CONFIDENCE, COPING AND CULPABILITY

 CONFIDENCE, COPING AND CULPABILITY


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 12, 2013

Confidence, the question of confidence, who has it and who does not, weighs on the mind of the times. These are not only difficult times but confidence forms threads to a wider pattern of an intricate complex of subtly interconnected ideas rather than belonging to a singular framework.

Our sense of reality has taken a jolt. The richness and diversity of human experience with its endless variety and individuality of things and people has come to cross currents, often spiraling into despair in terms of social intercourse and personal relationships.

Self-regard and confusions of aims lies beneath the surface of public life often in chaotic detail concealing actual motivation and projected experience.

We long after some unitary truth that will altogether transcend our problems and the distractions that plague mundane existence. In the course of a century, we have departed from our spiritual anchors of family and church to scientism and commercial secularism blurring our boundaries and introducing us to an alien world with its new litany of what is important, significant and admirable. In the process, we have left ourselves behind and with it our confidence and control.

Laws divide us between science and Utopia, effectiveness and ineffectiveness in every sphere of our lives as we are now relegated to reason and observation in a scientific age. We are also governed in a discoverable direction, where our course has been plotted more or less precisely, as if we were a clock and our movements were synchronized with a future that had no past and could never find a home in the present. That is the legacy of the twentieth century.

We fail to shrink from killing millions of human beings against accepted beliefs as to what is feasible and right, against what is thought right, by the majority. To survive, our institutions in one sense have had to be more malleable and our laws more elastic then at any other point in our history. Yet, we have yet to decide whether our creative or destructive capacities are to prevail.

Human beings can be radically altered, re-educated, conditioned and turned topsy-turvy, and yet while this is all happening (as it is now), to act as if nothing has changed and everything is habitual and normal as it has always been. Our unconsciousness to the human condition led Aldous Huxley to write “Brave New World” and George Orwell to pen “1984,” alas, with little notable impact.

We have become skillful forgeries as if pieces of synthetic antiquarianism grafted onto our inescapably contemporary foundation. Our fixed habits, our framework of things, our persons, attitudes and ideas, our uncritical assumptions, and our unanalyzed beliefs, leave us in the void, supported only by our language.

We think in words, as I am doing here, but fail to realize that our language, with its symbolism is suffused with our basic attitudes and mistaken beliefs, and therefore represents a retreat from reality, a comfort zone that is tissue thin.

It is only when our nerves touch other nerves which lie deep within us that we feel what we are feeling, think what we are thinking, and are conscious of the electric shock of life and what is genuine and profound. Otherwise, we go through life robotically with nothing touching our innermost private and quintessential thoughts and feelings. When that happens, we become furniture of our external world.

“Confident Thinking” is a book written to bring about consciousness, to put us in charge, in control, to allow life to vibrate with energy, meaning and joy, to make us the most intimate instrument in life’s endeavors, to assist us to think, feel and behave as we would like to as human beings.

Do not confuse problem-seeking solutions with solutions themselves. Nor should you expect the problem solving to be acquainted in the most intimate terms with the deeply ingrained territory of the subconscious where most of life’s answers exists, but seldom surface. This is the terrain of novelists and speculative philosophers, the world of Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Nietzsche but not the world of H. G. Wells, Kant, Wittgenstein and Russell.

The aim of science is to note the number of similarities in the behavior of objects and to construct propositions of the greatest degree of generality from which the largest number of such uniformities can be logically deduced. For the novelist and philosopher it is just the opposite. Feelings and introspections do not lend themselves to the rigidity of mathematics, yet science separated from the human 'being' is most real in its unintended consequences.

The novelist and philosopher sets forth, in unintentionally biased language, habits and thoughts, ways of looking at things and reacting to them, talking about his and the experiences of others in ways too close to be arbitrarily discriminated and classified. He is limited, strictly speaking, to what he is aware of and can absorb as a picture of what he perceives is going on. This is what 'to understand' is largely about.

Language describing ordinary experience is employed in the opposite manner of closed scientific language. Feelings and impressions, which in human behavior are most often treated as facts, are integral to normal experience, amounting to the massive integration of data, too ephemeral and ubiquitous to be mounted on the pin of some narrow scientific principle or process.

Language, so used, is not meant to develop an unassailable principle but is intended to communicate relatively stable characteristics of an external world, which forms the frontier of our common experience in a life largely consisting of manipulations.

I am referring to that sensitive self-adjustment to what cannot be measured precisely or weighed exactly or fully described at all, that innate capacity that exists in every individual called imaginative insight, or intuition, at its highest point of genius to which everyone is endowed, being that individual's understanding of life. It is the distinction that exists, for us all, between wisdom and folly.

