The so-called impostor syndrome does not really exist. It is an invention of postmodern psychology. No cynic ever doubts his own success. Don Quixote is a prime example. He deceives others with his feigned madness, but he never deceives himself. He knows perfectly well, without leaving his chamber, that he must not repeat the test of the helmet in his initial preparations. Only those who deceive themselves, without deceiving others, doubt their own success, because it is others who deceive them, just as King Basilio deceived Segismundo, inducing him to doubt his own will and making him believe that life is a dream governed by a higher and immutable power. In this way, vulnerable human beings are turned into marionettes in a tragic puppet show under which freedom is proscribed and destroyed.
Those who doubt their own merits do so because others deceive them, and they suspect it, even if they do not dare to confess it to themselves, since they know and sense, not without reason, that they have a tail of straw. And for those who do not trust themselves, everything becomes doubts and fears and noises and appearances and phantoms. Those who do not know are afraid, until they learn, first, to legitimize their merits as their own work, and not as recognition bestowed by others, and second, to stand on their own and to know how to live emancipated from the praise of others, which is usually the true and only impostor: other people and their praise.
Those who claim to suffer from impostor syndrome are unhappy people with pretensions they cannot afford, and others, instead of warning them about their limitations, make them believe in imaginary virtues and powers that they completely lack. That supposed syndrome is nothing more than another artifice of the contemporary world, very maliciously promoted, whose aim is to preserve the narcissism of one’s own ego in the face of those who may suspect or sense that they suffer from it, so that they are neither able to avoid it nor willing to overcome it, and thus become increasingly narcissistic, until their irreversible and definitive failure. Far from preventing failure, the so-called impostor syndrome preserves it. The market wants you sick. And dependent on the perpetual pursuit of an impossible happiness.