Interesting article, thanks! This is such an important point:
Liz writes: What do you think is the reason for our hero obsession in academics? Is this just the way people are built, or is it something about the culture that could be changed?
Your article reminds me of all the guides telling us how NOT to ruin a woman's chances of getting a job by pointing out that she's community minded and a team player...... God forbid we'd want one of those working with us ;).
I think there are deep problems with the culture! Sociopaths with big grants and CNS papers are lauded, feted and rewarded, with their frequent transgressions forgiven, whereas the PIs who focus on the growth and development of their protegees are often denied promotion because they fail to tick the right boxes of what higher education considers "merit".
BTW, I really enjoyed your last paragraph. I'm so glad you're enjoying being a writer.
I've been mulling over this discussion since yesterday - it such an important topic, and I wish we were free to discuss more openly the psychological barriers we place in our own way to avoid self-knowledge (and consequently, positive change). Self-knowledge is the necessary first step in deciding to consciously to resist manipulation and intimidation by society's most toxic members. It requires humility, and we do not live in a society that protects that level of personal honesty. If the world were a safer place for us to take responsibility for our errors in judgment, regrets, and betrayals, we would be more willing to do it.
One thing I have learned from opening myself to that kind of knowledge is that acceptance of personal responsibility brings with it a form of spiritual relief that hiding from myself does not. Avoiding responsibility for complacency and cowardice under the heels of bullies is like trying to hide inside a haunted house that I have personally constructed to stash the ghosts of my own shame. Taking ownership of my weakest choices is the only way I have discovered to free myself of the specters of self-betrayal and betrayal of others.
Thank you for sharing this article and for your special take on it, Liz. Also – I am really enjoying your newsletter, although I have not yet taken the time to respond to your thought-provoking and insightful articles yet. I have appreciated them quietly until today. Please forgive me if this lengthy response does not immediately appear relevant, but to me personally, it is entirely relevant.
___________________
I agree with this essay!!! The spear paradigm (UGH!) is a fallacy that has become a bad intellectual habit when it comes to our communal narrative of the way that science advances. Science is an individual effort by myth, but a social effort in fact. One need only conduct a Pubmed search on any topic to appreciate this. But more malignly, the spear paradigm also venerates/validates/normalizes a cannibalistic spirit of competition that undermines and often actively sabotages collective scientific progress and overall community welfare.
I have recently left academia for a career in law because in the past 15 years of my life, I have experienced academic culture to be exceedingly oppressive, unjust/unmeritocratic, emotionally adolescent, and for these reasons fundamentally toxic. Entering law as an off ramp … the irony of that choice is not lost on me. But ultimately, a human being must swim towards safety. I remember what science was like. We relished our hero worship and we acted like idiots to preserve it. At the time, I did not grasp how destructive and counterproductive this mentality was. Hero worship undermines the progress of our scientific disciplines, our ability to live in harmony with our values and character, and our essential psychological health. What do I mean by this? I mean - we are often terrorized by villains masquerading as heroes. Our fear of retribution from such characters has driven us to further cement their influence and acclaim, by acting as pawns and enablers to the harm they deliberately perform to enforce their superior positions of privilege and influence. e.g. It was commonplace for colleagues to trash each others' work, and each other generally, on the most intrusive of personal levels, especially junior people, who have limited resources for self-defense. This practice occurs far more frequently than legitimate scientific debate, when particular researchers of promise are singled out, and it transpires for reasons without objective or intellectual merit. We suppress our conscious awareness of these practices as a condition of living with ourselves. One way in which we do this is by propagating and falsely affirming rumor and misinformation about colleagues, under the profession-appropriate guise of objective critique. In Employment Discrimination Law, the term used to describe the layering of a reasonable justification for an unreasonable action is a “pretext”. Bad actors initiate unsavory and otherwise indefensible actions - rumors, false facts - against perceived rivals by manufacturing acceptable pretexts for their acts; scientific “mobs” of bystanders rally around such defamations, and elevate them to the level of “truth”. In this way, bystanders, too, evade personal responsibility and suppress the discomfiting cognitive dissonance arising from actions that betray one’s values and perception of self.
