I’m a big fan of the Proust Questionnaire that runs in Vanity Fair each month, and I was wondering if you’d answer one of the questions for me. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Christopher Alexander

Dear Mr. Alexander:

This one is easy.

Confidence.

Only assholes are confident. At a certain point in your life, likely when you yourself were an asshole but only suspected rather than knew it (think your 20s), confidence probably seemed like the cardinal virtue. It was the one thing you truly wanted to have, what you hoped beamed out of your eyes like James Bond sex lasers.

For most, confidence is just another manifestation of bullying. It lacks generosity and usually ends up being a self-referential imposition thrust upon the unwelcoming– like an unbidden boner at a dance class.

Don’t get me wrong, self-assurance is good, it’s inward, but confidence needs an audience, and that audience has to be subordinate. The gift of intelligence, for instance, is to help all those around you feel smarter about themselves, not stupider. The confident person, the one so determined to lead, to write the year’s most decorated novel, get a prestigious teaching position and then marry a headstrong and winsome PhD candidate from old money, all the while snickering at the small humourists working on the margins, never sees this. The confident person wants to win, and there can be no winning unless there is also losing. They solve your problems quickly, mathematically, rather than talk to you about them. They wear sunglasses at stupid times. They are crippled and broken inside and you should throw rocks at their BMWs, for that is always, always, their car of choice.

And the holy ones who ride bicycles are even worse.

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