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Confidence is the name of the book I’m writing. I found out just before Christmas that I’d got an advance from Bloomsbury and I quit my job the very next day. Now I’m working on Confidence full time, by which I mean from the moment I get up until the moment I feel tired just after lunch. I’ve got to get a first draft to my editor by mid-November.

In order to get an advance, I sent two chapters and an outline to publishers, via my agent, the irrepressible Charlie Viney. What’s below is the section of the outline I rather pretensiously called “the premise”. It’s a brief explanation of the main themes of the book, or at least the main themes as I saw them then.

Let me know your thoughts here.

THE PREMISE

“In my final year at university, I lost my confidence. I left it lying around for a moment; when I came back it was gone. This is the story of how I found it again”.

Confidence is the most precious thing in the world. It drives economies. It sustains nations. And, above all else, it makes the difference between personal success and failure.

Confidence is not a self-help book. Self-help is a genre dedicated to the worship of confidence. This book – owing more to history, literature and philosophy than it does to psychoanalysis – does not deal in unexamined dogmas. As so often, Nietzsche put it best. “The last thing I would promise would be to “improve” mankind”, he wrote. “I erect no new idols; let the old idols learn what it means to have legs of clay”.

We talk about confidence constantly. A surfeit of words disguises a shortage of conviction. We have very little idea what confidence is. We know what it can do for us – and we adore it for that. But this prized attribute is more sensed than understood.

Like “sanity”, “education” and “good character”, confidence’s appearance in conversation is usually a sign of uncertainty. “Consumer confidence” is the catchphrase of recessions. Political interest in “national confidence” follows a crisis like rain after thunder.

In private life, confidence is even more elusive. It comes and goes without warning, reliable only for its capacity to desert us just when we need it most. One day you are fine. The next the world seems without foundation, unmoored both physically and mentally. Without confidence, nothing seems stable. With it, life is pliable, yielding, plastic.

Confidence has not always been this important. As a word, it first came to use in the fifteenth century, when it meant trust or faith in things external to the self. It assumed its present most common meaning – and its social domination – far more recently. Pick up nineteenth century classics like Emma or Vanity Fair: books on what we think of as confidence never use the word. Their authors had no need of it.

The cult of confidence is intimately intertwined with the conditions of modernity. Philosophically, it follows the tendency to replace God with Man. The modern world has proved curiously devoid of things outside the self to believe in. Human will has instead taken centre stage. “Believe in yourself”: this is our First Commandment. “Be yourself”: that is our Second.

Confidence’s sovereignty is also sustained by late modernity’s material environment. The dissolution of traditional bonds and deferences drives an ideology of self-sufficiency. Late market capitalism renders the world liquid and susceptible to the will.

Born of these parents, confidence is an easy target. G. K. Chesterton was one of the first to recognise – and come to despise – its influence. “Believing in himself is one of the surest signs of a rotter”, he wrote in Orthodoxy. “Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness”.

Chesterton’s bluster disguises a deep sympathy for the condition. He lost his confidence at university. His extreme remedy – an eccentric mix of Catholicism and antiquarianism – showed just how hard it is to escape from its clutches. It is not just that confidence confers success. It has become critical to our very well-being.

Some people might not see the problem with this. But confidence is not an unmixed blessing. Believing in yourself is a strange thing to do, as Chesterton pointed out – one with strange results. The pursuit of confidence in financial markets collapses under its own contradictions. Are we witnessing the creation of the boom-bust personality?

Nobody should be rash enough to say they know all about confidence. It is something we can only approach through personal experience. In this centaur, this mongrel of a book, I try to do that.

Confidence is a book about confidence. It is also a book about me. Nietzsche proclaimed his ability to turn graven stone into rotten clay. Hopefully this book reflects the modesty of personal experience. Believing in yourself is important. But for those who know themselves, the damp tread of clay feet accompanies every turn.

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