Count me as one of them...actually count me in as a distinguished member of this club, maybe even the president, as no one has bothered to publish any of my universe altering ideas yet. For me it is a form of schizophrenic ego trip existence, but in a good way...Let me explain:
Let’s say you’re an ordinary person who has some interest in a topic, has formulated a proposal on it, and goes and enrols on a PhD course. The moment you put your signature on that acceptance paper something happens...or to be more precise regarding modern academia, the moment you part with your hard-earned cash down at the finance office, something happens.
You are no longer that ordinary guy with a healthy dose of agoraphobia, going down the bakery to buy some bread...Ye are God’s gift to mankind’s collective intellect. Your bread buying self might read Foucault and gasp in awe, your PhD self thinks he must have missed a couple of points, and you are the one to find out what these points are. In other words, you become a walking delusion of intellectual grandeur... I am not sure if this is healthy or not, but that is the general feeling I see myself getting.
A couple of weeks in the PhD I handed out my first pile of scribblings to my supervisor, (my supervisor is a modern-day Socrates, and in a Socratic way he lets me see my own errors without ever saying "What is this junk? Why am I reading this?"). The main point that stuck with me from the resulting feedback, (mind you, I also have a selective memory), is that my writings come across as too reserved. There were too many "...I think", "...If the kind reader allows me", "...maybe" and so on. In retrospect all these references to the kind reader must have stuck with me from a childhood diet of Dostoevsky... I like Dosto...He has a way of finding elegance and finesse even in the most wretched existence.
Anyway, back to our topic...It is not that once you get a PhD researcher status your knowledge increases automatically. It is the simple fact that you find yourself in one of the very few opportunities at truly free existence. It is almost like the textbook definition of liminality. Your supervisor is the master of ceremonies; lifting the rules that apply to everyone else, and giving you the space and freedom to become. Academia becomes your magic circle.
Here I made a beach sand illustration to give an added voodoo vibe to my point! The formation of rocks is the liminal person in the magic circle...The one with the twig hands is the master of ceremonies, and surely you have not missed the rules of existence being those wavy lines held outside the circle.
You have a couple of years that people will listen to you...They might reject you, but you will be given what has sadly become a privilege in day to day life: free speech and free choice. You will also surprise yourself by the level of responsibility you will feel towards what you say. It is because in becoming this liminal entity, you answer to a higher plane. Therefore, when you say, or rather write something, you will make sure that what you write is what it is. There can be no doubt in what you uncover, there can be no maybe to what you reveal, the reader is not reading you out of kindness...
And to be honest, I do not believe you do research to answer a question that you have, much like I don't believe that reading a book, academic or not offers anything new. It is only a matter of verification and uncovering. You know what the answer to the question is, you have seen it...A big part of the PhD for me is to be given the space so that i will be able to touch the answer inside me...The research bit is just how to communicate it to others in a way that it cannot be doubted. Let’s say you're a neuroscientist scaring lab rats and then waiting to see if they have nightmares...Well you already know that they are going to have nightmares....You've worked hard so that you know what to expect...You're simply scaring them so you can go to your peers and say: Look: nightmares! I told you so!!!
...I am sure this post will not go down well in my next progression meeting, but what do they know...I am the liminal one...