Will Imposter Syndrome Be What Finally Does America In?

"I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me."

Imposter syndrome sounds like one of those things I always privately thought of as “made up diseases” created mostly to keep the “caring professions,” especially those psychiatric wizards shoveling money into pharma coffers. You know, things like ADHD, which I was convinced simply did not exist except as a collection of symptoms looking for a disease, until I was diagnosed and began treatment for it a couple of years ago.

I never gave much thought to Imposter Syndrome personally, until I finally needed to research it, and somewhere in the process the flashing lightbulb began levitating above my cranium and I found myself thinking, “So that’s why.”

It’s odd how much you learn after you’re old, when it’s too late to make much difference except as an explanation of why things have seemed so screwed up for much of your life. For instance I now have a reasonably viable answer to an old but haunting personal question, “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?’

ChatAI offers the following on the question of whether nations, as well as individuals, can suffer from Imposter Syndrome:

Imposter syndrome is typically associated with individuals rather than nations. It is a psychological phenomenon characterized by persistent feelings of self-doubt and a fear of being exposed as a fraud, despite evidence of competence or accomplishments. It primarily affects individuals who struggle to internalize their own success and attribute it to luck or external factors rather than their own abilities.

However, it is possible to draw a parallel between imposter syndrome and certain dynamics within nations. For example, nations may experience a collective sense of insecurity or inadequacy in relation to other countries. This can manifest in various ways, such as an exaggerated emphasis on national accomplishments, a constant need for validation from the international community, or an overcompensation for perceived weaknesses.

Additionally, some nations may feel a sense of imposter syndrome when trying to assume a particular role or position on the global stage. For instance, a developing nation striving to be recognized as a regional power might experience self-doubt or a fear of not living up to expectations.

While imposter syndrome is more commonly associated with individuals, it is possible to draw similarities between personal experiences and certain aspects of national dynamics. However, it is important to note that nations do not possess consciousness or emotions like individuals, so the term "imposter syndrome" may be more metaphorical when applied to nations.

If I’m right, I’d say the phenomenon is about as metaphorical as a kick in the teeth, since it tends to generate real world phenomena like the currently unfolding Ukrainian catastrophe, not to mention other such bloody goat rodeos at regular intervals since 1945, the year I contend marks America’s entry into full-blown Imposter Syndrome.

I was born in May of 1946, so my life pretty much parallels America’s ascension into the status of becoming the world’s only “hyperpower.” It also encompasses all four stages of our current Generations Theory cycle, which calls it “The Millennial Saeculum,” but I submit would be better termed “The American Superpower Saeculum.”

Consider the following statistics about national death tolls in WWII.

Admitted, I’ve seen considerably higher estimates of the Russian toll, on the order of 20-25 million, but nobody really knows for sure. It was a world holocaust in which somewhere in the bloody, reeking neighborhood of a 100 million souls were turned into rotting meat. People died. Entire nations died. Ideologies died. The old world died, and a new one was born in which America, seemingly by accident, was the toppest of top dogs, despite the much greater sacrifices made by our allies in The Greatest War.

And therein lies the rub. Let’s check a snapshot of the America that woke up one day in 1945 and found itself effectively the new ruler of the world.

Great Responsibilities and New Global Power | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans

By 1945, the United States was manufacturing more than half of the produced goods in the world. US exports made up more than one-third of the total global exports, and the United States held roughly two-thirds of the available gold reserves.

Left unmentioned is the short-lived monopoly on nuclear weapons the nation also possessed. By almost any standard of power, America bestrode the world like a colossus, but what really changed at that point was the nation’s willingness, for the first time in its history, to use its powers to establish a global presence and eventual dominance. And this was something new.

The most significant figure to emerge from the American Founding, America’s de facto “king,” George Washington, departed the first Presidency with the following warning:

Washington's Farewell Address, 1796 · George Washington's Mount Vernon

The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop.

Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

This is the short version of the longer sections of the address that comprise what is usually called Washington’s warning against foreign entanglements. If you have not read the address, you should. I cannot think of any compendium of advice by somebody as integral to American history as he is that has been as comprehensively violated, ignored, or discarded as this one. Every single precept he put forth there has been reduced to dust in the intervening years between our present and the time of that address.

America in large part hewed to his advice for a hundred years or so, remaining mostly isolationist and focused inwardly on the capture and development of what eventually became “America, from sea to shining sea.” This began to change under President Theodore Roosevelt, who used the powers of his office to chart a course toward progressivism at home, and internationalism abroad.

