The Confidence Cult

Introduction

Nowadays, confidence is viewed as a crucial and empowering personal quality that everyone should work to possess. A recent example is the trending concept of body positivity which promotes a self-affirmation and self-appreciation of one’s physical body as beautiful. However, how much faith can be placed in the confidence framework in relieving contemporary anxiety and contradictions? In this essay, I will draw on Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill’s Confidence Culture and examine Forbes’ article “Body Confidence, Body Positivity And Self Esteem” as an example of confidence culture. I will argue that body positivity is a desperate search for existential meaning under alienation; it hinges on consumerist culture and ultimately fails to meaningfully alleviate anxiety as it promised.

The Spiritual and Social Confidence

If we take a step back from contemporary Western culture, it may seem odd that confidence is repeatedly preached as a universally desirable and beneficial characteristic. Indeed, in other cultures, the term confidence can even have a negative connotation—exemplified by the pejorative internet slang “average-yet-confident” in China. As Orgad and Gill explained, the obsession with confidence originated in the neoliberal capitalism that promotes individual entrepreneurial branding, where confidence is seen as a symbol of capability and success in the workplace (35).

However, what exactly is confidence to begin with? One crucial distinction needed to be made here is whether the confidence being discussed depends on the approval or success in the material environment. Through this lens, confidence can be divided into spiritual confidence and social confidence. On the surface, the self-help and self-affirmation philosophy of the confidence culture approximates the Buddhist philosophy of letting go of attachments (others’ judgments). However, contrary to the Buddhist attitude of receding into one’s spiritual world, the neoliberal and capitalist cultural foundation and the confidence culture it grows are outward, aggressive, and seeking secular success (over others). In addition, what can spiritual confidence look like? A biological and psychological sense of security, aggressiveness, and self-trusting? Or even just enough level of testosterone, dopamine, or serotonin? Then how can confidence be distinguished from arrogance, self-centeredness, and narcissism? If the difference is only in degree, not in kind, how is it proved that this person concerned (or the average persons) needs more confidence to achieve the ideal level rather than, say, need less confidence because they have already surpassed the ideal level? Therefore, spiritual confidence is very limited in its function and adequacy. It may be useful in hollowly comforting the social “losers,” like a few motivational quotes.

Therefore, to be influential, confidence must be social—materialized and specified. According to the Oxford Advanced American Dictionary, confidence is “the feeling that you can trust, believe in, and be sure about the abilities or good qualities of someone or something.” For example, when an experienced cook is confident in preparing a dish, the confidence comes from a probabilistic projection of the success of the cooking based on past experiences and practices. Meanwhile, the confident cook may be an unconfident painter due to the lack of expertise in the latter. Such confidence is social and is (1) particular, (2) dependent on the material world, and (3) usually dependent on others’ subjective approvals, given that most live in a secular society with frequent interactions with others. For reference, a clear example of social confidence is the assertiveness training back in the 1980s that was “arguably, more bounded in certain domains and less widely taken up — e.g., not institutionalized in workplaces or schools or advertising” (Orgad and Gill 12). Interestingly, when I googled the term social confidence, the first result was that “Social confidence is you KNOWING for a FACT that what you are about to do or are doing is not only completely acceptable, but it is totally desired by all parties involved” (Cullum). Such an interpretation also shows that meaningful confidence hinges on practices and factual responses.

Body Positivity as Confidence Culture

    However, if meaningful confidence has to be social confidence, why is the confidence discourse often framed in a general, spiritual, and personal (as opposed to objects-based) way? Like “be a confident man/woman”? I argue that, exemplified by the body positivity trend, the disguise of social confidence as spiritual confidence fits into the neoliberal consumerist culture of commodity fetishism. The disguise is two-fold: it first advertises spiritual confidence as an all-encompassing benefit for everyone in every situation (which was termed “the confidence imperative” by Orgad and Grill [1]); it then, out of the necessity of narrowing into social confidence to acquire meaningfulness as discussed in the previous section, materializes into advertisements for clothes and beauty products. Through this conceptual switch, it sells personal appearance products as universally desirable and indispensable, which thus becomes “the beauty imperative.”

To be fair, the body positivity movement originally started in the 1960s as one of the series of anti-fatness movements and was arguably before the emergence of the current confidence culture (Cleveland Clinic). But as Lizzo observed: “Body positivity, which at first was a form of protest for fat bodies and black women and has now become a trendy, commercialized thing. . . . Suddenly I’m mainstream” (Orgad and Gill 155)! To illustrate the logic of the current body positivity culture, I want to quote Forbes’ 2020 article “Body Confidence, Body Positivity And Self Esteem – The Complicated Truth Behind Instagram And Body Image Woes.” In the article, Forbes interviewed the body confidence photographer Mervyn Reid-Nelson. Mervyn claimed that “the consensus [on body confidence] is that it’s essentially challenging one’s self to accept (and eventually love) who you are today, just as you are, instead of the visceral need for ‘perfection.’” I want first to note the merit of body positivity. As Mervyn also explained, it challenges the “‘one size fits all’ basis to perfection” and offers more variety of beauty standards (which Orgad and Gill also noted in their critique of the Lean In Collection [21]). However, it still subscribes to the confidence-appearance binding and the importance of physical beauty standards. Therefore, it even demands one to love their body and appearance. As a Youtube comment illustrates: “I hate when I say ‘I don’t like my belly’ and a lot of people come to me saying “What are you talking about? You should love your body, there’s nothing wrong with you, you’re perfect” and I’m like “man I just said I don’t like some parts of my body, I’m not saying that I hate myself” (Francine). As psychologist Susan Albers explained: “Body positivity is a subset of toxic positivity…. Some feel that it blames people for how they feel based on their mindset. It can also push people into trying to feel something that they don’t” (Cleveland Clinic).

