confidence is no virtue
Dan Brooks takes on the hollow core at the heart of performative confidence:
Being confident is just a way to justify what you’re doing already. You can do anything, once you learn to believe that whatever you do is good. And I submit that people doing whatever is a huge problem in our society. Confidence is at the root of the worst social, political, and even existential problems of the 21st century.
The gospel of confidence has given us the social media influencer, the pickup artist, the improv comedian who mostly performs offstage. These people have weaponized confidence against strangers, hoping the self-deception they have cultivated will become contagious and trick other people, too. The galling thing about this kind of social confidence is that it is impersonal. The goal is not to seduce their crush or make their friends laugh; it’s to seduce women or make people laugh. Confidence is the virtue that turns every interpersonal relationship into a business plan.
There’s something entirely liberating about a person who has learned to believe in themselves for the first time, and something so gross about someone who believes they are better than you.
Two different types of confidence, I suppose. One which is rooted in truth, another which isn’t. The pride kind just manifests itself in confidence, in that bro-ey desire to control the interaction and explain your own life to you. You know you’d never have any trouble keeping that weight off if you just…
But take a person who has never believed they had a voice, a story worth sharing, and give them to confidence to participate, to know their life is of equal value as everyone else - that’s the confidence that we need to empower folks on the margins with.