Confidence is a metaphor for the inflation and deflation that oscillates within human existence, wherein the imagination grows overly luxuriant at the expense of vigorous observation, while wisdom is based on ‘understanding,’ or discerning comprehension rather than simple knowledge.

We live in the age of the professional, where knowledge is power, and 'power' often gets lost in what can be done and what cannot be done. Since education is constructed on what has worked, or knowledge, there exists a rigidity and loyalty to the past. We see this in the failure of our institutions to change with the times, with education still as infallibly structured as if it were the nineteenth century with diplomas and degrees having more currency than what people can do.

Possessing confidence, there is an element of improvisation, of playing by ear, of being able to size up the situation, of knowing when to leap and when to remain still, for which there is no curriculum, no formula, no general recipe, no specific set of skills required in identifying specific situations as instances in which general laws can be substituted for initiative and imaginative intervention.

Confidence is the practical genius that differentiates learners from knowers, and listeners from tellers. It is the difference between people having a center they trust that governs their behavior and directs their actions, and others who lack the capacity for doing anything without a detailed prescription.

When we are on top of things, our parts are all working in harmony with the imaginative music of our souls vibrating with a cadence unique to us. We behave confidently because we are confident. We may not be able to explain it. We need not worry, it is like being able to ride a bike without being able to explain exactly how we can ride a bike or why we prefer the riding

IS THERE A CRISIS IN CONFIDENCE?

President Jimmy Carter got into trouble during his administration during a period of double dip unemployment and double dip inflation by telling the American people in a fireside chat reminiscent of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s during WWII, in a cardigan sweater no less, that we had a “crisis in confidence.” Whether correctly stated or not, the president’s popularity tumbled.

Recently, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a column on how Americans’ self-confidence had also pummeled.

Brooks had asked readers to respond to him on the question of their self-confidence. A mother wrote that she might as well have her vocal cords cut because her children want her to stay calm, talk nice to the point of not wasting their time. A military man claims women shut down women who are confident more than men do. Another woman, a business owner, claims that workers don’t want her to interfere with their dress or manners, much less their work, and prefer her to act as if invisible, blending into the world as passively as wallpaper, more like a lap dog than a border collie. Another person pronounces that all men and women suffer equally from “under-confidence.” Men bluff their way through while women choose to be skeptical and to look for advice or simply remain passive.

In each of these instances, the projection of undernourished personal confidence centered on the need to please others at the expense of pleasing ‘self,’ preferring the role of victim to that of victor.

Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts shows a different aspect of what happens when our confidence deserts us.

Pitts writes of Brenda Heist who showed up at the police station in Key West, Florida stating she was a missing person. Eleven years ago, when the bottom fell out of her marriage, and she was turned down for housing assistance, three strangers found her crying in a park and asked her to hitch a ride with them. From that moment forward, her existence went into a tailspin of pastiche alliances, petty crimes, panhandling, trailer parks, common law marriages, sleeping under bridges, and working as a housekeeper. This lifestyle was mirrored on her recent mug shot, measured against her old driver license photograph. She looked at least a decade older than her actual age.

Pitts believes everyone thinks at one time or another of running from life, but it is just that, the thought and not the act. Yet, tens of thousands of people do it every year. Brenda Heist daughter says her mother can rot in hell, her husband doesn’t want her back, and the saddest part of all, she is so damaged that she doesn’t want herself either. With confidence, we embrace our resistance to life’s challenges and soar over them, but with despair, we run away from life until life catches up with us.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, always one to look on the dour side of things, while not engaging this subject of confidence directly, implies its relevance by default. Her subject is sexual harassment citing a Pentagon study estimating that 26,000 men and women in the military were sexually assaulted in 2012. Only 3,374 incidents were reported, as the majority of victims were afraid to lose a paycheck, while only 238 assailants were convicted. Dowd employed her column to profile United States Air Force Colonel Jeffrey Krusinski accused of sexual battery. Krusinski, it so happens, is in charge of the sexual assault prevention programs for the U.S. Air Force.

Dowd bolstered her column against Krusinski by reminding us of the Thomas-Hill hearings, in which Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was Anita Hill’s boss, and was accused by her of vulgar and insinuating behavior while in his employ. Thomas at the time was the nation’s top enforcer of laws against workplace sexual harassment.

It may surprise the reader but the angels and demons of our nature are often revealed by what we claim to be vehemently against rather than for, taking on a hue that reveals our personal obsessions rather than our high-minded motivations. Be skeptical of the person who crusades against common human failings, because that person may be revealing more naked truth about herself and her biases than those she reproves.

Confidence is an enabling disposition, and as revealed in “Confident Thinking,” exposes culpable behavior for what it is, how it takes hold, and why those who seem the most in control and confident, are more likely out of control and victim to their demons.

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