Confidence

by Rowland Manthorpe

  CONFIDENCE

  Rowland Manthorpe and Kirstin Smith

  ‘The last thing I would promise would be to “improve” mankind.

  I erect no new idols; let the old idols learn what it means to have legs of clay.’

  Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is

  Contents

  1 Losing It

  2 What It Is

  3 Instinct

  4 Nihilism

  5 Say Yes to Life

  6 How to Get It

  7 Become Yourself

  8 Style Your Character

  9 How Nietzsche Wrote

  10 Momentum

  11 Beyond Good and Evil

  12 Repression

  13 Will to Power

  14 Selfishness

  15 Greatness

  16 Overconfidence

  17 Higher Men

  18 Boom and Bust

  19 All Nietzscheans Now

  20 Confidence and Love

  21 A Philosophy of Confidence

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Authors

  1

  Losing It

  Before he died Nietzsche went mad. At the age of only forty-four he collapsed into insanity and never recovered. This is how it happened.

  It began with a series of letters. At first these messages, written to friends and occasional correspondents, appeared to convey good news. For the first time in his adult life, Nietzsche was completely happy. His work was going wonderfully. His health was good – no, in fact, it was perfect. ‘Everything comes easily to me,’ he wrote. In the mirror he looked ‘ten years younger’.

  Gradually, this elation turned into a kind of megalomania. In reality, Nietzsche was an impoverished philosopher known to no one but a small circle of friends (among whom not a few believed he should stop embarrassing himself and do something respectable). In his letters, however, he was ‘tremendously famous’, a superstar. ‘I exercise utter fascination on people,’ he confessed to an old friend. To his mother he confided, ‘They treat me like a little prince.’ As his state of mind deteriorated, he took to signing himself ‘Nietzsche Caesar’.

  That was at the end of 1888. On the morning of 3 January 1889, Nietzsche saw a cabman beating a horse in the street. Tears streaming down his face, he ran over and threw his arms round the animal’s neck, before collapsing on the ground. When he regained consciousness, Nietzsche was no longer himself; he sang and danced ecstatically and spoke in random bursts of thought. He continued to write letters, but now they were completely insane: ‘I am flinging the Pope in jail,’ he ranted. And it was these letters that caused his concerned correspondents to travel to see him, to find out if their friend really had lost his mind.

  At first he showed signs of improvement. ‘He recognised me immediately,’ reported a friend, ‘embraced and kissed me, was highly delighted to see me, and gave me his hand repeatedly as if unable to believe I was really there.’ But over the next few years he shrank into lifelessness. ‘Clearly he no longer suffers, no happiness or unhappiness,’ wrote a visitor in 1894. ‘In some terrible way he is “beyond” everything.’

  Nietzsche’s doctors diagnosed syphilis. Later scholars repeated this verdict – actually as a way of defending him against the accusation that his philosophy drove him mad – until it became part of the standard history. But aside from his headaches, which were most likely brought on by his bad eyesight, none of Nietzsche’s symptoms are the ones you’d expect for someone with syphilis. (He did manage to contract an STI during a rare sexual encounter as a student, but there is nothing to suggest it was anything more than gonorrhoea.) From the perspective of the twenty-first century, syphilis looks like a default diagnosis, the kind of thing doctors surmise when they don’t know what happened.

  Here’s what I think. Nietzsche’s philosophy did drive him mad. He wanted to be his own ideal, and his ideal was a never-ending state of confidence, a perpetual high-on-oneself. Nietzsche was a philosopher of confidence, the first and the best. He didn’t just write about confidence, he lived it too, through exhilarating highs and long, painful lows. In his determination to be confident, Nietzsche embraced his euphoria. Yet even as he shot up in his own estimation, the reality of his circumstances remained un-altered. The discrepancy between his ideals and his life became so great that his sanity could not sustain it.

  Nietzsche told himself he could handle it. That’s what confidence does: it tells you what you want to hear. You can do more, it whispers, and for a while it’s true, because when you’re confident, everything goes right. You’ve got a touch of magic. Risks seem less risky, and in a sense they are. You achieve, so naturally you believe – achieve, believe, achieve, believe, each time ratcheting up the level of risk, until belief exceeds the limits of achievement and the whole edifice comes crashing to the ground. It’s the process that causes a financial crisis – and it happens in people just the same. Boom and bust economy; boom and bust personality.

