Seems to me this is kind of the opposite of impostor syndrome which is a kind of anxious humility in which we fear that everyone else is smarter and wiser than ourselves.
In the case you describe, you are divided between a suspicion that everyone else is an idiot (and you are wise) or that everybody is equally aware, but you've all learned to live the lie.
The absolute worst is when you do point something out, and people laugh and say, "haha! yeah it's always been like that! ha!"
Like - so we should do something about it, right? This thing that would dramatically improve our lives that is really obvious to everyone. Shouldn't we do it?
First time I went was a couple weeks ago. I noticed that they didn’t play with any out of bounds - whoever kicked it out, got to keep going with the ball. Made no sense.
I asked the organizer of the group about it. His reply? “We’ve been doing it like this for 10 years. That’s just how it is.”
I asked him if he personally enjoyed playing like that (him being the organizer for literally the last decade...)
He slowly turned and looked at me with a blank stare, as if he had never thought of it like that before. “No I don’t,” he said.
This goes back to hidden complexity. The answer is no. You should not "do something," you should do "the right thing." And figuring out what the right thing is, and staffing it through everyone that has some equity in the problem space, and taking their feedback to iterate over the solution, is immensely time-consuming -- maybe more time-consuming than just dealing with the less optimal system that more or less works.
> Seems to me this is kind of the opposite of impostor syndrome [...]
> you are divided between a suspicion that everyone else is an idiot [...]
Not at all: you can be painfully aware that 90% or even 99% of your peers are not that good and yet you are still light years away from being in the top 0.0001%. It's the same type of awareness.
Compare it with income only for the sake of having a numerical benchmark. With a salary of 32k$/year you are in the world top 1% yet you might feel you should be earning 100x that.
In such a case, let's imagine a programmer in a department of 100 people. I take that case because to me Impostor syndrome relates to a peer group that one is actively engaged with - not to an abstraction.
Anyway, in this case, he believes that 98 people in the office are no good. 1 is amazingly good. He is both better than the 98 but much much worse than the 1. To my mind that is not impostor syndrome.
In the case you describe, you are divided between a suspicion that everyone else is an idiot (and you are wise) or that everybody is equally aware, but you've all learned to live the lie.