Imagine you’re a scientist in some sci-fi alternate universe, and you’ve been charged with creating a boot camp that will reliably turn normal but ambitious people into broken sociopaths more or less willing to do anything.
There are two main traits you’d want to cultivate in your recruits. The first would be terror: You’d want to ensure that the experimental subjects were kept off-balance and insecure, always fearful that bad things would happen, that they would be humiliated or lose their position and be cast out. But at the same time, it would be crucial that you assiduously inculcate a towering sense of superiority, the belief that the project they happen to be engaged in is more important than anything and that, because of their remarkable skills and efforts, they are among the select few chosen to be a part of it. You’d want to simultaneously make them neurotically insecure and self-doubting and also filled with the conviction that they and their colleagues are smarter and better and more deserving than anyone else.
He’s writing about young investment bankers, whose lives, such as they are, are described in Kevin Roose’s new book “Young Money.” But doesn’t this boot camp actually describe the Ph.D. experience pretty well? And if so, why aren’t math professors sociopaths?
I can think of one reason: in finance, the thing you are trying to do is screw over somebody else. If you win, someone has lost. Mathematics is different. We’re all pushing together. Not that there’s no competition; but it’s embedded in a fundamental consensus that we’re all on the same team. Apparently this is enough to hold back the sociopathy, at least for most of us.