  Confidence lies to you. That is why you can’t trust it.

  The rain was stopping Ellie writing her dissertation. It dripped from the leak in the gutter onto the rotten wood of her windowsill: hard, heavy drips that sounded like someone knocking to come in. Ellie resolved to ignore it. She was lying in bed, laptop hot and wheezing on her chest like an asthmatic cat.

  Today was the first day of the final semester of Ellie’s final year of university. While everybody else went home over Easter, she had stayed at uni to finish her dissertation. Instead, her dissertation had finished her. She had . . . not a dissertation, but a mess, a disaster: thirty thousand words in infinitely nested folders, which at the beginning had been carefully filed with names like ‘1.5 (13 Feb 2008)’ but now went under the titles of ‘This shit’ and ‘The worst yet’.

  Ellie took a deep breath to calm her rising panic. There was no getting away from it. She had to admit she was feeling ‘down’, ‘really down’, more or less ‘desperate’, and was showing all the ‘symptoms’ of ‘depression’. She’d thought she’d be so much further on by the start of term. And she still had exams to revise for. But she couldn’t think about that. ‘Come on,’ she murmured. ‘Think. What is important?’

  That bloody drip. Her best friend, Rose, had given it a name: ‘Terence’, after their useless landlord, who’d promised so often to come round and fix it, and the bathroom window, and the mushrooms in Rose’s cupboard, it was as if he thought promising to do something was the same as actually doing it. Ellie opened up the email she had been mentally composing since the start of the year. ‘Dear Terence. You arsehole.’ Then she caught herself. She was wasting time – wasting time on something that she’d never send, that was sad and stupid anyway.

  Rose shuffled sleepily into Ellie’s room. Muttering darkly under her breath, she got into the bed, pulling the covers over her head.

  Ellie typed a word – ‘Nietzsche’ – hoping that by some untapped instinct or muscle memory, it would transform itself into a sentence. After all, she’d done so much reading, she’d taken so many notes, she’d never worked as hard at anything in her life. But it was as if she began each day on the ocean bed. It took every scrap of mental effort to reach the surface and gasp some air. And when, the next day, she saw the two or three suggestive half-sentences this effort had produced, it astonished her. It sent her into shutdown. At times she felt really quite mad.

  ‘Didn’t Nietzsche go mad?’ said Nadine, when she mentioned it.

  No wonder. It made you think. If his philosophy drove him mad, fascistic old bastard, what chance did she have?

  From under the covers came a muffled croak. ‘That fucking drip.’

  Ellie thought of things to say, but none of them seemed right. She wanted Rose to shut up, but at the same
time she was glad of the company.

  Rose lifted the cover to fix Ellie with a mascara-rimmed leer. ‘It’s Terence. He’s lonely.’ She spoke in time with the drip. ‘“Ellie, let me in. I’m wet for you.”’ She cackled.

  ‘Ugh.’

  ‘I told him. I said, “She’s taken. Justin doesn’t count, but there’s this dead German guy she’s been seeing. It’s kind of complicated, but they’ve got a special bond.”’

  ‘Don’t—’

  ‘God, don’t worry about Justin. He’ll get over it.’

  Ellie made a face – she had been worrying about Nietzsche. She was a truly rubbish girlfriend. She’d had a whole list of things to do over Easter – revise for exams, apply for jobs, read, jog, learn and then practise yoga, spend time with Justin – but it didn’t make sense to focus on anything else until the dissertation was done. She’d make time for Justin later.

  Rose wriggled her way up the bed, bones flashing just beneath her skin. Ellie saw, and then tried to forget, how thin she was. People – idiots – still said, ‘It’s just her build.’ Right, the anorexic build. Strangely, it was often the same idiots who pulled Ellie to one side to whisper, ‘You must be worried’ and ‘It’s so sad.’ It wasn’t sad, it was bullshit – infuriating, but totally normal. Rose would grow out of it. In the meantime, all Ellie could do was try and keep her temper while Rose took half an hour to slice and dice herself a lettuce leaf and low-fat cream-cheese sandwich, no bread. (Though if Rose asked her again in that cooing tone of voice if she’d had anything to eat, Ellie wasn’t sure she could be held responsible for her actions.)