Bullies are a HUGE problem. In the sciences, and in all professions, as in our politics and our society-at-large. Bullies are the advancers of the spear paradigm, because they are the spear. They are weapons of destruction, not laudable progress. Academic bullies are intractable beings who are driven to destroy because that is all they grasp about how to survive in this world. Organizational psychologists often describe such characters, for lack of a sufficiently descriptive term, as people "with holes in their souls." Academic and institutional bullies destroy their targets because they do not and cannot perceive a better way. (Targets are those - generally junior researchers - whom they perceive as threats, regardless of genuine entreaties for peace and collaboration by such unfortunates – targets do not get to choose). Bullies degrade and splinter the communities within which they reside, because, as individuals, resisting them is too costly, exhausting and personally risky. Bullies eliminate neutral ground and force all of us to betray our consciences, our common sense, our communities, and our most vulnerable and promising members: junior investigators. The ones who will carry the torch with their own intellect, but who also genuinely wish to work collaboratively and communally. They never get to be heroes – but they also have no desire to be. They just want to be allowed to exist, and to succeed. It is time to stop listening to the bullies who run amok in our disciplines if we are to preserve our integrity as scientists. It is necessary to reclaim our dignity and self-respect, to embrace our courage, the human beings we aspire to be, and each other. Breaking the bully paradigm is risky if we go it alone. It is impossible, in fact, to go it alone. BUT WE DON'T NEED TO. Our numbers should be our strength. American science, like American democracy, is looking down the barrel of extinction in the coming years. Violence and resistance are two entirely different things – we must remember this. Violence is the act of doing what a bully wants – by destroying targets that bullies provide for us, and by destroying our relationship with our own humanity. Silence is a slave to violence. It's a blank check for bullies, and the more blank checks we write for them, the more emboldened they become. On the other hand: Resistance is the act of defiance – the act of saying “no” to the unavoidable bullies among us, by standing up for each other and for our best selves. Resistance protects what needs protecting – resistance does not destroy. Resistance preserves and protects us – all of us: our society, our children, our planet, our future.
_________
Thank you for all you are doing to get us talking, Liz. Thank you for sharing uncomfortable truths. Thank you for forging your own path forward into the wilderness, which is such a scary thing to do, and thank you for bringing us along with you. Hopefully, it is giving you courage and hope, as it is giving us courage and hope.
Justine ❤️💔!! There is so much truth in what you write. (Like, you should be writing this newsletter, not me!!) Especially the part about villains masquerading as heroes, whew. We saw a lot of that in grad school to be sure. I’m so sorry that academia made it impossible for you to stay, and I’m glad you are finding a new occupation. Finally, I’m glad you found this post helpful and honest.
Dear Liz, your kindness and welcoming spirit is like a cool, invigorating breeze. Thank you for saying these things. I asked a mutual friend for your email address yesterday, and am about to send you a private note. Thank you again for creating this special space, and for encouraging its growth in healthy directions. The truth really does set us free.
Great observations Justine! 👏 I've seen the nastiness you describe across a range of fields and organizations. The functional psychopaths seem to grab power and "rise" to the top everywhere. I hope you find something different and better in your chosen law firm!
Thanks B2. I wish I knew who you were. Thanks for taking the time to read that. It is a relief to hear someone else use the term functional psychopath. When I use that term, even with friends, it's usually received with skepticism and/or perceived as a sign that there is something wrong with my attitude. But these people are real. Their toxicity is real. I'm the moderator of a workplace abuse survivor community called Safe Harbor, and it is dispiriting and demoralizing how discredited and abandoned most of us are by our colleagues, friends, even our families. It is risky to share such thoughts on a public platform. And it is deeply shaming to "wash out". When the reasons aren't intellectual, or based on objective quality of work product, we tend to blame the "failed scientist" - rather than those who worked so hard to discredit them. We have such an ethos of stoicism in academia. Is it truly stoicism, though, or is it the denial of underlying cultural dysfunction? We harm ourselves, each other and our community, when we participate in the petty under-culture of academia. Gossip is not fun, it is not harmless. When it used to defame and discredit talented, capable scientists, who are usually junior, and usually women, it is violence. No one wants to take responsibility for it. How again, are we supposed to be different from a MAGA-esque mob, when we are so willing to betray our own moral sense and the vulnerable members of our community out of deference to influential bullies? The possibility that we have conducted ourselves in such a way is so abhorrent that we'd rather blame the victim.
