Confidence is Criminal
I talked to one of my dearest friends the other day. Finally having occasion to break the seal on my emergency 1.75L bottle of rye whiskey, we ended up discussing her teacher-please-approve-of-me relationship with an institution in a community we both share, and I ended up rambling about she doesn't get what she wants because the institution (and a community on a whole) is designed to stay afloat by exchanging free labor for a social dreamscape that's inherently at tension with the decidedly competitive atmosphere and scarce roles available for only so many talented people willing to do their work for free. Specifically, this institution doesn't reward my friend because she doesn't quite perform either acceptable cultural role perfectly enough. She plays halfway between the fiendishly-optimistic-and-helpful-manic-pixie-dream-person who's willing to do ANYTHING if they can JUST. BE. INCLUDED. and the more aloof, incisive, critical and highly skilled and professional heavy hitter who gets called in to take care of The Big One yet also has enough social clout to freely criticize inefficiency, implicitly demand time and attention, and generally be a fully individuated identity in the context of an emergent, complex socioecono-environment that by design must reward one or the other.
(In case you couldn't tell, my friend and I like to get deep into each other's shit.)
While that's all very interesting in a "frustrating systems" way, my point was this: we project into the world our perceptions of ourselves in a way that other people inevitably perceive, including self-doubt or need for approval or the complete lack of giving a shit. Indeed, people on the whole are so full of self-doubt (I'm not excluding myself here) that we will glom like moths to those with the glim (holy shit did you know that glim is actually an archaic term for a candle or a lantern? I was trying to be stupid over here), glimmer and just take other people's word for it that they know what they're doing, so much so that they must know better than us, occasionally even causing weaker personalities in positions of power to yield to the glim's unearned confidence.
And make no mistake: confidence is always unearned, because both confidence and insecurity are apropos of nothing, often merely projections of psyche scripts embedded into us by early childhood and adolescent experiences with little bearing or utility on reality as adults. It's no accident that "con man" is short for "confidence man", nor is it an archetypal accident that "confidence man" was originally a term used sarcastically by New York Herald reporter Dr. James Houston to describe an ultimately bungling and incompetent fraudster that was misinterpreted as literal by the public, nor is it a cultural accident that the same culture that produces high-stakes high-status theft porn like Ocean's Eleven elected perhaps the most undeservingly confident man in American history to the country's top position of authority. But I digress.
So what do we do in a culture that celebrates a criminal level of confidence and punishes insecurity? Well, we become criminals.
Sometimes, Paul Hertz / James Usill
This is something I picked up early on in my tech career as I witnessed gargantuan companies be guided to agonizingly slow destruction by a few insightful-as-bricks with the confidence of superstars: if you want people to listen to you, act like you have the keys to the kingdom. And magically, you will. Of course, competence and success are simply incidental. Those who embody this are the types of people who generate their own reality distortion fields that have nothing to do with capability, your Steve Jobses and Billy McFarlands. The RDF effect is so powerful that you can drive the kingdom into the ground because nobody will question your authority until it's too late. And if you're a superstar confidence person (notably close to supernovas, exploding, dying stars) without the actual competence to back it up, you'll be wise enough to walk off with the stores of the treasure rooms first before it all erupts.
But for those of us who want to use confidence to just get by, there are immense learning opportunities to be taken from our psychopathic friends. If you can dial your expression of confidence into a tool that walks the subtle edge of infinite optimism with a precise amount of realism, something magical happens. It's not just the people we convince that change; we change. Vistas that were previously inaccessible suddenly open themselves to us, even if just in our minds. Things that previously seemed insurmountable are rendered perfectly doable so long as you continue to entertain the possibility of possibility. Indeed, I use my confidence to bolster myself and my friends, inspiring them with irresponsible encouragement and faith worthy of the DSM.
Don't get me wrong--I'm not saying this is easy. Metacognition and awareness of your own mental structure makes life more complicated; actively working to change the boundaries of your own self-perception makes life positively explosive. Indeed, that much possibility and potential is positively overwhelming and can lead to a unrecoverable case of self-delusion and (inaccurate) magical thinking. Walking the fine line of ourselves and our lives by our self-opinion is, in my opinion, the true art of life where the stakes are immeasurably high. Everything unfolds from this confidence (or lack thereof), as predictably and unchangeably as the deterministic unfolding of everything from the beginning of the Big Bang. That is, if you choose to believe in that determinism and the story it ordains for you (look Mom, I'm drawing parallels!).
Of course, the ultimate strategy is to have no opinion at all about possibility: people throughout history have accomplished absurd things that others rule out as impossible because they never bothered to wonder if they could. But this is a task born of nature, obsession, or an enlightenment far beyond the scope of this newsletter.
Anyway. More stuff!
don't touch me, ras.alhagve [nsfw insta]
More Stuff
GL!TCH.INTERNATIONAL FEATURE: Leah McLeod
Hello! This week's featured GL!TCH.INTERNATIONAL artist is Leah McLeod! Note: much of her work is usually NSFW or at the very least quite suggestive, so consider yourself warned (or encouraged).
Leah McLeod
Boston, USA
"I'm an artist and VJ from Boston, MA. Glitch art is my favorite to make currently. I'm inspired by the randomness and unexpectedness of the glitches, and just how trippy it is. To describe my work would be weird, raw, psychedelic, glitchy, confusing, erotic, interesting, beautiful, and silly.
I love how I can take an image from nature or a human body and destroy it in a way that makes it look like you're on psychedelics, or to take an image or video and make somebody feel something completely unexpected and confused- like " what am I looking at?" "am i turned on by this or scared?"
Instagram | Facebook | Patreon
Divination Not Guaranteed - tarot videos!
So in a sudden burst of possibility I started a channel on divination in general but starting with tarot called Divination Not Guaranteed! If you're interested in such topics, you might be into my channel which hopes to present both secular and intuitive (i.e. spooky) views on the tarot. Here are the two videos I've got so far on whether it's bad luck to buy yourself your first deck and if you should cleanse or charge a deck or not:
That's all, folks!
That's it. I love you. Please share me with a friend.