  ‘Lean forward.’ Rose tugged at Ellie’s pillow. ‘And how is Friedrich this fine day?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it. Or maybe. I dunno.’

  ‘I thought you had fifteen thousand words already,’ said Rose doubtfully.

  ‘I do. It’s not.’ Ellie swallowed a burst of irrational rage. ‘It’s not a problem of words, or number of words.’ Rose didn’t get it. She didn’t think in paragraphs, or even in sentences. Her head was like a car boot sale: full of the thought equivalent of ‘collectible’ porcelain knick-knacks and cassette tapes, hidden masterpieces mixed in with weird old tat. ‘I honestly feel like I’m not going to finish this dissertation. After three crappy years I’m going to fail and the whole thing will have been a waste of time. It’s not like I care about having some amazing career, but, it’s my life, you know . . .’

  Spying something on the floor, Rose leapt up to grab a dust-filmed CD. ‘I told you this was here!’

  Rose didn’t like other people’s weaknesses. With a great effort of will, Ellie cracked a single laugh. ‘Even my misery is a cliché!’

  ‘Have you had anything to eat?’

  There was a long, dark silence.

  ‘Come on, let’s do something. Cinema! We could go to the cinema.’

  ‘I’ve got to work.’ Ellie wasn’t speaking right; her words were slurred. ‘I’m gonna go to the library.’ She made no move to get up: the thought of that desk in the library, her laptop wheezing away at her, the chaos of her thoughts countered only by the chasm of the internet, kept her pinned to the bed.

  ‘Fuck you then.’ Rose’s voice boomed in the tiny bedroom. ‘I’ve got to work myself anyway. But I will treat you to one drink at the Shackle first if you can spare the time.’

  Ellie knew by now the Shackleton Arms’s Cabernet Sickinyon didn’t help. ‘No. I should go straight there.’

  ‘Okay, you’re right.’ Rose put her hands on her hips. In her pyjamas, she looked about eleven years old. ‘Straight to the library via the Shackle.’

  Ellie gave in and tried to muster a smile.

  The drip dripped.

  ‘Sorry I’m such a boring bitch these days,’ said Ellie.

  ‘You are,’ nodded Rose. ‘You are.’

  Thinking about confidence is harder than it seems. Both in theory and in practice, it is hard to get a grip on. It’s undeniable, yet impossible to define. There’s something innately mysterious about it, more like magic than anything else.

  You know it when you see it, that’s for sure. Confidence is unmistakable: it comes off people like a smell (not necessarily a smell everybody likes). You know it when you feel it too. You’re completely at ease, natural and right in yourself. Your movements are so sure they could be preordained, but at the same time they are free and relaxed; you are loose yet also alert. Nietzsche put it beautifully: ‘A continual feeling that one is climbing stairs and at the same time resting on clouds.’

  It doesn’t matter whether you’re dancing, running, speaking, writing or thinking, when you feel like that, it is magical. Those moments are like a gift from some higher power, but at the same time they’re an expression of your true self, your best, most complete self. It’s a perfect moment, extending seemingly for ever – a sense of infinite potential and possibility.

  Maybe it’s fear of losing confidence that stops us focusing on it: there’s an almost superstitious belief that if you look confidence in the eye, it will disappear. I’ve wasted hours worrying about it – but I didn’t think. What is confidence? Why is it so important?

  Every aspect of life is conditioned by confidence: sex, work, socialising, sleep – everything from the way you dress to the way you stand. Even the economy is controlled by confidence: it’s the invisible force that makes the whole thing go round, what John Maynard Keynes called ‘animal spirits’. But although everyone agrees it’s indispensable, no one can say exactly what it is, or how to get it.

