There have been countless books written about confidence and how to get more of it. It’s a genuine concern for all of us at some time or another. We inevitably find ourselves confronted with a situation in which we are, for whatever reason, completely lacking in confidence to proceed in.
Fears abound us in modern-day society. We are no longer the commanders of our domain, like when we were hunter-gatherers. We rely on the actions of others for our material needs. We are cogs in the great machinery of society, a special skill developed to help turn the engine that drives our economies forward. We are also faced with situations completely removed from natural life. Public speaking is something the caveman never had to face, nor was intercontinental travel. But in this modern society, we overcame our resistance to other cultures and instead embraced them, shared them, all the while infusing ours into theirs. Ordinary people rose to the top ranks of large corporations through white-collar channels rather than battle and subterfuge. Men no longer hunted women in the same way as he might hunt a gazelle, but rather had to revert to conversation and dialog. He had to read a woman’s signals, then try to decypher what they mean. For the woman it is often just as strange, when men approach and speak nonsense in hope of impressing them, or entertain them all night unable to mouth the words of interest due to the social stigma of rejection. Or what of the countless number of people scared of the outdoors, of nature? Unable to fend for themselves, even in the most basic of natural scenarios, they would make their forefathers of only a few generations blush in their caskets. We no longer need to learn the skills of natural survival that were so essential just a century or two ago.
The fact is, we are incomplete people. We are only an element of an equation, entirely unbalanced in our efforts to fit in to modern society. We no longer seek to make ourselves the best in a wide range of endeavors, but rather to better one particular aspect of an endeavor in order to serve society better. As a whole, it makes for a better society, all the cogs working in harmony. But is it any wonder that the average person lacks confidence in a wide range of situations? We find ourselves living in a modern society with social rules and laws of manner and ettiquette, yet with biological programming identical to our spear weilding forefathers. We are conflicted, unbalanced and as a result, unconfident.
I don’t have a social answer to the larger problem, however I do have a solution to all those lacking confidence: act.
Confidence or rather, self-esteem is determined by your actions, not your thoughts. Those who are overly thoughtful, no doubt have heightened sensitivity to a whole range of topics, with increased knowledge and quite possibly the correct answer to many problems. But those who act, endear themselves with the confidence that the action brings forward into future situations.
In personal terms, conquering fear requires action. There aren’t any thoughts which can satisfactorily conquer it. Action with an external focus is the only way. External focus is important. Concentrate on the subject of your action, enjoy every part of the action, the process. Standing there on the verge of action, contemplating the result, be it success or failure, only serves to weaken confidence.
Constantly focus on things outside yourself. Let your emotions tell you how you feel, rather than analyze your own head. Act. Start small. Let that action lead to the next action, instilling confidence into the way you act, again and again. It will not always have the result you hope, but everything that happens will still give you the confidence you need for the next action because you did something. As soon as you act, you have more power than all the self-confidence boosting prop speeches gave you.
As for all the cog-in-the-wheel stuff, try not to let it bother you. Take up a new hobby. You’ll feel much better.
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An addendum. Eugenics has always been a dirty word, equated with Hitlerian aspirations of a ’super-race’. However, while reading the Wikipedia entry for Nikola Tesla, I noticed this interesting quote:
[...] man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct [...]. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.[ref]
I think Tesla was too optimistic of social trends. But it makes one wonder. Is the weakening of this mating instinct offset by the increased opportunities for meeting your potential mate that modern society affords? The question of who to mate with will still be programmed into us, to a degree, but how much this does or should play a role is highly debatable. As I discussed above, we have moved away from personal self-sufficiency and the pride that brings, toward a mutual interdependency and the material pride that brings. The result is a society which seeks personal happiness at any cost. When faced with one’s personal happiness over more perfect offspring, we might choose the former more readily. After all, the rule usually goes that whatever is lacking, people are more desperate to have. Poor people are thus more likely to steal and people lacking in self-worth more likely to scream “me! me! me!”.
So who would you choose? A person with a personality you like, or someone who was, eugenically speaking, a perfect match? Should that even be raised as a question?
The other side of the argument is that today’s society has moved away from the notion of physical strength. Functioning well in modern society requires superior mental ability, not pure physicality (sports men and women excepted). However is just as much a physical trait as strength, arising from superior cognitive functioning, rather than muscular.
Ethically, the whole issue is a slippery slope. While countries such as China have embarked on a program of sterilization for those with “genetic diseases of a serious nature” and even some mental health conditions. Canada had a program of eugenics which continued into the 1970s, as did other countries including my own, Australia. And surprisingly, the largest state-sponsored eugenics program behind Hitler’s was run by, you guessed it, the US of A.
Programs such as these are artificial attempts to restore the natural balance of society. Programs and policies such as Feminism, Taxation/Welfare or Economics seek to correct some failing of modern society through a set of imposed rules on it’s subjects. Yet social programs which instill their own criteria on social interaction easily circumvent human nature to suit their ends and leave society more imbalanced than ever, inevitably. I could talk about each of the above programs in detail as to why I feel they are unnatural, but I think this rant has gone on long enough.
Plus, I’m meant to be travelling, not philosophizing.
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