In addition, although body positivity rejects the notion of perfection, the real appearance pressure is commonly comparative rather than absolute. Most teenagers do not seek to be perfect anyway, they want to look better than others around them and acquire more favour. This logic of comparative winning is rooted in the capitalist ranking that necessitates the existence of losers (perhaps as the majority), be it on confidence, appearances, or entrepreneurial success (or all of them intertwined, as understood in the confidence culture). Sadly, body positivity cannot reject such a ranking system. When asked if people should aspire to body improvements, especially for health reasons, Mervyn responded: “Yes, make improvements, of course! But these improvements shouldn’t ideally be founded upon self-resentment or because you want ‘Sarah’s’ thighs… The goal is self-acceptance first and then improvement.” To be fair, this is a reasonable answer, and I do not have a better answer. But it also exposes the dilemma of body positivity: the initial self-affirmation of one’s physical beauty seems to be the ticket to the unending, exhausting, yet overall unwinnable beauty contest.

Body Neutrality and Function over Form

As Dr. Albers suggested: “Body positivity wouldn’t even be needed if we appreciated and found all bodies inherently beautiful. Society is reflective of what our culture and environments teach us to believe — to dislike our bodies for so many reasons” (Cleveland Clinic). So is there no escape from confidence culture and body positivity? I argue there is. The term body neutrality was popularized by the eating disorder specialist Anne Poirier in 2015, who defined body neutrality as “prioritizing the body’s function and what it can do rather than its appearance” (Cleveland Clinic). For example, we appreciate the intestines’ function of digesting, but we neither hate nor love the intestines because we feel neutral about them.

Appearance is a simple and external indicator of one’s overall health, which was much needed in the pre-modern context due to the lack of better measurements and the limitation of a person’s value to biological capabilities. But as society progresses, the importance of mental capacities significantly outweighs physical conditions and the function of appearances diminishes. However, although this is no new knowledge, why are people still so obsessed with appearances? I suggest that the failure to manifest higher values and acquire personal existential meaning downgrades creative minds to instinctual drives. Under the neoliberal society, the technological breakthrough in automation, the global labour regime, the division of labour, the commodification of relationships, and standardized and repetitive work schedules resulted in the alienation from one’s work, society, and life. At a time when individuals are unable to make sense of their personal values and meaning more than ever, the neoliberal culture refrains people from locating their values in the greater cooperative community and, on the contrary, interrogates and questions personal meaning as uniqueness even harder through the individual lens (reminds the diversification body positivity provides). Therefore, we witness the seemingly paradoxical post-modern primitivism, where meaninglessness pressures individuals to exploit their last and most basic biological value—appearances. Consequently, the form becomes the function: the body is not simply a person’s form, but the body does the person. It was like American slavery in that even the smartest Blacks had their values reduced to physical labour. Moreover, the economic stagnation, rising inequality, solidification of class, lack of opportunities, and the criminalization of sex work only magnify the psychological repression and alienation.

Conclusion

In this essay, I demonstrated that (1) the meaningful and influential application of confidence must be social; (2) body positivity as an example of confidence culture relies on consumerist purchases and social competition; (3) the public acceptance of body positivity over body neutrality is a regressive salvage of personal meaning under the alienation and meaninglessness in contemporary neoliberal society. It should also be noted that confidence culture and body positivity is the symptom rather than the disease and criticism of the confidence culture should seek primarily to improve the neoliberal, individualist, and repressive root.

—-Atlas, 2022.8.10

Works Cited

Cole, Binaca Miller. “Body Confidence, Body Positivity And Self Esteem – The Complicated Truth Behind Instagram And Body Image Woes.” Forbes, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/biancamillercole/2020/06/04/body-confidence-body-positivity-and-self-esteemthe-complicated-truth-behind-instagram-and-body-image-woes/?sh=d3ac8746a667

Cullum, Todd. “What is Social Confidence Anyway?” Medium, 2016, https://medium.com/@ToddCullum/what-is-social-confidence-anyway-8ca8f669d785

Francine, Isabella. Comment on The Body Positivity Movement Is Not So Positive Anymore…, Youtube, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGlbifiP4ig

Orgad, Shani, and Rosalind Gill. Confidence Culture. Duke University Press, 2022.

“Confidence.” Oxford Advanced American Dictionary, https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/confidence

“What’s the Difference Between Body Positivity and Body Neutrality?” Cleveland Clinic, 2022, https://health.clevelandclinic.org/body-positivity-vs-body-neutrality/