The Problem With "Confidence"

These days the language we speak seems filled with usages for trivializing and dismissing the problems of the disadvantaged, above all when the disadvantaged speak up about them--like the accusations of "entitlement," "narcissism" and "self-pity" used to beat down expressions of what may be legitimate grievance on the part of those whom society has treated less well than it may have been obliged to do. In fact, this, rather than genuinely calling out the failing in those who really do have that failing, seems to me the principal use to which the word is put these days.

So does it go with "confidence." All you need to "succeed," they tell you, is "confidence." If you have "confidence" you will do just fine. If you lack "confidence" you will not. If you "succeeded" it was because you had "confidence," and if you "failed" it was because you did not have it.

This thinking, which is simple-minded in the extreme, not only slights hard material fact in favor of nonsense about "personal force"--plain and simple barbarous thinking, as Veblen knew. It threatens to reduce getting through life to a matter of striking stupid poses. And having done so it tells those who may never have a had a chance at all that they failed because they did not strike such poses often enough or correctly enough--rather than, perhaps, because of where they started out in life and how society distributes opportunity with regard to careers, or anything else--so that once again those tearing into them can have the satisfaction of snarling in their faces "You have no one to blame but yourself!" And the even more important satisfaction conformists so often take in deflecting what might have turned into a criticism of the status quo--especially when stinging those "life" has treated less well than they comes as a bonus.