No lies here, Justine. Your community sounds wonderful but I’m sorry that it’s needed. I have been swept up in the kind of gossip you mention too many times to count, it’s like the bedrock of academic culture! I’m still accounting for and acknowledging my own bad behavior.
A beautiful nuanced essay as usual Liz! 👏 I hear the echoes of the wisdom of middle career/adulthood is your comments where we have achieved a certain level of individual success and stand on the top of our little mountain and suddenly see all the other mountains in the range. Developmental theorists like Kohlberg, Maslow and Erikson talk about this widening out from egocentricity to an awareness of others and the bigger picture. Joseph Campbell (a la the hero's journey) writes about the dramatic rise in consciousness when we no longer focus just on ourselves.
In the "old days", people at your stage of career were valued as the mentors and thought leaders, a role you have clearly played in your career and enjoyed. But our culture seems now to be very focused on "new" and "winning" and "profit" which makes middle and later career much more challenging to navigate. I have recommended to my mid-career clients that they shift into more of a consulting mode where they can move in and out of systems, have an impact, and move on before the politics eats them alive! 😉
Several years ago I read David Brooks’ book The Second Mountain and it made the same point. I guess the question is why mid career folk who might see the landscape better aren’t changing the system or promoting better community?
I think part of mid-career wisdom involves losing some of that righteous crusader mindset that provides the energy for challenging/changing the system. What do you think?
That’s surely part of it. Also I think people who make it to powerful positions by mid-career often are the ones who buy into the system, since it gave them success.
Gosh... righteous crusaderdom, what a throwback to my twenties. The righteous crusader mindset I once admired did not hear, consider or respect the different views or experiences of others. Crusading is just so fruitlessly exhausting, and it obstructed my opportunities to gain maturity, insight and wisdom. Personally, the energy to resist the system stems from the gradual but inexorable recognition of how controlled I am by it, realizing/admitting the ways in which I have perpetuated my own enslavement and demoralization by it, and by realizing that doing nothing is the same as giving up on myself, my loved ones and the planet. I am curious how many other mid-career folks following this discussion feel the energy to resist oppressive heirarchies, and if you do, where inside you does it come from? Where do you want it to go?
This year, as woman without children of my own to care for, I feel like the most meaningful choices and actions I can take are those made in defense of and care for democracy. With graduation now 5 months away I am starting to explore "what" and the "how" of that goal. I've recently learned of two organizations that sound amazing and am excited to learn more: 1) ProtectDemocracy.org (https://protectdemocracy.org/about/democracy-playbook/) and 2) Community Builders - a consulting firm that is helping to heal the community-wide trauma and discord brought on by Trumpism (in Silverton, Colorado)(https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/us/politics/silverton-division.html). Do either/any of you have other suggestions?
I wish he were a woman ;) but I appreciate David Brooks too. "The Road to Character" provided spiritual encouragement during a scary time. I'm excited to begin his latest
(admittedly - based mainly on the strength of its title): "How to Know a Person - the Art of Seeing Others Deeply and of Being Deeply Seen." If it lives up to its promise, I'll let you know!
The last post made me think of The Hero's Journey too (especially the protagonist returning home, changed).
I agree that there is a lot of “Great Man”-style history and hero worship in science. It feels like villain narratives have become more popular. Perhaps serendipity narratives or even clown narratives will resurge.
Hi Liz,
Interesting article, thanks! This is such an important point:
Liz writes: What do you think is the reason for our hero obsession in academics? Is this just the way people are built, or is it something about the culture that could be changed?
Your article reminds me of all the guides telling us how NOT to ruin a woman's chances of getting a job by pointing out that she's community minded and a team player...... God forbid we'd want one of those working with us ;).
I think there are deep problems with the culture! Sociopaths with big grants and CNS papers are lauded, feted and rewarded, with their frequent transgressions forgiven, whereas the PIs who focus on the growth and development of their protegees are often denied promotion because they fail to tick the right boxes of what higher education considers "merit".
