To confirm, or not to confirm
Have you ever asked someone to “confirm” their email address or “confirm” their telephone number?
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Have you ever asked someone to “confirm” something?
Or maybe you’ve been asked to “confirm” whether or not you finished a task at work? (This one especially gives me the ick!)
The word “confirm“ is firmly embedded in online culture, at workplaces and in public communications. Luckily, it hasn’t really made it into spoken language. Well, that’d just be plain weird.
But in writing, It sounds so official and professional, doesn’t it? Those who like having things “confirmed” appear on the surface to be on top of things. It’s almost power leverage – “give me the truth, sign here, and get out of my sight!”
This is also why the practice of confirming things hasn’t moved into the family domain – it’s much too formal. Too corporate. Too institutional.
“Darling, could you please confirm that you took out the trash?”
“Junior, confirm you won’t forget to empty the dishwasher again“.
Here’s the kicker: it’s all a misunderstanding. You actually can’t confirm anything. It’s a myth. A deception.
And it is grown out of a means-to-an-end culture with institutional targets, Excel-sheets, signing-off-legalism, and statist paper-pushing as philosophy becoming our guiding principle.
And the worst part is – all the confirmed half-truths work great to their own end, within an isolated system. They actually make the wheels turn! But they aren’t true.
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You assume there’s a readily achievable, absolute truth out there, and by having me confirming it, you demand me handing the final truth over, just like that, without doing any analysis of your own!
You push the responsibility of owning the truth onto me, and you then want to reap the rewards and conclusions yourself, for free, and without taking on the risk, responsibility and hard work it takes to arrive at that end goal.
Our habit of constantly confirming things may serve as a framework for cooperation in the short term, but long term this habit will make us lazy and accustomed to accepting half-truths, signing them off as actual truths.
Does the requestor instead ask “What is X?”, he’d have to refine all the information himself, and take ownership of any conclusion hereof. This is hard, of course.
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In Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886), Nietzsche takes a critical look at the assumptions that underpin traditional morality, particularly Christian morality, and questions its claim to universal validity. Assumptions people had to confirm with each other daily in order to continue to participate in the economy.
Nietzsche also questions whether Christian moral values are in fact undeniable, objective “truths”, or more subjective values sold as objective ones.
"[…] this system of morals helps its author to forget, that system makes him, or something of him, forgotten, many a moralist would like to exercise power and creative arbitrariness over mankind, many another, perhaps, Kant especially, gives us to understand by his morals that "what is estimable in me, is that I know how to obey—and with you it SHALL not be otherwise than with me!" In short, systems of morals are only a SIGN-LANGUAGE OF THE EMOTIONS.”
(Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (original: Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft), chapter 5, aphorism 187)
Nietzsche attacks what we could call a Christian “establishment“ of his time, and argues that the elite patenting a moral truth is a power exercise and nothing but a “sign language” in itself. The elite priesthood needs the masses to confirm their moral framework as true in order to maintain control over the narrative.
You reproduce a historically repeated notion of “something“ as absolute truth, without taking a critical stance toward the topic.
You base your understanding of reality on an assumption, by “confirming” a repeated notion of the truth and then buy into that stance as the reliable, established, unwavering truth.
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Sources
Phonetic graphics: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/confirm
Definition of “confirm (verb)“: Merriam Webster at https://www.merriam-webster.com
Nietzsche, Friedrich: Beyond Good and Evil (original: Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft), chapter 5, aphorism 187. Available here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm#link2HCH0005
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