@philosophyminis

There’s a fairly well-known feeling known as ‘impostor syndrome.’ Impostor syndrome is when you feel underprepared or underqualified for a job that you are doing, and you feel like a fraud. And so you spend so much time and effort trying to convince everybody that you are not just an overgrown child in a new wardrobe. But there is a deeper element to impostor syndrome. And this is when we realise that everyone else is just making things up as they go along. Everyone is just pretending that they know what they are doing, but no one has any more idea than you. This is a feeling that Kafka gets at in his works and especially his book, The Trial. In The Trial, we meet a whole range of characters, characters who hold authority like judges, lawyers, priests, and officials. But none of them actually understand the system they serve. They all perform their roles of absolute seriousness, but they have no more idea about what is going on than the accused. Everything is completely hollow. For Kafka, life is a theatre that oscillates between playing along and recognising the farce for what it is. We are all just actors reading our lines, but occasionally we will stop to say, ‘hang on, this is just ridiculous.’ And when we realise that when we realise that everyone is just making it up, what will we do? Do we carry on reading our lines? Or do we walk off the stage and go somewhere else?

♬ original sound – Jonny Thomson