Our Natural Attitude Is One of Confidence
In general, people in the world have no confidence operating. The oppression has driven almost everyone’s confidence underground. Within the main society there is no confidence. Anywhere. There is pseudo-confidence. The oppressors, the people in oppressive positions, continually sound confident. The people who write the newspaper headlines sound confident. They say, “It’s obvious that nothing progressive will ever work. Once again it has been proved that the progressives are wrong about everything.” This is pseudo-confidence. The only people who even sound confident, in general, are the oppressors, and, of course, they feel terrible and go out and get drunk afterward.
We are in a position to get the timidity patterns, the unconfident patterns, off of ourselves. I would like to raise this issue sharply before you, for you to make it a key project to get the timidity patterns off of ourselves. They’re just patterns. Our natural attitude is one of confidence. Those of you who’ve seen happy very young children know that they are confident. So we must possess that confidence. It must only be covered over with distress. If we dig out our confidence—simply discharge the fear occluding it, or do whatever else it takes—we’ll be in a position to just keep sounding positive notes. I think we will lead large numbers of people very quickly.
Harvey Jackins
From pages 86 to 87
of A Better World