BTW, I really enjoyed your last paragraph. I'm so glad you're enjoying being a writer.
What!?!? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that there are such guidelines!
Sometimes I think things are changing in our culture and then I see awards and grants and speaker lists and I know they are not.
I've been mulling over this discussion since yesterday - it such an important topic, and I wish we were free to discuss more openly the psychological barriers we place in our own way to avoid self-knowledge (and consequently, positive change). Self-knowledge is the necessary first step in deciding to consciously to resist manipulation and intimidation by society's most toxic members. It requires humility, and we do not live in a society that protects that level of personal honesty. If the world were a safer place for us to take responsibility for our errors in judgment, regrets, and betrayals, we would be more willing to do it.
One thing I have learned from opening myself to that kind of knowledge is that acceptance of personal responsibility brings with it a form of spiritual relief that hiding from myself does not. Avoiding responsibility for complacency and cowardice under the heels of bullies is like trying to hide inside a haunted house that I have personally constructed to stash the ghosts of my own shame. Taking ownership of my weakest choices is the only way I have discovered to free myself of the specters of self-betrayal and betrayal of others.
Thank you for this. It resonates, especially the last sentence--last year I came to the conclusion it is enough if I exist.
“Ego” is the key term to this dilemma, it seems. How hard it is to put ego to the side and focus on the ideas, the work, and the people.
Absolutely! Every bit of my personality and training want me to be the center of all the stories and all the accomplishments.
Absolutely. And the system hates it when we eschew ego for collaborative story-making.
Thank you for sharing this article and for your special take on it, Liz. Also – I am really enjoying your newsletter, although I have not yet taken the time to respond to your thought-provoking and insightful articles yet. I have appreciated them quietly until today. Please forgive me if this lengthy response does not immediately appear relevant, but to me personally, it is entirely relevant.
___________________
I agree with this essay!!! The spear paradigm (UGH!) is a fallacy that has become a bad intellectual habit when it comes to our communal narrative of the way that science advances. Science is an individual effort by myth, but a social effort in fact. One need only conduct a Pubmed search on any topic to appreciate this. But more malignly, the spear paradigm also venerates/validates/normalizes a cannibalistic spirit of competition that undermines and often actively sabotages collective scientific progress and overall community welfare.
I have recently left academia for a career in law because in the past 15 years of my life, I have experienced academic culture to be exceedingly oppressive, unjust/unmeritocratic, emotionally adolescent, and for these reasons fundamentally toxic. Entering law as an off ramp … the irony of that choice is not lost on me. But ultimately, a human being must swim towards safety. I remember what science was like. We relished our hero worship and we acted like idiots to preserve it. At the time, I did not grasp how destructive and counterproductive this mentality was. Hero worship undermines the progress of our scientific disciplines, our ability to live in harmony with our values and character, and our essential psychological health. What do I mean by this? I mean - we are often terrorized by villains masquerading as heroes. Our fear of retribution from such characters has driven us to further cement their influence and acclaim, by acting as pawns and enablers to the harm they deliberately perform to enforce their superior positions of privilege and influence. e.g. It was commonplace for colleagues to trash each others' work, and each other generally, on the most intrusive of personal levels, especially junior people, who have limited resources for self-defense. This practice occurs far more frequently than legitimate scientific debate, when particular researchers of promise are singled out, and it transpires for reasons without objective or intellectual merit. We suppress our conscious awareness of these practices as a condition of living with ourselves. One way in which we do this is by propagating and falsely affirming rumor and misinformation about colleagues, under the profession-appropriate guise of objective critique. In Employment Discrimination Law, the term used to describe the layering of a reasonable justification for an unreasonable action is a “pretext”. Bad actors initiate unsavory and otherwise indefensible actions - rumors, false facts - against perceived rivals by manufacturing acceptable pretexts for their acts; scientific “mobs” of bystanders rally around such defamations, and elevate them to the level of “truth”. In this way, bystanders, too, evade personal responsibility and suppress the discomfiting cognitive dissonance arising from actions that betray one’s values and perception of self.
