Groucho Marxism

I recently went through a rather unpleasant experience at work. I had applied for a professional qualification and as part of the application process was invited to what was labelled a ‘career discussion’. The point of this, I was told, was to go through my career history with a member of the relevant professional body so that they could make an assessment of whether my skills and experience were sufficient for them to award me the qualification. Fine, I thought; might even be quite nice to talk a bit about my career. After all, everyone loves talking about themselves don’t they! It was made clear to me that this was definitely not an interview and that I therefore didn’t need to prepare anything prior to the meeting.

So I was somewhat taken aback when instead of a nice, calm discussion about my career history, I was subjected to an interrogation which lasted well over an hour. The meeting started badly when I was a minute late due to the inevitable IT issues (the meeting was held virtually, as most meetings are now). My attempt to clear the air by making a jokey comment about this went down like a lead balloon, and things only went downhill from there. For the next 80 minutes I was subjected to a series of increasingly aggressive questions about what I had achieved in my career, with each answer I attempted being met with a derisory comment or put-down. I could feel my self-confidence ebbing away. Things got so awkward that I was tempted to terminate the ‘discussion’ halfway through.

As you can imagine, I came out of the meeting feeling like a failure. A few days later the results came back; needless to say, I wasn’t awarded the qualification. Not only that, I had been marked at a graduate level for around half of the competencies, despite the fact that I have 20 years of professional experience. No further feedback was provided of course. By this point, however, the shock of the meeting had subsided and I had started to get things into perspective. One advantage of having 20 years professional experience is that you learn a few things. And one of the things I have learned is that if somebody unfairly criticizes you like this, it is almost always coming from a place of insecurity. Applying this principle to my current situation, I suddenly saw it in a much clearer light.

The reason I was given such a hard time, I realized, was not because my assessor thought I was incompetent; it was because deep down they believe themselves to be incompetent, and were subconsciously projecting their perceived incompetency on to me. For example, at one point my assessor made a mistake about something then chided me for not making it clear in my application. But when I looked at it my application again after the discussion, I saw that I had made it perfectly clear. The mistake was a result of my assessor not reading my application properly. Of course they knew this really, and blaming me was their way of subconsciously deflecting the blame away from themselves. My discussion had been littered with examples such as this.

I began to realize that my entire career has been littered with similar examples. There is a profound irony here: the more competent you are at your job, the more you make others feel incompetent, and the more likely they are to then try to undermine you and bring you down to their level. This undermining isn’t done consciously, at least not usually; it mostly happens subconsciously. It is important to recognize this dynamic, for two reasons. First, it provides an explanation for why you can often come in for criticism from others even when (or especially when) you are perfectly good at your job. And second, it highlights just how insecure some people can be. Once you understand that, you immediately flip from disliking the people who unfairly criticize you to feeling sorry for them.

Why are we humans so insecure? Is it just a part of our genetic makeup? If it is then there must be an evolutionary explanation for it, but I struggle to think what that could be. If anything, I would have thought that being secure in yourself would confer an evolutionary advantage. One explanation is that this insecurity stems from our natural competitiveness: when coming into contact with others we naturally size ourselves up against them, and if we feel we are falling short then that makes us feel insecure. This explanation ties in with the right-wing view that human beings naturally compete with each other in a kind of evolutionary survival of the fittest. But I think this explanation gets things backwards.

In my view, the idea that human beings naturally compete with each other stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of evolutionary biology. It is true that competition takes place on the micro-level of the gene, but it doesn’t follow that competition also takes place on the macro-level of the human being. This is an example of the so-called ‘fallacy of composition’: the logical error whereby people wrongly assume that what’s true for the individual parts of something must also be true for the whole. It has been demonstrated time and again that micro-level competition between genes often leads to cooperative behaviour at the macro-level of organisms. We all know this well enough from observing human interactions in our everyday lives, the vast majority of which are cooperative.

I think our insecurities ultimately stem from the system we are all forced to live under – namely, capitalism. It is a system which creates insecurity by maintaining a constant threat of unemployment and poverty for the majority of the population. It is also a system which forces us all to compete with each other, usually against our subconscious will, which reinforces this feeling of insecurity. The only way for us to rid ourselves of our insecurities is to replace capitalism with a system which discourages competition and encourages cooperation.