Confidence over Competence

I was always taught that if you don't know something that the best response is, "I don't know, but I'll look into it for you." And on the other hand, I've recently been told by my boss that I don't come across to the client with enough certitude about our solutions. I know enough to know that I don't know everything.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the crisis of too-much-confidence in our country and culture. It seeps into every corner of life, from business culture to politics.

Perhaps the greatest manifestation of this is George W. Bush, who didn't need to ask questions, get intelligence or see the other angle because of absolute confidence. Sarah Palin perhaps took this to such an extreme of Confidence over Competence that we'll pull back from this madness. When did confidence become the supreme virtue?

Well, here are a few words from a BBC news article, as well.

[L]ife's not like that and people know that. We know in our heart that it's not black and white ... and yet we pretend with the public that it's absolutely this policy and it will deliver what we want. Politics needs to change in that respect." But will it? Is it imaginable that a prime minister could stand up one day and say: "Look, I think this will work, and I'm going to give it a try, but frankly, I'm not sure."

Some parts of public life also function, less noisily, with subtlety and honesty about the real dilemmas. But we tend to hear less of them than the trumpet blasts of self-assurance. Is it the public that demands certainty, craving bedtime stories to help us sleep soundly rather than face up to the rather obvious fact that the future - and to some extent the present - is unknown? Or is it the fault of journalists who would rip into any minister who confessed to being unsure?

Some years ago, the former Archbishop of York John Hapgood suggested - with one eye on the politics of the time - that the lust for certainty could be a sin.