The principle of paradoxical confidence is, constrasting with real confidence, the level of belief and trust we place in someone on the basis of their failure or their absence of qualities. All those prophets firmly, yet mistakenly, predicting the end of the world fall under this principle.
Six years after the 'audacity of hope' swept America to elect Barack Obama in an unprecedented blizzard of hyperbolic fervour and expectation, followed by his epiphenomenal receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, it is this principle of paradoxical confidence that perhaps best surmises people's attitudes towards the President today.
His annual State of the Union address to Congress this week was filled with all the hallmarks of Obama's presidential tenure. He is still a charismatic orator, still made proclamations regarding inequality and fairness for all; and yet in 2014 it is now sadly impossible to view him as being anything other than a media-friendly stooge wound up behind the scenes like a battery-powered toy by lobbyists, private financiers and security advisers.
His Address was engorged with the habitual platitudes and bland rhetoric that one is now almost capable of telepathically voicing along with him: 'the United States is better-positioned for the 21st century than any other nation on Earth', 'let's make this a year of action', and (my particular favourite bit of whimsical plumage) 'through hard work and responsibility we can pursue our individual dreams, but still come together as one American family to make sure the next generation can pursue its dreams as well'.
The thing is, I don't doubt Obama's sincerity, and I understand the fact of his near-total Congressional hobbling at Republican hands. But this cannot excuse absolutely the many issues over which has abjectly failed. He campaigned on the promise to close Guantanamo Bay (it is still open and operational); he campaigned championing the cause of whistleblowers (he has overseen more whistleblower prosecutions than the sum total of all past Presidents); his Obamacare website roll-out was a shambolic failure that has resulted in a widespread loss of civilian confidence in the inherent benefits it may well offer them; he made a pledge to tackle head-on America's arcane gun laws after the Newtown massacre (when was the last time you heard anything about that?); his environmental record is negligible save from promoting the US's oil and gas self-sufficiency. Not to mention his perpetuating stance on America's foreign wars, numerous drone attacks on those residing on his personal 'kill list', and continuing to stand by the NSA's colossal spying programme, doing little more than attempting to mollify the public with reformist vagaries.
What all of these poor performance indicators demonstrate is less a measure of Obama in and of themselves, but emphasise the desperate need for some kind of electro-convulsive shock therapy to be administered to the somnolent body of American politics. The fact that you have to be saddled with a President as artificial and insubstantial as Obama for two terms only because he is easily preferable to the oleaginous salesman Mitt Romney, is a stark indictment of America's democratic system as a whole, wherein any semblance of political power is a front for the market capitalist and big business lobbyists that paid to put them in office in the first place.
One modicum of hope may lie in the fact that Obama seemed to suggest he would use his presidential veto to enact some of his policy proposals, in the process trying to haul his current non-legacy out of the dustbin of disappointment. But then, such hope is surely just another stab of paradoxical confidence?
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This week I became aware of new plans that, so far, seem to be rumbling on with very little in the way of media attention. A new NHS scheme 'care.data' aims to expand the mass accumulation of patients' medical information under the auspices of being able to efficiently react and plan for advanced scientific research and projections through having a nationwide overview of every civilians' medical files.
Once again, we can read this as being another far-reaching invasion of privacy, just like the NSA and GCHQ, in which colossal quotas of information are trawled up in the state's dragnet under the promise that 'don't worry, this is good for you' as though it were some kind of harmless vaccination. In actual fact, the possible ramifications are manifold, nefarious and, in this particular instance, represent another flagrant attempt at commercialised amputation of the NHS anatomy on the part of the Tories.
For a start, the claims on patient anonymity are vague at best; what would be the impact if all or any of this data were to be hacked?; and what if, slowly but surely, the whole exercise became a mass marketing exercise for drug companies and insurance firms (something, incidentally, that the architects of this scheme have made no effort to officially rule out)?
My feeling is that before long we will all no longer care anymore; our notions of privacy in this increasingly online digital world are steadily eroding away to the point where the instinct to safeguard our personal information may not even be manifest anymore. A friend of mine thinks it will go the other way and younger generations will all become more security conscious and responsible. I have a feeling that it will firmly lean one way or the other, there won't be a middle ground.
Having recently been reading Anarchist theories (hello to you all at GCHQ), I was struck by one theory of Saint Simon: 'the time will come when the art of governing men will disappear. A new art will take its place, the art of administering things'. Perhaps, governing power will eventually fade into the background to be replaced by the power and influence of 'big data', the constant accumulation of everything that can possibly be known about everyone, because then it will be known exactly what we all really want and need.
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