The Voice of Authority, or, the Authoritative Voice

I learned a valuable lesson yesterday about confidence.

As it turns out, when you are unsure of yourself, it shows. When you think that you are right, even despite evidence to the contrary, people believe you. Or rather, if you have that certain ‘je ne sais quoi’, they believe in you. And once someone believes in you, it’s very hard to dissuade them. (Just look at the Bush 2 presidency for evidence of this phenomena.)

It’s all about perception, baby, and don’t you ever forget it.

If you think that I am an ‘expert’, then you will believe whatever I have to say. Especially if it’s couched in language you don’t understand, and/or about a topic that is difficult – like genetics, or philosophy. That is the only thing that can reasonably explain the popular appeal of statements like the following in academia:

Does anthropology abide in humanity and if so what type of shelter is this abode and from what is the discipline and discourse sheltered from? Can there be an anti-anthropology of humanity, a de-anthropologizing of the human, and one that might not be an anti-ethnography? This raises the question of inhumanization, by which I mean, not the maltreatment of humanity, but rather, the insulation and auto-immunization of specific norms of the human or the anthropocentric through expulsive definitions of humanity’s negations, alters, others and antagonists—all that which lacks humanity and signifies the human in their lack. I will explore the interdependency of humanization/dehumanization/nonhuman as elements of a unified power/knowledge apparatus of inhumanization—a prophylactic instituting of the human through emblematic negativity.

Or the appeal of this type of circular logic in politics:

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

How can you argue with either of those statements? You can’t. You just can’t. Unless, of course, you happen to speak in a codified language that supports this type of theoretico-speak.

It is essential to use the ‘authoritative voice’ in order to become the ‘voice of authority’. I don’t know why I ever doubted it before, or didn’t see it more clearly. It’s so obvious.

My problem is that I have no confidence. Or, to use the passive voice to underscore the point, confidence is lacking in me. This will not do in my chosen field of work. Or any field of work, really. Can you imagine a doctor coming into the examination room and admitting that he didn’t absolutely know what he was doing, that he was going to ‘wing it’? You’d be out of there faster than your paper examination vest tore open.

So, from now on, I will try to use the authoritative voice. I will hopefully become the expert. And then, if I’m really, really lucky, I’ll find a great job later.