From the library of The Peripatetic Philosopher:

CONFIDENCE, COPING AND CULPABILITY

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

© May 12, 2013

© August 28, 2015

REFERENCE:

This is a chapter out of a book now being written.

The question of confidence, who has it and who doesn’t, is revealed by an intricate complex of subtly interconnected emotional states forming a singular framework and approach to daily life.

Self-confidence has taken a jolt in recent times due in no small measure to an emerging climate of doubt and uncertainty.  Nothing is certain anymore if it ever was, but there once existed the hubris of imagined predictability. 

That has vanished with economic fluctuations, chronic national and international crises, verisimilitudes of gender issues, collapsing belief systems, while nobody seems to be in charge anywhere.  This has led to the cynical suggesting, “Stuff happens and then you die.”

 Misplaced is an appreciation for the richness and diversity of human experience with its endless variety of people, places and things as increasingly these have become cross currents with false expectations spiraling individuals and societies into despair: 

·       Terrorists took control of two commercial airliners and flew them into the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 innocent people and reducing these structures to rubble. 

·       In 2003, President George W. Bush launched a preemptive invasion of Iraq claiming Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which proved false.

·       In 2008, there was an economic meltdown on Wall Street with collapsing banks and brokerage houses, and a wave of bank failures across the globe threatening another Great Depression even worse than that of 1929.  The US Federal Government felt compelled to bailout businesses too “big to fail” with taxpayers’ money such as General Motors, Chrysler and Wall Street, an approach that was followed by European and Asian governments. 

·       In 2011, the Tōhoku (Japan) earthquake and tsunamin took nearly 16,000 lives destroying more than 120,000 building and half collapsing another 300,000. The Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said, "In the 65 years after the end of World War II, this is the toughest and the most difficult crisis for Japan." Around 4.4 million households in northeastern Japan were left without electricity and 1.5 million without water.

The tsunami caused nuclear accidents, primarily the level 7 meltdowns at three reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant complex with the evacuation affecting hundreds of thousands of residents.  At least three nuclear reactors suffered explosions due to hydrogen gas that had built up within their outer containment buildings after cooling system failure resulting from the loss of electrical power. Residents within a 12 mile radius of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant were evacuated.  The area today is little more than a death zone, uninhabited with questions of why it was allowed to happen.

·       The American withdrawal from Iraq in 2013 led to a civil war in that country.  That spun over into Syria and Turkey with ISSI, an al qaeda like group, declaring itself a new nation state taking hostages, beheading them, and further destabilizing the Middle East.

These and many other unexpected and equally wrenching events continue to occur while citizens in everyday life act as if unconscious of the impact on their personality. Yet that is improbable, given the high collective anxiety of society – murders, rapes, suicides and riots – and the high incidence of recreational drug abuse and stress related diseases.

We are in the Information Age and there are no secrets anymore.  Billions of souls across the globe have instant knowledge of any untoward or disruptive event, while social media find these same souls captive to their electronic mobiles.  These instruments have become the worry beads of the postmodern secular universe.

THE LONGING FOR STABILITY IN AN UNSTABLE WORLD

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 our routine 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 self-confidence and self-control.

Laws now divide us between science and Utopia, effectiveness and vanity.  In every domain of our lives, we have relegated our existence to reason and observation in a scientific age abandoning the contentment of the unknown and unknowable.

We are governed in an expected 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 with no need to find a home in the present. That is the legacy of the twentieth century.

We have limped into the twenty-first century bruised and beaten with accepted beliefs no longer considered relevant or feasible.  To survive in this climate of doubt, our institutions have had to be more malleable and our laws more elastic then at any other point in our history. Given this predicate, we have yet to decide whether our creative or destructive capacities are to prevail.

We as human beings can be radically altered, re-educated, reconditioned and turned topsy-turvy into something other than what we are or what we thought we were. 

Daniel Yankelovich writes in New Rules: Search for Self-Fulfillment in a World Upside Down (1981) that traditional ethics of self-denial and self-reliance are being replaced by self-indulgence in an effort to seek narcissistic self-fulfillment. In other words, there are no rules to point the way. 
  

Yankelovich is writing in the tradition of such cultural standards as David Riesman’s "The Lonely Crowd" (1950) and William H. Whyte’s "The Organization Man" (1950).  To be fair, he can’t be held to those 1950’s norm as the current age is much more muddled and upside down.

The traditional American credo: "I will work hard, defer my gratification, swallow my frustrations, love my spouse and family, and, in return. I will receive a steady and increasing income, a house in the suburbs, a loving family, and the respect of my community” is now committed to history. 

That post-WWII cliché was displayed with much confidence between 1945 (the triumphant end of that war) and 1975, when Japan and South East Asia quietly stole the manufacturing base of the United States. 

Wages since the 1980s have failed to appreciate, tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs have been lost forever, and the American dream and with it the formerly sacrosanct views of marriage and family, women's roles, work, and leisure time, money, and security have faded away.  We are truly in a new day.

That cultural shift came at a time when the United States was on route to double digit inflation and double digit unemployment.  At the moment, forty years later, the American economy is relatively stagnant.  Meanwhile, politicians, pundits and gurus continue to promote self-assertive psychologies insisting the future is in our hands. 

The future is actually hostage to failing schools, high illiteracy rates, and worthless high school and college diplomas and degrees when it comes to the new skill requirements on the job of a digital economy.  In addition, we have a crumbling infrastructure while commercial and industrial organizations and academic institutions act as if nothing has changed. 


