Confidence

Confidence is a trait that is highly regarded.  Merriam Webster defines it as follows: a feeling or consciousness of one's powers or of reliance on one's circumstances.  We are told that confidence is essential to success in life, indeed even to happiness.  A lack of confidence is seen as a failing, a weakness, and likely to lead to misfortune or at best, mediocrity.

But as I regard my own life, I am struck by how variable and ephemeral confidence is.  It comes and goes with surprising fickleness.  One can be supremely confident in the moment, imbued with almost limitless trust in oneself, then find soon thereafter that confidence has fled, leaving one hesitant and uncertain about a course of action.

I have experienced this in many aspects of my life, but perhaps most acutely in sports.  In my soccer career I was fortunate to have a good level of success, both in high school and college.  There were games where I felt like a superman, where almost every touch I made on the ball was clever and skillful, and goals came with surprising ease.  But a week later I could seem hapless, unable to generate much creativity or presence on the pitch.

What was clear was that confidence bred more confidence in a delightful acceleration, and that the loss of confidence became a downward spiral with similar dynamics.  It was easy to ride the upward march of confidence and quite difficult to stem its fall.

There were similar alternating flights of confidence and insecurity in my professional life. Sometimes I felt like a master of the universe, completely in control of a situation, meeting, project or task.  Other times I faced a crisis of confidence, feeling inadequate or enervated. 

Confidence can be cultivated and nurtured through effort – by practice, acquisition of skills, and other methods of creating a basis for it.  If we are industrious and work in good faith to increase our competencies, then a deserved increase in confidence will likely occur.  Confidence does not appear out of nowhere and a small measure of pride in having built it is not entirely unmerited, but we should be acutely aware that confidence also requires some measure of good fortune, opportunity or well-suited circumstances. 

Sometimes a loss of confidence is clearly a consequence of events outside of our control.  And similarly, a lucky confluence of good fortune may make our self-confidence soar and produce that euphoric sense that we are invincible.

There is a line in Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar that I find helpful in understanding the impact that some what random, external events can have on our confidence:  

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

It is a mark of immature vanity to believe that all of our confidence and accomplishments have been self-created and that we deserve sole credit.  We should all indulge in a bit of imposter syndrome now and then to keep our egos in check.  And we should always remind ourselves as we gaze upon those whose confidence has departed and whose fortunes have plummeted that ‘there but for the grace of God/fate go I’.

The Age of Multi-Impotency

When I was young, the cold war was underway and the threat of nuclear war hung over our heads like the sword of Damocles.  In elementary school at a naval base in Hawaii, we practiced walking to bomb shelters during the Cuban Missile Crisis and performing the absurdly useless ‘duck and cover’ maneuver.  At the time, I don’t recall being frightened or overly concerned.  I was a child.

As I got older, in the late 60’s and 70’s, the thought of nuclear war became less abstract to me and I began to seriously ponder the consequences and the probability of it occurring.  The potential consequences were, of course, catastrophic beyond comprehension.  

But as frightening as a nuclear holocaust seemed, the actual likelihood seemed very low (only later to discover that we came scarily close several times!).  And of course there was little or nothing I could do about it.  I felt impotent, but it didn’t really bother me that much.

What a difference a few decades make!  The world today offers up multiple nuclear holocaust types of scenarios, each with its own unique feeling of impotence.  There is global warming, artificial intelligence, growing authoritarianism and unilateralism, the new ultra-plutocracy, the loss of biodiversity, the proliferation of plastic pollution, and worst of all, the MAGA cult and its megalomaniacal leaders.

And while the probability of nuclear holocaust was perceived as rather low during the cold war, the twenty first century plagues are already inflicting massive damage on our world and clearly accelerating the march toward cataclysmic events.  

To feel impotent to impact an unlikely, though chilling, single scenario like nuclear war is one thing.  To regard so many encroaching perils and feel impotent to have any real impact on any one of them is almost insupportable.  The age of multi-impotency is upon us, and humanity hangs in the balance.

Missing the Point on Morality

A large motivational force behind the MAGA movement is the hysteria over the decline of so-called Christian values and morality.  Well intentioned people see the changes in sexual mores, the ubiquity of Internet pornography, the increase in single parent and non-traditional families, the acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage, abortions and drug use as signs of a catastrophic decay of societal morality.

They attribute this ‘decay’ to the decline in Christian affiliation and church attendance, and more generally, to left wing or liberal ideologies.  The historical association of communism with atheism is conflated with any left-leaning political inclination.  The fact that many mainline Christian denominations have embraced more liberal policies in the past is dismissed as corruption or naïveté.

The so-called ills that frighten the MAGA cult are complex societal or personal topics.  Sexuality, and all of its associated issues (sexual preference, pre-marital sex, abortion, pornography) have challenged societies for millennia.  There is no single set of moral codes that can resolve them.  

And if we are honest with ourselves, then we must confess that these primarily affect the individual, whether for good or for bad, and it is therefore up to each individual to decide what path to take as long as it does not directly harm others.

There are indeed moral failings in our society, but they have nothing to do with sexuality or substance addiction.  

It is a moral failing that we have so much wealth in our society yet there is no universal medical coverage.  

It is a moral failing that much of the world still languishes in desperate poverty and falls prey to famine and disease when other parts of the world have an embarrassment of riches.  

It is a moral failing that we spend so much of our resources on weapons.  

It is a moral failing that we continue to pollute the air and water, accelerate global warming with no effort to reduce it, and produce ever more plastic and other long-term contaminants.

It is a moral failing that we are more interested in throttling or preventing the immigration of desperate world citizens than in helping to solve the problems that cause this migration.

The fact that Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism have much more to say about these moral failings than the ones the MAGA world decries is apparently lost on these hyper religious doomsayers.  If there is to be a true ‘turning point’, then it would be the loving unification of the religious faithful with their humanist brethren to address the real moral failings and work toward a more moral world together.