Roosevelt ran as a third party candidate for a third term as President in November of 1912. He lost to Woodrow Wilson, and less than five years later, the United States abandoned its long-standing policy of neutrality and entered World War One against the German Empire. Our era of “international entanglements” began on April 16, 1917, and continues to this day. By 1945, though, we were not just entangled. We had become the international order, in the west, at least, which, for all intents and purposes, meant everywhere but within the borders of the Soviet Union, the only other polity on the planet with the military means to effectively resist our will with naked force. And most Americans were almost entirely unaware of what had occurred, let alone what it meant, and would come to mean, to them.

The meeting at Bretton Woods, which I have discussed here previously, ushered in the Era of American Empire, which in some ways resembled other, older empires, and in other ways did not. Probably the biggest departure from traditional empires was that America did not attempt to physically conquer and then occupy other lands, for while we did distribute U.S. military units into semi-permanent emplacements all over the world (and still do):

List of United States military bases - Wikipedia

The total number of foreign sites with installations and facilities that are either in active use and service, or that may be activated and operated by American military personnel and allies, is just over 1,000.[3]

We did not in general use those forces to directly intervene in the control and/or governance of the host states. In truth, aside from the strategic military significance of many of them, they primarily served as a reminder that we could intervene, if we wanted to do so.

And even this wasn’t iron-clad. Some countries have successfully kicked us out of strategically important bases - Subic Bay in the Philippines is one such example - without having to employ extraordinary means, which would have in any event failed.

So we weren’t the traditional iron fist of empire, or even the iron fist in the velvet glove sort. We were the velvet hand in the velvet glove…but with a switchblade in our back pocket, right next to our wallet, which was our real means of enforcing compliance to our will, and supporting, in various ways, the greatest financial hegemony ever to exist on this planet.

An entire new ruling class sprang up with empire, as well as a ruling party controlled by that class which would guarantee domestic political pliability to all its aims. Along with the massive economic boom that would see the Dow Jones Industrial Average nearly quadruple over the next twenty-something years, this domestic ruling class began to understand, in some cases to its surprise, that it was really a global ruling class, insofar as its actions could help, or hinder, just about any other political entity on the planet. And so, heads held high, and eyes wide shut, it marched forward into America’s brave new world of nearly unfettered power, wealth, and, most important of all, control.

This was all, however, mostly screened from the domestic public eye. The average American swallowed the soothing bromides they were fed without a quibble. After all, they were Americans. How could anybody not like them? Especially after everything we had done for them? Which was the problem, of course.

Other Americans, assuming they weren’t entirely dumbasses, incurable jingotards, and maybe even traveled into the world beyond the U.S. borders, often found that Americans were by no means as well liked as they were told back home in their movies, newspapers, and on their television sets. For some reason, it seemed that a lot of foreigners didn’t much like being helped. Especially when the helping was carried out against their will. It turned out that while they wore our jeans and drank our Coke, their waiters spit (or worse - American palates were famously undiscerning in such things) in our cafe au laits before serving them to us in quaint patisseries along French boulevards. This only served to confirm such average American’s generalized distaste for foreign entangling, just as Washington had hoped. It did not deter, however, the denizens of the international, primarily American, ruling class from their projects of world domination.

For them, everything seemed, in most ways, the best of all possible worlds. Korean “conflict?” Boy, did we ever make some money off that one. But the profits on that paled against the oceans of cash that flowed into American coffers from the war in Vietnam. And if the kids didn’t like it, so what? They had no real power, and anyway, they would grow up and assume their rightful places in the order of things, many of them becoming part of the same ruling class that had sent more than fifty thousand of them off to die in the steaming jungles of some place almost none of them could initially find on a map. Wash, rinse, and repeat with Iraqs 1.0 and 2.0, the war on “terror,” (the profits on that one weren’t all that great, but the vastly expanded domestic powers of that class made up for it), and now the sitzkreigs brewing with Russia and China.

And yet…and yet… In the back of everybody’s mind, high and low, the secret, sniggling, niggling little voice: Is it all an accident? Are we really this good? Or will we look behind our own curtains and discover a naked and giggling dwarf pulling at levers it never had to ability to understand, let alone control?

Let’s return to that initial discussion of Imposter Syndrome, shall we?

