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The Psychological Difficulties of The New Cosmopolitans and Homo Globalis

I have clients who could be referred to as Homo Globalis, or the New Cosmopolitans (Stenger). Thank zoom! The global psychotherapy client can now dial in from Silicon Valley, or Zurich or Singapore. They are part of an English speaking professional elite, well educated, and widely travelled, yet beset with psychological difficulties.  They feel that what they do is somehow inadequate.  Their frame of reference is no longer local, but extends to Mars and back!

As the sociologist Zygmunt Batman (2013) writes

"We live in a world of communication, everyone gets information about everyone else.  There is universal comparison and you don't just compare yourself with the people next doors, you compare yourself with people all over the world and what is being presented  as the decent, proper, and dignified life.  It is the crime of humiliation."

Carlo Stenger writes in a 2011 edition of Psychology Today:

"Homo Globalis is faced with a difficult predicament. A new class has evolved at the border of the upper and the upper-middle classes, which led Secretary of Labor and now professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley Robert Reich to speak of the "New Rich-Rich Gap." He writes:

"A new group is emerging at the very top. They're CEOs and CFOs of global corporations, and partners and executives in global investment banks, law firms and consultancies. Unlike most national symbolic analysts, these global symbolic analysts conduct almost all their work in English, and share with one another an increasingly similar cosmopolitan culture.

Most global symbolic analysts have been educated at the same elite institutions -- America's Ivy League universities, Oxford, Cambridge, the London School of Economics or the University of California, Berkeley. They work in similar environments -- in glass-and-steel office towers in the world's largest cities, in jet planes and international-meeting resorts. And they feel as comfortable in New York, London or Geneva as they do in Hong Kong, Shanghai or Sydney. When they're not working -- and they tend to work very hard -- they live comfortably, and enjoy golf and first-class hotels. Their income and wealth far surpass those of national symbolic analysts." (Robert Reich, The New Rich-Rich Gap. American Prospect, December 12, 2005.)

The second impact is psychological. I have, for example, worked with physicians who felt like complete idiots. "I have studied and specialized for fifteen years, and I'm starting to make money only now. I feel like a complete idiot when I look at my classmates who dropped out of medicine and moved to some biotech company or a fund that invests in them. They have more money now than I'll make in a lifetime!"

These physicians represent the larger group of the traditional professions who feel largely disenfranchised. First they feel financially stressed. They need to work very hard to just get their kids through college, and they still feel that they have difficulties maintaining the lifestyles that they were led to expect when they chose their professions.

Second, they feel that the status that they expected when they entered their professions eludes them. If doctors or lawyers could once reasonably expect to be respected in their communities, most of them, except a few stars plugged into the system of Reich's "international symbolic analysts," don't make the type of money needed to afford a lifestyle with the prestige that was associated with the traditional professions in the past.

Existential Psychology has shown the depth of the human need to matter, make a difference, to feel that you have a significant place in this world. We all need to feel that we do something that matters within the frame of reference that defines our experiential world. The question is what this frame of reference is.

Those who belong to the group of national symbolic analysts may be highly competent, and do interesting work, but their impact and reach is limited to their immediate environment. As a result they often feel left out, because the global infotainment system has become Homo Globalis' frame of reference.

Add to this that many national symbolic analysts have lost their independence through the new global developments. For lawyers it is becoming increasingly difficult to be competitive in a market that has come to be dominated by ever larger firms able to provide 24/7 services, providing their global clients with legal services at very high speed. The same holds true for consultants, accountants and advertisers whose environment has changed dramatically with the advent of global firms like McKinsey, Ernst and Young and McCann Erickson.

 

 In order to get into this concept deeper, I have reproduced a case study from Carlo Strenger's academic papers.  The case of Jeff allows us to become acquainted with the psychological processes and inner life of the New Cosmopolitan:

Jeff

The first impression I got of Jeff was of a bundle of energy hardly contained. He was of medium height and his physique seemed strong, but he carried some extra weight. I couldn't quite make up my mind whether the way he dressed was studiously casual, or whether he didn't care about slight mismatches; his jeans and his jacket's colors grated slightly; he carried his shirt over his jeans, which is not unusual in academic circles. His curly, thick hair was unruly; his features were strong, slightly fleshy, and dominated by amazingly expressive dark eyes.

