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September 14 - September 25, 2019
Don’t be proud, or witty, or even at ease: you’ll come across as arrogant. Stop being so passionate: you’ll scare people off. Most importantly, avoid “good ideas”: the shredder is full of them. That piercing look of yours makes people anxious: open your eyes and relax your lips. Your thoughts should be flabby, and they should look flabby, too. When you talk about yourself, make sure we know you’re nothing much. That will help us put you in the right box. Times have changed.
What is the chief skill of a mediocre person? Recognizing another one.
What really matters is not avoiding stupidity, but making sure it is decorated with images of power.
You should know how to use the software, fill out a form without whining, parrot phrases such as “high standards of corporate governance” and “value proposition,” and say hello to the right people at the right time. But—and this is key—you must not go any further.
Technical perfection is needed to conceal the profound intellectual laziness involved in so many conformist professions of faith. Committed to the exacting demands of work that is never their own, and immersed in thoughts that are ordered from above, mediocre people lose sight of their own banality.
systemic processes help those who have average levels of competence rise to positions of power, pushing aside both the super-competent and the incompetent.
naive expression such as “playing the game” is a salve for the conscience of fraudulent actors. Following this smiling injunction, pharmaceutical companies ensure that prostate cancers are cured at great expense, even though patients are not expected to face a serious problem until the age of 130, and physicians provide useless treatments knowing that by contract they are compensated for each of their medical acts. With the same nudge-nudge, wink-wink attitude, tax agents who are well equipped to zero in on parties guilty of major economic fraud prefer to hound waitresses who fail to declare
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Mediocracy encourages us in every possible way to doze rather than think, to view as inevitable what is unacceptable and as necessary what is revolting.
the university today no longer sells research results, but strictly its brand, the one that it stamps on reports and to which it owns the rights.
Academic writing is based on an implicit rule that becomes explicit if anyone breaks it: only a neutral, calm, and measured tone makes one’s prose worthy of science. Whenever possible, writing should be dull.
don’t name names when actors are involved in illicit undertakings: withholding information shows that you are scientific.
Rhetorical fashions come and go but the penchant for opacity has become a defining feature of contemporary scholarship. . . . Academese is the secret code that some scholars use to signal that they are members of the club. It ensures that no one can really tell whether their ideas are brilliant, bad, or merely mediocre.
Steven Pinker, in an article coldly entitled “Why Academics Stink at Writing,” (17) finds in academic texts a wide variety of faults that would lead to their rejection by any editor who was not a complacent member of the academic milieu.
Playing the game involves too many contradictory meanings to allow for escape from the arbitrary reality of naked power relations and shameful underhanded dealings. And yet the expression “playing the game” conceals the true situation: these three simple words make things look harmless, playful, and even childlike.
Playing the game involves participating in rituals (being seen at an evening event, making a conspicuous donation to a certain charity, congratulating a colleague for an excellent article that you have not read), that, while not obligatory, indicate your loyalty to the group, the network, or the institution.
Actually, playing in the sense of following the rules is only for the weak. For those who are able to think big, the game means surveying the entire situation from above in order to dominate it by arbitrarily determining its rules.
