Appeals to confidence are regularly bandied about in the public sphere.
Sports teams win or lose because they either have confidence in abundance or are low on it; prime ministers lose their jobs because of it; statisticians estimate it and their suppositions then form policy in health, education and science.
The latter meaning is an artefact of not being able to predict the outcomes of chaotic systems with absolute precision - far more often than not, a molecule of drug x will bind to its specific and intended neuroreceptor, and antagonise in the prescribed manner. We can't predict specific cases on an ad-hoc basis, but 95 per cent of the time, it's expected to do so.
This is confidence in a technical and specific sense. Its everyday useage is more interesting and accessible to your author.
What does it mean for the prime minister to be denounced in a vote of no confidence? The cabinet and backbench of the ruling party are in effect saying; "At some point in the past, you were able to carry out your duties to an acceptable level. That point has been and gone. You are now inept, incompetent and cumbersome."
'Everyday confidence' is therefore the ability to carry out what is expected of you. In my own mind, and in the minds of those around me, I am able to do whatever is required of me. We are dealing with a euphemism that is also an excuse - the team failing to win because they lack confidence equates to them being unable to perform the tasks required of them due to incomptence, boredom, lack of concentration, mutiny etc.
Confidence is ultimately chimerical, and melts away into a list of tasks to be either completed or not once subjected to a sustained period of thought. I'm not confident that this blog entry will be up to the standards I wish for, because I lack the technical, linguistic and intellectual tools to make it so.
Until those challenges are overcome, I can make the excuse that I lack confidence ad nauseum.
If I lack the motivation, interest or talent to acquire them, then whatever 'confidence' remains will plummet until there is none left.
Incidentally, what abacus is used for measuring the amount of confidence left in the body? A 5.5/10 at this very moment might equate to a 3/10 when I am in an unhappy state of mind, or laid low with a virus, and a 7/10 when the sun is reflecting off the newly-opened cage of my mind, where thoughts dance randomly, untethered.
Again, once subjected to too much thought, the whole concept crumbles to dust, and we are left with one single aphorism: either do or do not.
