Unfortunately, we often trust confidence intrinsically. We like it when people speak up, when they make direct eye contact, when they shake firmly, and when they stand behind their assertions. The problem is that confidence doesn't beget truth, and that someone can be good at the confidence game but terribly wrong about the subject at hand.
This gets deeper, though, because it is true that a lot of the things we're personally confident about are things we're emotionally supportive of, which means that we can fool ourselves into thinking we're right, when in fact we're very wrong, instead we sit emotionally invested in our wrongness. We really want to believe that what we believe is right. The latest diet, the latest partner, the latest career move. We crave certainty like we crave release, and in a way it does provide release. A productive self-examined life isn't a very fun life. At least not in the short term.
Personally, I've always had a tendency to essentialize some schema onto the world around me and decide that it was the most irreducible structure of relations, or motivations, or [name your phenomena], but I've been wrong more than I've been right, and if I'd have been more flexible in the past, I'd have suffered less--or been productive more. I hope. If it is just irrelevant whether I've been wrong or right, well, then I can see how meaningless life could get, how one might want to manufacture confidence for the sake of certainty, how it could be easy to repeat phrases to try to get a hold or lose a hold or just exist without the torment for a few moments. I don't want to intuit answers though. I want to know them. Beware.
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