“I … I don't know how to put this. I … I really need help.

“My guess is that you've looked me up on Google. So you probably know that I'm considered to be a very successful academic. I'll get straight to the point: I feel that my life has been one big hoax; I'm a con-man; I'm 42, and I feel that I've never had a day of decent work of value. I feel like shit. I feel that I can't continue like this.

“I don't know whether I'll ever have children. But at this point, I can't even consider having any. How can I raise a son when I don't have anything of true value to give to him? How can I raise children who will have a father that loathes himself?”

Huge sobs broke out of Jeff's big chest; he was shaking violently, crying his heart out.

He calmed down a bit and said, “Hmm; that was a dramatic opening. I didn't plan this—and don't worry: I'm not a nutcase. I'm just in pain … “.

Jeff was a world-famous political scientist. He had made a name for himself by merging a theory in social psychology into a model of political processes, both within polities and between countries. He had claimed in his doctoral research that all models of political decision-making were hopelessly flawed because they were overly rationalist; that if you didn't take into account deep existential needs that drove both voters and politicians, you could never understand political processes.

In a series of papers and books he had floored the academic community by bolstering his hypothesis with a highly sophisticated statistical analysis of a huge amount of data. Some people thought that he might revolutionize political science. He held a professorship at one of the most prestigious universities in the United States, which paid him a substantial salary to ward off the constant attempts to lure him elsewhere. They also kept his teaching duties very low to allow him to run research projects around the world. And, quite untypically for academics, he was generally paid business class tickets to fly from one high-powered conference to the next, and governments around the world flew him in to advise them on the most burning conflicts on the globe.

Jeff was a classic case of impostor syndrome that, even though not unique to them, is quite prevalent in ««New Cosmopolitans»». Most of them rarely see a concrete, physical result of their work: they see numbers, graphs, words, websites; many of them wonder whether what they do is real, or whether they are not fooling the world. So I told Jeff “in any case you assume that you're a genius: if not in your academic field, so at least in fooling everybody all the time.”

Jeff was bubbly, energetic, and expressive; he spoke at phenomenal speed underscoring his point with expansive gestures. Even after he had stopped crying, he was still quite emotional. His pain was a tangible, almost physical presence in the room. And now he looked at me with a combination of disappointment and humor.

“I would have expected more from you, Carlo. I know all about the impostor syndrome, and I don't just think that I'm an impostor. I think the whole game we're part of—and that includes your discipline—is a huge hoax. We feed the world the illusion that we actually understand the phenomena we purportedly analyze. We write papers based on complex statistical analyses giving the impression that this is science. But you know how minimal the effects are; you know that there is no way we can truly ground our conclusions on our data. There are zillions of alternative explanations.

“Somehow we manage to convince taxpayers to fly us around the globe for conferences that are basically rituals in self-congratulation. We celebrate how smart we are, and what we're doing for the world, and we convince everybody that they can't live without us. But you know as well as I do that not much would change if most major social scientists were blown up in one of these conferences!

“There are people who do actual science: physicists, chemists, biologists. They don't work on totally minimal effects: they do stuff. You can see the end result clearly. A friend of mine in physical chemistry developed a new form of ceramics, and it's now being applied in the production of luxury car brakes. In 20 years all breaks will be made of these materials: lighter, more durable, and with much better heat conductivity than steel. Neither you nor I have ever or will ever produce something that is as tangible as that. Our castles are made of air, so we never see them crumble.”

His expression became crestfallen again. “I'm in pain; I'm in bloody pain. If your field was any good, you'd sever some neural connection, and then feed something else into my brain, and I'd be out of here in an hour. Given that you guys still basically are in the stage of alchemy, I don't have much of a choice, do I? Just tell me that there is hope; tell me that one day maybe I'll love a woman; that I'll have a boy I can raise, and that I'll be in less pain!”

“So here I am. I made it. I'm here in Israel for a few weeks continuing my research on your bloody Israel-Palestine conflict, knowing that my results won't make any difference. But what the hell: I have a quarter of a million dollar grant that funds this, because my theory is hot stuff. I have partners here; they run the whole operation. I just fly in and out, speak on CNN, and meet senior intelligence officials, diplomats, and politicians, the so-called Super Class (Rothkopf, 2008). And here I am hating myself every minute of my life.”