Humility and confidence are two names for the same thing

Alright, phoning it in a bit on my "daily post" challenge today. Here's a cross-post of something I put on Substack a few weeks ago:

Here is something that took me a while to realize: humility and confidence are two names for the same thing. This might sound strange, but let me explain.

According to Aristotle, every virtue is a middle ground between two extremes. Courage is the opposite of cowardice, but also of reckless stupidity. Generosity is the opposite of stinginess, but also of financial irresponsibility. Self-restraint is the opposite of self-indulgence, but also of not knowing how to enjoy yourself. Every virtue has two opposites, not just one. And they all lie on a spectrum of personality traits: Courage, cowardice, and recklessness, for example, are all points on a spectrum of willingness to face risk. Cowardice is a deficiency in risk-tolerance, and recklessness is an excess.

But now we have a puzzle. Humility and confidence are both virtues. But they seem like they could be opposites of each other. So what gives?

Let’s think about what the corresponding vices would be. The opposite of humility seems like it would be arrogance. And the opposite of confidence would be something like insecurity (or self-doubt, or low self-esteem). But we just saw that virtues have two opposing vices, and they lie on a spectrum. So what are the other vices for each of these virtues, and what spectrum do they lie on?

For humility, arrogance is the vice of excess, and it’s something like “thinking too highly of yourself.” So the vice of deficiency would be “thinking too lowly of yourself.” And that’s basically insecurity. And for confidence, insecurity is the vice of deficiency, and again, it’s on the spectrum of how well you think of yourself. So the two extreme vices on this spectrum are “arrogance” and “insecurity,” and “humility” and “confidence” turn out to be two names for the optimal point along this spectrum, depending on which opposing vice you want to make salient.

I personally find it easier to keep in mind the dangers of arrogance than the dangers of insecurity. The dangers of arrogance are that, when you think too highly of yourself, you will be likely to disparage others in contrast, and to make mistakes because you dismiss people and don’t accept their criticism, or because you simply don’t consider that you could be wrong.

On the other hand, the dangers of insecurity are that you will always crave the approval of others, and potentially be motivated to do things you shouldn’t in order to get it. You might also get defensive, and refuse to accept criticism because it triggers your insecurity.

Confidence, on the other hand, allows you to give yourself the approval and affirmation you need in order to feel good about yourself, while at the same time allowing you to be secure enough to honestly accept criticism, and not put others down to make yourself feel better.

(The same ideas apply to epistemic humility/confidence as well. It’s possible to be too confident in your own conclusions—Bertrand Russel wrote that “If only men could be brought into a tentatively agnostic frame of mind about [religious and political] matters, nine-tenths of the evils of the modern world would be cured!”—but it’s also possible to be too doubtful, to the point of paralysis—this is the danger of skepticism.)

The humility framing emphasizes not needing to feel or appear superior to other people. The confidence framing emphasizes having a sense of self-worth, and not needing others approval. But these are two sides of the same coin: if you have a sense of self-worth, then you won’t need to feel superior to others in order to make yourself feel better. And if you don’t have a need to feel superior to others, then looking worse than others won’t damage your sense of self-worth. The two go hand-in-hand.

A really good example to illustrate how confidence and humility are the same virtue is Uncle Iroh from Avatar: The Last Airbender (spoilers for a 20-year-old show). Throughout the show, he is shown not to hold himself above others (the mark of humility). In the early show especially, he acts the fool quite often, being concerned with seemingly trivial things like games and tea, which gets in the way of Zuko’s quest to capture the avatar. But later we see that he’s both wise and competent, so this earlier foolishness is an act—designed to keep him close to Zuko without appearing too threatening, so that he can subtly nudge Zuko onto a better path. He is willing to act the fool, because he has no need to feel or appear superior to others. He knows his own worth, so masking it is no threat to him. This is shown even more starkly later in the show. When he is put in prison by the Fire Nation, he pretends to be a crazy old man to the guard, while secretly preparing for his escape. He doesn’t need the guard’s approval—he is confident in himself.