Note: Not every scholar or professional wears the mask I describe here. There are exceptions, bright lights who hold fast to conscience. But this reflection concerns a familiar and prevailing kind, the type into which many are quietly molded without noticing. It is written not to condemn alone, but to warn and to awaken, for those who still stand at the threshold of choice.
There are people who walk the halls of hospitals, universities, and professional associations who believe themselves to be the center of the human story. They hold advanced degrees, titles, and positions within carefully stratified hierarchies. They live inside structures that have been refined over centuries to reward those who can navigate the rituals of accreditation, dissertation, and specialization. Their lives unfold in the corridors of academe or in the ordered ranks of elite professions. They have grown so accustomed to this stratified world that they no longer see how deeply it has shaped them. They have become agents of hierarchy itself, perceiving every aspect of life through the lens of classification and rank.
When they look at one another, they compare degrees, titles, and institutional affiliations. Their identities are inseparable from these badges. Ask them who they are and they will answer with what they have studied, what they have published, where they have trained. Even in the first moment of meeting someone new in the hospital, their instinct is to ask, "what year are you", probing for rank, hoping that the person before them is beneath them. If the answer is yes, their posture shifts, their tone alters, their demeanor changes at once, becoming ever so slightly more paternalistic, as if hierarchy itself were etched into the very cadence of their speech.
They see themselves as big fish in ponds defined not by rivers or oceans but by the walls of a hospital or the gates of a campus. Within these fiefdoms, the contests of prestige and the games of recognition take on the quality of absolute truth. Yet, it is a truth written and maintained by a top-down culture that has convinced its inhabitants that these cartoonish dramas are the very substance of reality.
Outside those walls, the world is different. Beyond the classroom and the conference room there is genocide, the New Jim Crow, abject poverty, starvation, refugee camps, and minefields. There are cobalt fields in Congo where children risk their lives so that batteries may power the devices through which professors send their manuscripts and doctors send their referrals. In these places the real forces of history unfold. They are the places where oppression is confronted in its most brutal form, and where survival is not a matter of tenure or promotion but of hunger, disease, and war.
The men and women of the professions rarely remember this other world. Some have never entered it at all. They inhabit glass houses and ivory towers, and because the fish is the last to know it is in water, they mistake their containment for freedom. They strut across conference stages and hospital corridors believing their degrees confer omniscience and their positions grant omnipotence. The result is arrogance. They believe themselves hardened veterans of life, but their armor is made of paper credentials.
It is striking that very few of them have ever confronted true oppression face to face. They have not fought dictators. They have not resisted despots. They have not lived under occupation or endured forced migration. They have not marched with indigenous peoples who defend forests against bulldozers, or with Peasant Workers in Bolivia who risk their lives for bread and justice. Yet they often imagine and carry themselves as nose-high, heroic actors. They believe, consciously or unconsciously, that they are the enlightened vanguard, the true movers of civilization, yet in reality this particular type drifts in a kind of waking sleep. Their intellectual armor is brittle, their independence hollow, and their minds the least prepared to break free from the invisible chains of hierarchy. Those who most pride themselves on consciousness are often the least conscious of all.
The genuine struggles for liberation have never been carried forward by those insulated by titles and degrees. They have been borne instead by the uncredentialed, by those with no institutional shield to hide behind. It is the people who face the storm directly, without protection or pretense, who have consistently bent the arc of history toward justice.
Liberation has been carried forward by the oppressed themselves, by indigenous communities, by laborers, by women who defied both colonial power and domestic subjugation. These are the ones who have borne the cost of resistance in their flesh and in their daily bread.
The polished professionals, by contrast, are the most obedient of rule-followers. They are well adjusted to injustice, which is precisely why the system promotes them. Their assimilation into arrangements of hierarchy and domination is complete, and they are rewarded with salaries and prestige that shield their delusions from external, real-world disruption. Their bravest gestures of dissent are faint echoes of rebellion, whispered behind closed doors when they are certain no risk attends their words.
A muttered curse in the safety of a lounge is the limit of their defiance, carefully measured to leave their careers intact. But societies are not remade by those who have mastered the art of calculated complaint. History does not shift because a well-fed professional murmured discontent. It is shifted by those who put their conscience above their advancement, who accept that justice demands more than obedience dressed in the costume of rebellion.
Their delusion persists because their lives are so narrowly defined. They move within a small parameter of existence, insulated by money and by institutional recognition. These resources allow them to sustain the illusion that their contribution is decisive and their identity secure. Their bubbles are rarely cracked open, rarely ruptured by the full reality of human suffering. The cost of this insulation is that they lose sight of scale. They forget how small they are.
To remind them of their smallness is not to deny their learning. Knowledge has value, and disciplined study can illuminate. But knowledge that is wedded to hierarchy and divorced from solidarity becomes sterile. It becomes a mirror that reflects only itself. True wisdom comes when knowledge is placed back into the vast human context, when the scholar recognizes that her voice is but one among billions, and that the measure of her work is whether it serves justice, not whether it satisfies a hierarchy.
From a cosmic perspective, the hierarchies of academia and the stratifications of professions are as fragile and artificial as castles drawn in sand. The Earth has turned for billions of years without them. Stars have lived and died without caring who chaired which department or who led which hospital committee. What matters is whether, in the brief moment we are given, we use our intellect and our labor to lessen suffering and to resist oppression. That is the work of those who are truly free.
The lesson is simple: do not mistake your pond for the ocean. Do not confuse your title for truth. And do not assume that your obedience makes you strong. In the end, you are small. The question is whether you will let your smallness be in service to hierarchy or in service to humanity.