Overcoming the pyramid of professional oppression

“Why is it that Nobel prize winners are always nice, and the people right below them on the professional ladder are complete assholes?” This question was asked to me about ten years ago by one of my hosts, a senior professor in economics, when I was giving a talk at a university in Florida.

 

My host was perfectly right – fully confirmed by my own experience of the last 22 years at MIT. A fair share of Nobel prize winners reside at MIT and Harvard, and many others come to visit – usually they are a pleasure to talk to, and amazingly approachable. The same universities are full of people with huge egos, right below the Nobel prize winners, who are convinced that they deserve the Nobel prize and just didn’t get it because some assholes were against them. These people pull the levers at the most respected academic institutions, as editors in chief of prestigious scientific journals, making tenure decisions for junior faculty, and deciding on funding and promotions. Usually, they are a pain to deal with, full of themselves promoting their own greatness, always the first to speak and never to listen. In all significant academic organizations there is no way to circumvent them, one has to accept their toxic behavior in order to survive and to thrive.

I had been pondering this conundrum for a long time, but then it dawned on me. Nobel prize winners cannot nominate themselves, rather others need to recommend them for this honor. This means only people with social capital, who have a reputation not only for being smart and creative, but also for being kind, will be nominated. All the self-aggrandizing ego-boosting arrogant assholes right below them will never be nominated, rather their peers will take every opportunity to put their inflated egos down.

 

Unfortunately, this means that to succeed in a top academic environment, only the most opportunistic, resilient, schmoozing people will raise to the top. Of course one needs to be smart, but what matters much more is to be the perfect “cyclist”— kicking downwards and bowing upwards. Also, taking academic risks, doing high risk research that challenges accepted wisdom, can be ruinous to the academic career of a young idealistic researcher. The ones gaming their academic citation count the best, doing review papers of “hot” academic topics, and repeating earlier studies with more sophisticated ever more “scientific” methods will rise to the top the fastest. Most of the ones truly furthering the state of the art by bravely following their own curiosity will end in an academic dead end, very few will get the Nobel prize! 

 

In my own research, leveraging AI and social network analysis to study collaboration among humans, animals, and plants, the ones challenging conventional wisdom about interaction with other species and the sentience of animals and plants are sent to the academic desert, while the ones constructing elaborate “proofs that the new theory is just hogwash” will get their publications into prestigious journals like Nature and Science. This goes on until suddenly the academic establishment concludes that “it has always been clear that <<new theory>> exists”, usually after the courageous researchers challenging accepted wisdoms have paid the price by losing their career, their funding and academic positions.

 

This leads to a toxic pyramid of professional oppression. Professionals at the beginning of their career are asked to play by the mindless rules of their bosses, obeying frustrating processes directed by superiors who boost their ego by demonstrating their power. Meaningless status-driven rules are invented by the people at the top and enforced by midlevel managers who hope to make it to the top by being obedient “cyclists”- kicking downwards and bowing upwards. It doesn’t matter whether it’s academics, lawyers, doctors, accountants, MBAs, or engineers, almost all large organizations operate like that. Whether it is working in a hospital, at a large law firm, at an accounting firm, or building car parts, it’s not really about doing the best possible job, but about doing whatever it takes to move up the career ladder. This means doing meaningless activities asked by your boss, and asking your subordinates to do meaningless activities to satisfy your boss. In 99 percent of large organizations, employees are doing their job not to do it intrinsically well, but for the sake of professional advancement. They are prohibited from doing what is good and goal oriented at the expense of doing what is good for being promoted. This pyramid of professional oppression is at the heart of job-related stress as the primary source of professional misery. The pyramid is robbing individuals of their own agency and removing their individual freedom to do a good job.  This misery is independent of whether an individual is at the bottom doing mindless things to move up to mid-level management, or being a mid-level manager doing mindless things to reach the top, or being at the top and enforcing mindless things to avoid being pushed out by others shooting for their job. 

 

The job is the primary source of stress and misery!

 

How can we change this feeling of not being in control of our own destiny, of spending eight hours a day in a meaningless task at the whim of a system creating stress and unhappiness?

 

Take your own destiny back and reclaim the freedom to make your own decisions!

Understand what you really want, what gives you meaning, and have the courage to change your life!

Our SocialCompass will tell you who you really are, what you really want, and who your true friends are!