Aldous Huxley attempted to stimulate our unconscious with the shock of Brave New World (1932) as he anticipated the impact on society of cloning, robotics and pharmaceuticals used to alter states of consciousness.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) attempted to alert us to the dangers of closed societies of totalitarian regimes with their invasive “Big Brother” watching us 24/7. Today, “Big Brother” is as obvious in democracies as oligarchies.  Likewise, Huxley’s prescription for disaster is now common fare everywhere.

We have become an obliging parody of ourselves as if a patch quilt of synthetic pieces grafted onto our collective free floating anxiety. Our fixed habits and uncritical assumptions leave us in the void, supported only by the frivolous language of psychological psychobabble or corporate speak.

We think in words, as I am doing here, but fail to realize language is suffused with irrelevant or clashing metaphors, and therefore representing a retreat from reality to an elaborate electronic counterfeit facsimile that we embrace with surreal delight. 

It is only when our nerves touch other nerves deep within us that we feel what we are feeling, think what we are thinking, and are conscious of the electric shock of what is genuine and germane. Otherwise, we go through life robotically with nothing touching our quintessential self. We become furniture of our external world.

TOWARDS A MORE CONSCIOUS SELF

Self-confidence requires self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-actualization.  Each requirement synergistically supports the other.  Together they put us in charge, in control.  It allows us to pulsate with energy, meaning and joy, as a satisfying medium in life’s endeavors.

In a pragmatic sense, confidence evolves from the problem solving, as problem solving is central to our sense of self.  Americans pride themselves in taking on and successfully dispatching such challenges.

Do not confuse defining the problem with problem-seeking solutions.  We inhabit a solution driven economy with little appetite for the hard work of problem defining.  Nor does this mean that the problem solver, in the best case, is well acquainted with his subconscious where most of answers reside, and therefore seldom surface. Problem solvers are not comfortable with this meditative process for it sounds too much like philosophy.

This is the terrain of novelists and speculative philosophers, the world of Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, of Nietzsche and Kant, but not of Wittgenstein and Russell.

The aim of science is to note the similarities in the behavior of objects and to construct propositions 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 rigors of mathematics, yet science separated from that most real world of the intuition can result in unintended negative consequences.  

Does anyone know where cloning, the use of drones, the forgiveness of self-indulgence with pharmaceutical palliatives, or the building of nuclear reactors will lead?   

The novelist sets forth subconsciously a somewhat biased ways of looking at people, places and things to exercise control over the landscape with a story.  Journalist Malcolm Muggeridge claims he can identify every one of Tolstoy’s characters in his novels as people in the great Russian’s life.  This lifting of the subconscious into a bevy of classic figures has found our conscious minds celebrating his works.  This is what it is 'to understand' is largely about.

Literary language describing ordinary experience is employed in an opposite manner to that of scientific language. Feelings and impressions are treated as facts and are integral to the story, but not so in science.  Massive amounts of data are reduced to verifiable facts, and proved to be true in a discrete scientific process.

Literary language, so used, is not meant to develop unassailable principles but to communicate relatively stable characteristics of an external world, which forms the frontiers of our common experience in a life largely consisting of external controls.

It is good that we have science but sensitive self-adjusting, self-adapting methods as well.  Obviously, this methodology cannot be measured precisely or weighed exactly or fully described at all.  It is necessary that the reader plug into it with the relevance of the story to his own life beyond being simply entertainment.

What I am saying here has only value if it has value to you, the reader.  Otherwise, it has no value and can be ignored.  Like Muggeridge’s comment about Tolstoy, my writing rises out of empirical experience and is as much a part of me, as I hope it will find connection with you. 

Confidence is metaphor for the fluctuations in experience that are our teachers, and which become the basis of our understanding of what works for us and what does not.  No one can teach or tell us this.  We must find it out for ourselves.

Unfortunately, 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. We trust experts more than our own experience. 

Since education is constructed on the basis of what has worked before, there is a rigid dependence and loyalty to the past.  We are asked to trust what we are taught, and when experience proves inconsistent with that learning, we are expected to adjust to that teaching.

That has proven a fatal flaw to the educational system as education has been reduced to an infallible construct rather than a learning institution.  Students leave with diplomas and degrees in miseducation.  They enter the workforce as educated but not necessarily educable. 

Confidence is the practical genius that differentiates learners from knowers, and listeners from tellers. It is the difference between people having a conscious self with a trusted center that governs their behavior, or a rationalization repertoire that apologizes for it.    

When we are on top of things, we behave confidently because we are confident. We may not be able to explain why we are so.  We just are. We need not worry, once acquired if is always there whatever the shock to the system.  It is like being able to ride a bike.  As soon as you learn, you may not be able to explain how it is done, but you know the skill is part of you.

IS THERE A CRISIS IN CONFIDENCE?

President Jimmy Carter got into trouble giving a “crisis in confidence” speech on July 15, 1979.  The nation was in an economic slump with double digit unemployment and inflation.  Inspired to use the phase by political scientist James MacGregor Burns, the speech was made in a style reminiscent of the fireside chats of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during WWII. 

The president was dressed casually in a cardigan sweater to suggest intimacy.  Unfortunately, the “crisis in confidence” speech found the president’s popularity tumbling.

Recently, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a column on how Americans’ self-confidence had also pummeled in this new century.  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, and 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 and ourselves 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.

Dowd’s 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.

The columnist profiled 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.

The angels and demons of our nature are often revealed by what we claim to be vehemently against rather than for.  Our angels take on the hue of our demons revealing our buried or secret personal obsessions, while presenting the persona of the high-minded person.

Ergo, be skeptical of the person who protests too much.  That person may be revealing more naked truths than he would care for you to know.

Confidence is an enabling disposition, and 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.