Bullies are a HUGE problem. In the sciences, and in all professions, as in our politics and our society-at-large. Bullies are the advancers of the spear paradigm, because they are the spear. They are weapons of destruction, not laudable progress. Academic bullies are intractable beings who are driven to destroy because that is all they grasp about how to survive in this world. Organizational psychologists often describe such characters, for lack of a sufficiently descriptive term, as people "with holes in their souls." Academic and institutional bullies destroy their targets because they do not and cannot perceive a better way. (Targets are those - generally junior researchers - whom they perceive as threats, regardless of genuine entreaties for peace and collaboration by such unfortunates – targets do not get to choose). Bullies degrade and splinter the communities within which they reside, because, as individuals, resisting them is too costly, exhausting and personally risky. Bullies eliminate neutral ground and force all of us to betray our consciences, our common sense, our communities, and our most vulnerable and promising members: junior investigators. The ones who will carry the torch with their own intellect, but who also genuinely wish to work collaboratively and communally. They never get to be heroes – but they also have no desire to be. They just want to be allowed to exist, and to succeed. It is time to stop listening to the bullies who run amok in our disciplines if we are to preserve our integrity as scientists. It is necessary to reclaim our dignity and self-respect, to embrace our courage, the human beings we aspire to be, and each other. Breaking the bully paradigm is risky if we go it alone. It is impossible, in fact, to go it alone. BUT WE DON'T NEED TO. Our numbers should be our strength. American science, like American democracy, is looking down the barrel of extinction in the coming years. Violence and resistance are two entirely different things – we must remember this. Violence is the act of doing what a bully wants – by destroying targets that bullies provide for us, and by destroying our relationship with our own humanity. Silence is a slave to violence. It's a blank check for bullies, and the more blank checks we write for them, the more emboldened they become. On the other hand: Resistance is the act of defiance – the act of saying “no” to the unavoidable bullies among us, by standing up for each other and for our best selves. Resistance protects what needs protecting – resistance does not destroy. Resistance preserves and protects us – all of us: our society, our children, our planet, our future.
_________
Thank you for all you are doing to get us talking, Liz. Thank you for sharing uncomfortable truths. Thank you for forging your own path forward into the wilderness, which is such a scary thing to do, and thank you for bringing us along with you. Hopefully, it is giving you courage and hope, as it is giving us courage and hope.
Justine
Justine ❤️💔!! There is so much truth in what you write. (Like, you should be writing this newsletter, not me!!) Especially the part about villains masquerading as heroes, whew. We saw a lot of that in grad school to be sure. I’m so sorry that academia made it impossible for you to stay, and I’m glad you are finding a new occupation. Finally, I’m glad you found this post helpful and honest.
Dear Liz, your kindness and welcoming spirit is like a cool, invigorating breeze. Thank you for saying these things. I asked a mutual friend for your email address yesterday, and am about to send you a private note. Thank you again for creating this special space, and for encouraging its growth in healthy directions. The truth really does set us free.
Great observations Justine! 👏 I've seen the nastiness you describe across a range of fields and organizations. The functional psychopaths seem to grab power and "rise" to the top everywhere. I hope you find something different and better in your chosen law firm!
Thanks B2. I wish I knew who you were. Thanks for taking the time to read that. It is a relief to hear someone else use the term functional psychopath. When I use that term, even with friends, it's usually received with skepticism and/or perceived as a sign that there is something wrong with my attitude. But these people are real. Their toxicity is real. I'm the moderator of a workplace abuse survivor community called Safe Harbor, and it is dispiriting and demoralizing how discredited and abandoned most of us are by our colleagues, friends, even our families. It is risky to share such thoughts on a public platform. And it is deeply shaming to "wash out". When the reasons aren't intellectual, or based on objective quality of work product, we tend to blame the "failed scientist" - rather than those who worked so hard to discredit them. We have such an ethos of stoicism in academia. Is it truly stoicism, though, or is it the denial of underlying cultural dysfunction? We harm ourselves, each other and our community, when we participate in the petty under-culture of academia. Gossip is not fun, it is not harmless. When it used to defame and discredit talented, capable scientists, who are usually junior, and usually women, it is violence. No one wants to take responsibility for it. How again, are we supposed to be different from a MAGA-esque mob, when we are so willing to betray our own moral sense and the vulnerable members of our community out of deference to influential bullies? The possibility that we have conducted ourselves in such a way is so abhorrent that we'd rather blame the victim.
