The Myth of the Clever People: How the Great and Good Disappoint
Barack Obama’s advice: don’t be dazzled by the room. From Harvard to the G7, the “fancy title” crowd isn’t always as brilliant as you think. In academia and politics alike, prestige hides mediocrity.
Stack Polemics
It is the kind of advice that sounds simple, almost casual, until you sit with it and realize how deeply it cuts. “Do not let people think you do not belong,” Obama says. “Once you sit at these tables, with folks with fancy titles, and you talk to them, and you go, ‘oh, they ain’t all that.’ “
If you’ve ever crossed into one of those rooms—rooms that carry the weight of reputation—you know the sensation. You arrive expecting something electric: minds sharper than yours, voices steeped in knowledge and moral clarity, people who can see connections and truths you can’t yet see. You expect to come away changed. And then you listen. And after the speeches, the debates, the carefully staged exchanges, you find yourself thinking: Is that it?
Obama’s point is not just about disillusionment. It’s about stripping away the aura that surrounds certain rooms and the people who inhabit them. At Harvard, he says, you discover “it’s full of some fools” alongside its brilliant minds. In the U.S. Senate, you find the same ratio of the gifted and the inept. In the G7, in the United Nations—again, the same mixture. Prestige doesn’t refine the human material; it only concentrates it in certain places, and wraps it in a narrative of superiority. The real distinction is not raw ability, but exposure and confidence—the learned habit of believing you belong, of speaking as though your words carry weight simply because the room has told you they do.
I have seen this in academia more times than I can count. Behind the reputation of a department or the grandeur of a university name, the work is sustained by people whose talent varies as widely as in any other workplace. The machinery runs as much on self-preservation as on curiosity. Titles and committees become currency. Fluency in the institution’s language—its jargon, its rituals, its preferred forms of consensus—matters more than the capacity to ask the questions that unsettle the comfortable order. Bureaucracy dulls the edge of inquiry, and what could be bold becomes safe.
The danger is that the institution’s measures of success begin to shape your own. You find yourself counting the wrong things: not the clarity of your ideas or the integrity of your work, but the invitations you receive, the positions you’re offered, the proximity you’ve gained to people with “fancy titles.” And proximity can be intoxicating. The longer you sit at the table, the more it can seem like sitting there is the achievement itself.
But then you meet them—the exceptions. The people who are as sharp, as principled, as you had hoped when you first entered the room. They are not always the ones in the spotlight. Often, they stand at the edges. They speak plainly, without calculation, because they have nothing to lose by telling the truth. And when you find them, you realize that they are the reason to endure the rest of it.
The rest—the posturing, the false confidence, the careful cultivation of appearances—is only the scenery. Pleasant enough to notice, perhaps even instructive to study. But never the reason you came.
Transcript of Obama clip
“Do not let people think you do not belong. Once you sit at these tables, with folks with fancy titles, and you talk to them, and you go, ‘oh, they ain’t all that.’ This idea that they’re so special, they’re so smart, they’re so sophisticated, not really. They’ve been exposed. They’ve been given the confidence of feeling like they belong. But if you sit down and talk to them, turns out , uh uh. That’s my point. And the benefit for Michelle and me because we came up and each stage…you know…you go to Harvard and wow, it’s Harvard. And then you find out, oh Harvard is full of some fools, and people you would not put in charge of anything, but they’re there. And there’s some really brilliant, amazing people too. And then you go to the U.S., Senate, and everybody’s represented. Smart people. Dumb people. Good people and bad people. Now, suddenly, you’re meeting with a group of 7 world leaders are all in a room or the United Nations and nope, same thing. Turns out there’s some really smart, amazing world leaders and there’s some fools running countries.”
Complete Interview
References
Barack Obama, Barack Obama Shares Personal Stories & Experiences: Family, Leadership, Sports & Marriage, YouTube video, 1:34:25, posted by “The Pivot,” April 5, 2025,
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we kind of have the king of fools and a collection of elitely educated fools running things right now, to obama's point
I don't mean to denigrate anyone in particular but I find most of the "best" schools to have generated most of the most ignorant.
what is amazing is that somehow they do sometimes develop truly remarkable people.