Imposter syndrome is typically associated with individuals rather than nations. It is a psychological phenomenon characterized by persistent feelings of self-doubt and a fear of being exposed as a fraud, despite evidence of competence or accomplishments. It primarily affects individuals who struggle to internalize their own success and attribute it to luck or external factors rather than their own abilities.

However, it is possible to draw a parallel between imposter syndrome and certain dynamics within nations.

For example, nations may experience a collective sense of insecurity or inadequacy in relation to other countries. This can manifest in various ways, such as an exaggerated emphasis on national accomplishments, a constant need for validation from the international community, or an overcompensation for perceived weaknesses.

Additionally, some nations may feel a sense of imposter syndrome when trying to assume a particular role or position on the global stage.

Put those all together, and you’ve got a near-textbook explanation for much of what America has done in the world since, oh, the catastrophe that struck us on September 11, 2001. 9/11 was a far bigger game-changer than most of our rulers understood.

First off, it shattered the collective national belief in the myth of our own invincibility. Oh, sure, we’d been successfully sneak-attacked before, the most notable example being Pearl Harbor, but that was by a nation that fought in our weight class, and anyway, they paid the price for it.

9/11 was not that. 9/11 was a bunch of semi-literate Saudi Arabian goat herders inflicting mass slaughter in our two capitals, New York City and Washington, D.C., just when we’d been congratulating ourselves on being the most powerful nation in the history of the world.

We did what we usually do. We launched a war. It seems we are not happy as a nation unless we are waging war on something or someone either domestically or abroad. The best is when we can combine the two, and make war on Afghani opium farmers at the same time we make war on America heroin users. It certainly seemed a felicitous outcome to our Ruling Class. Combine the War on (some) Terror with the War on (some) Drugs, and make a crap-pile of money at the same time. Not to mention the less-mentioned, but much appreciated, huge increases in its power to control the everyday lives of all Americans.

And yet…and yet…

We lost in Afghanistan. We lost the War on Terror, specifically on Islamic terrorists, and we lost the War on Drugs. And we lost friends in the process, both at home and abroad. This is all swept under the rug lest the hoi polloi become restive, but our rulers are acutely aware that the national global batting average is not what they believe it should be, especially for the most powerful nation in the history of the world.

Why, its almost enough to make any self-respecting ruler question that assumption, and wonder if maybe, somehow, there’s been a terrible mistake. Maybe it was just all a lucky throw of the dice. It is said that God smiles on drunks and Americans. Maybe that was it. Real imposters, by the way, are never troubled by such questions. They know what they are, and have no qualms about it. But those who are troubled by Imposter Syndrome think about it all the time, and are constantly finding new evidence that supports their fears.

That report I spent two weeks on, and gave my absolute best shot? At first I thought I’d done a great job, but then Sally from accounting pointed out a couple of mistakes I’d made, and in her snottiest, most condescending tones, no less. When she said, “I guess even Superman can screw up every so often,” I just wanted to crawl under the table and die. She knows. She knows! Oh, my God, what if she tells everybody?

It is right at that point of perceived “exposure” that nations suffering from the syndrome become most dangerous. Their internal supports are already weakened by the suspicion that they are not what they seem, that they don’t deserve their high status, and frankly, that everybody else is either laughing at them, hating them, or both.

So what do you do when some third-world gas station with rusty nukes like Russia gives you about as much respect as you do it and dares to contravene your will? Well, that’s a direct threat to your core concept of self, so you double down. You overcompensate. You escalate.

Because while on the one hand you know that this defiance is not really an existential threat to you, it feels like an existential threat. To allow it to succeed is to allow the defiant to pull back the curtain and reveal the naked dwarf installed by luck or chance behind the curtain pretending to be a great power. The greatest power ever, in fact.

If you talk the talk, you have to walk the walk. You don’t want to be a nation that’s all hat, no cattle. Power talks while bullshit walks.

And all of a sudden logic, reason, and rationality fly out the window, leaving behind nothing but an ever-growing mass of dread. What if they all know? What if they’re all laughing at me?

But wait. What about…?

I’m America, damn it!

And the beatings won’t stop until my morale improves and you stop threatening me with exposure by your very existence.

Hell of a way to construct a foreign policy, wouldn’t you say?

Minor Update: Has anybody looked at the downside of having national policy being made based on a subterranean conviction that we aren’t good enough, aren’t smart enough, and doggone it, people hate us, should this thesis pan out? Maybe someone should.