Even the left-wing Daily Beast admits this: “As David Leonhardt put it in the New York Times, ‘low-income students, controlling for race, receive either no preference or a modest one, depending on which study you believe.’ In other words, affirmative action is now another upper-middle class benefit.” Thus, the net result of these policies is inter-racial strife and intra-racial stratification. A lovely combination.
DEI and merit are actually compatible.
We could imagine a world in which something like DEI might improve merit-based selections by identifying and elevating who would otherwise have their natural rise impeded by invidious, systematic discrimination. But, in such a world, we’re not really dealing with DEI anymore. What we’d really be doing is committing to paying attention to whether qualified people are passed over just because they happen to be brown. Great news: In fact, we do live in such a “DEI-lite” world. That is exactly what Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is supposed to do!
Often, the most meritorious person doesn’t even get interviewed (perhaps he was overlooked in favor of someone with connections and clout), which puts the lie to meritocracy at the root.
This is a serious objection, but it goes too far. Assume for a moment our society’s meritocracy mechanisms and muscles are severely damaged and atrophied; it still wouldn’t follow that the morally just response would be full-throated race-conscious hiring. I do think meritocracy is broken. Look no further than the mediocre-in-the-extreme Cuomo brothers, Chelsea Clinton, or Jeb! Bush, all of whom have soared because of their parents’ success.
This means the pipeline needs to be widened and the gunk cleared out, not destroyed altogether.
Now what?
Diagnosis is easy compared to prescription. That’s why most things you read are complaints and not proposals. Whining is easy, but doing is hard.
That being said, I’ll admit that don’t know that there’s a good, easy-to-recognize, and practically implementable solution to this predicament.
(That’s not quite right. There is one such path, offered to us by, of all people, Chief Justice John G. Roberts in his plurality opinion in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 551 U.S. 701 (2007): “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” But in a world in which we could do/were doing that, we wouldn’t need to push for it as a goal; we’d already be doing it.)
Take a step back. On one hand, at the macro level, I’d say that we’re better off when those with the ability and grit to rise up from the circumstances of their birth aren’t arbitrarily blocked from doing so. But, on the other hand, political scientist Richard Hanania paints a compelling picture of experts’ deep incompetence—which happens to coincide perfectly with the explosion of the use of the word “meritocracy.”
It sure seems to me like they’re compensating for something!
Ultimately, if forced to stake out a position, I’d tentatively say that the problem is, at its root, spiritual in nature.1 And spiritual problems require spiritual solutions. From that perspective (specifically an orthodox Christian one), we don’t really deserve anything; everything good that we have is a pure gift from a loving Father. This truth is hard for people to accept. But believing that you achieved everything by yourself is also crushing and not an obviously easier burden to carry.
Which is why, as we’ve seen, DEI emerges: as a way to lighten the load.
However, if we look at the world as it is, we are compelled to admit that our accomplishments have come:
amidst innumerable contingencies over which we had zero control (e.g., community-based factors such as our socioeconomic, family, geographic backgrounds, as well as personal traits, such as our intelligence, temperament, strengths, and interests);
in conjunction with chance events over which we had some control (e.g., meeting X person at that cocktail party you were thinking about skipping who turned out to have been critical in jumpstarting your business); and
with the random intervention and aid of “Lady Luck” here and there.
If we’re honest with ourselves, our effort was only part of the “equation” of our success.
In light of this, perhaps the cure for our elites’ gnawing, clawing self-doubt is for them simply to own up to it, to accept that their successes are meant to be shared, not hoarded. In so doing, they’ll be freed from directing their existential, restless dread inward, toward more and more material success which never satisfies, and instead be able to channel it outward, in service of their neighbors and country.
Wouldn’t that be something.
This will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me.
Fascinating analysis, Deion. I've never heard of "imposter syndrome". It stands to reason, though, that if there's a syndrome out there, our leftist overlords must be swimming in it. Personally, I find the headlong retreat from merit in the last couple of years deeply disturbing. "Getting things right" and rewarding ability are what make civilizations civilized. We are headed down a very dark path.