  Self-help books don’t help. They start with the assumption that confidence is the most precious thing in the world and everything in them follows from that premise. (It’s like reading a business book to find out about the true nature of money.) When you speak to professional psychologists, you get the same thing. You can’t even get a simple statement of what confidence is – it always turns out to be some version of: ‘Everybody thinks it’s important, so therefore it must be.’ I’m not saying they’re wrong, but it’s frustrating. If I’d never read Nietzsche, I wouldn’t have a clear idea of confidence at all.

  ‘My dad’s splitting up with his wife.’ Ben rolled the ping-pong ball around his palm. ‘So he kept wanting to take me out in Bristol and get shitfaced, which was incredibly depressing, and also annoying ’cause I was trying to do my dissertation.’ He launched a looping topspin serve. ‘Here’s some life advice: don’t become a single fifty-five-year-old who keeps making creepy remarks about Carol Vorderman.’

  ‘The wanking man’s think,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Exactly,’ Ben narrowly missed Charlie’s trickling dropshot. ‘In other news, I had an actual recurring nightmare about my Quaternary Palaeoenvironments exam.’ He shuddered. ‘You serve.’

  Charlie and Ben had followed a bunch of first years through the card-access doors of Paterson, their old halls. Despite its Changing Rooms-style makeover (seven years too late), the common room was still a perfect tragedy of the commons. A light snowfall of beanbag beans dusted the floor, the bags themselves piled in a corner, wrinkled and tired of life. Even so, Charlie felt strangely at home here. This was how he’d got to know Ben in first year: playing endless sets of table tennis, until they’d reached the point where they could just rally, passing the ball back and forth, with no end in sight.

  ‘Mine was a nightmare too.’ Charlie’s backhand waft sailed over the end of the table. He fingered his bat distractedly. ‘I’ve been thinking about breaking up with Sara – I mean I am breaking up with her. Now. As in, as soon as she gets back.’

  ‘Shit.’ Ben paused mid-serve. ‘But I thought you guys sorted it out.’

  ‘We did. I dunno!’ Charlie threw up his arms. ‘We had this big chat after Christmas about all our relationship problems, and it was good, and we agreed it was no one’s fault—’

  ‘You were all into each other at New Year—’

  ‘It was such a relief I’d got it out there, you know? But then . . .’ Charli
e nodded for Ben to serve. ‘You know when you get an essay back and it’s got loads of feedback and you think, “Okay, I really see how to put this right”?’

  ‘I always think that. Once I’ve stopped crying.’

  ‘Then you start the next essay and realise you know how to make the last one better, but you still don’t know how to write a good essay. You don’t actually have a clue . . . Oh crap’ – Charlie missed with a wild forehand. ‘And then you start to think: maybe the problem isn’t the essay, maybe the problem is the person writing it.’

  Ben grimaced. ‘Sounds serious. Luckily you’ve come to me with my dearth of experience.’

  ‘Experience only confuses things as far as I can tell. I mean, when I think about Becky.’ Charlie’s first (and only other) girlfriend, Becky, had been second oboe to Charlie’s third in the interschool youth orchestra. He had lost his virginity to her on an orchestra trip to Bordeaux in summer 2004. (Sometimes he still daydreamed about sitting through sunny rehearsals with a painful boner, miming along to the James Bond medley.) ‘Maybe it isn’t fair to compare, but when I think what that was like, it makes this feel kind of conscious and convenient and all about our little uni routines, you know? A bit like work. I mean, without the Commitment Craze – everyone suddenly in their little mini-marriages – I wonder if we would have got together at all. Christ, even ending it is work. Me and Becky split up ’cause she went to Aberystwyth – there wasn’t all this torturous deciding.’

  ‘Well . . .’ Ben served an easy opener and they settled into a predictable to and fro. ‘Maybe you’re overthinking it.’

  ‘This from Ben Redpath, who has to bring sandwiches because the lunchtime decision ruins his day.’

  ‘Nobody sells cheese and crisp sandwiches – there’s a business idea for you. All I’m saying is you like her. And I like her, for the record.’

  ‘Thanks. What kind of advice column is this?’

  ‘Well, I’m practically institutionalised,’ Ben shrugged apologetically. ‘I want everyone else to be in a relationship, so I can be sure they’re having just as boring a time as I am. But what happened – did something change your mind?’