No lies here, Justine. Your community sounds wonderful but I’m sorry that it’s needed. I have been swept up in the kind of gossip you mention too many times to count, it’s like the bedrock of academic culture! I’m still accounting for and acknowledging my own bad behavior.
A beautiful nuanced essay as usual Liz! 👏 I hear the echoes of the wisdom of middle career/adulthood is your comments where we have achieved a certain level of individual success and stand on the top of our little mountain and suddenly see all the other mountains in the range. Developmental theorists like Kohlberg, Maslow and Erikson talk about this widening out from egocentricity to an awareness of others and the bigger picture. Joseph Campbell (a la the hero's journey) writes about the dramatic rise in consciousness when we no longer focus just on ourselves.
In the "old days", people at your stage of career were valued as the mentors and thought leaders, a role you have clearly played in your career and enjoyed. But our culture seems now to be very focused on "new" and "winning" and "profit" which makes middle and later career much more challenging to navigate. I have recommended to my mid-career clients that they shift into more of a consulting mode where they can move in and out of systems, have an impact, and move on before the politics eats them alive! 😉
Several years ago I read David Brooks’ book The Second Mountain and it made the same point. I guess the question is why mid career folk who might see the landscape better aren’t changing the system or promoting better community?
I think part of mid-career wisdom involves losing some of that righteous crusader mindset that provides the energy for challenging/changing the system. What do you think?
That’s surely part of it. Also I think people who make it to powerful positions by mid-career often are the ones who buy into the system, since it gave them success.
Gosh... righteous crusaderdom, what a throwback to my twenties. The righteous crusader mindset I once admired did not hear, consider or respect the different views or experiences of others. Crusading is just so fruitlessly exhausting, and it obstructed my opportunities to gain maturity, insight and wisdom. Personally, the energy to resist the system stems from the gradual but inexorable recognition of how controlled I am by it, realizing/admitting the ways in which I have perpetuated my own enslavement and demoralization by it, and by realizing that doing nothing is the same as giving up on myself, my loved ones and the planet. I am curious how many other mid-career folks following this discussion feel the energy to resist oppressive heirarchies, and if you do, where inside you does it come from? Where do you want it to go?
This year, as woman without children of my own to care for, I feel like the most meaningful choices and actions I can take are those made in defense of and care for democracy. With graduation now 5 months away I am starting to explore "what" and the "how" of that goal. I've recently learned of two organizations that sound amazing and am excited to learn more: 1) ProtectDemocracy.org (https://protectdemocracy.org/about/democracy-playbook/) and 2) Community Builders - a consulting firm that is helping to heal the community-wide trauma and discord brought on by Trumpism (in Silverton, Colorado)(https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/us/politics/silverton-division.html). Do either/any of you have other suggestions?
I wish he were a woman ;) but I appreciate David Brooks too. "The Road to Character" provided spiritual encouragement during a scary time. I'm excited to begin his latest
(admittedly - based mainly on the strength of its title): "How to Know a Person - the Art of Seeing Others Deeply and of Being Deeply Seen." If it lives up to its promise, I'll let you know!
The last post made me think of The Hero's Journey too (especially the protagonist returning home, changed).
I agree that there is a lot of “Great Man”-style history and hero worship in science. It feels like villain narratives have become more popular. Perhaps serendipity narratives or even clown narratives will resurge.
Was “McFee” an subconscious slip?
I wonder how much he makes in speaker's fees...
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
I want to hear more clown narratives in science 😭😭!! McFee was just a typo but you are probably right!
Whoa. Talk about paradigm changing. Thank you for sharing this theory. I think it’s something I’ll be meditating on for a while.
Let me know if you want a copy of the Le Guin essay--it’s great!
I would be very grateful for it, if you don’t mind. I always enjoy reading Le Guin.
I'm not entirely sure how to get it to you--you can write to me at lizhaswell@gmail.com and I'll send you the PDF?