What Is Enlightenment?

"Enlightenment isn’t something we march toward, and one day, somehow, we grab it. Enlightenment is the ending in yourself of that hope for something other than life being as it is."

Charlotte Joko Beck, “Just Snow, Just Now”

People chasing confidence tend to attach themselves to beliefs ideologies or dogma

There's a strong psychological pattern where people who are desperately chasing confidence (or more precisely, chasing a stable sense of certainty and self-assurance) often end up clinging tightly to rigid beliefs, ideologies, or dogma.

This isn't universal, but it shows up repeatedly across different areas of psychology. Here's why it tends to happen:

People with underlying insecurity, low self-worth, or chronic uncertainty frequently experience an intense discomfort with ambiguity. Life feels chaotic or threatening when answers aren't clear-cut. To escape that anxiety, the mind seeks quick, absolute resolutions — something solid to stand on.

• Need for Closure / Certainty — Research on the "need for cognitive closure" shows that people high in this trait dislike ambiguity intensely. They prefer clear, definite answers, make judgments quickly, and stick to them. This drives them toward black-and-white thinking, strong opinions, and dogmatic positions because these provide immediate psychological relief: "Now I know the truth, I'm on solid ground." High need-for-closure individuals are more likely to seize on supportive information and freeze on it, avoiding anything that might reopen uncertainty.
• Overcompensation for insecurity — When core confidence is shaky (e.g., from past experiences of inadequacy, rejection, or instability), people often overcompensate by projecting exaggerated certainty outward. Rigid adherence to a belief system becomes a defense: "If I am absolutely right about this big important thing (politics, religion, morality, identity), then I must be okay / strong / smart / worthy." The dogma acts like psychological armor. Challenge the belief, and it feels like a personal attack on the self — which is why dogmatic people often react defensively or angrily.
• Emotional security through belonging and identity — Many rigid ideologies offer not just intellectual certainty but also tribal belonging ("We are the ones who understand"), moral superiority, and a ready-made identity. For someone whose inner confidence is fragile, latching onto "the cause" or "the truth" provides a borrowed sense of strength and purpose. It's easier than building authentic, flexible self-confidence through self-reflection and tolerating doubt.
• Certainty as an emotional state — True confidence based on evidence and experience can coexist with some humility and openness. But the frantic pursuit of certainty often produces its opposite: brittle overconfidence. The brain filters out contradictory information to preserve the feeling of being right, leading to confirmation bias on steroids and dogmatic entrenchment.

In short: people aren't usually attaching to dogma because they're genuinely super-confident. More often the reverse — they're attaching because they feel not confident enough and need an external scaffold to feel steady. The louder the dogma, the more fragile the underlying self often is.

The healthier (but harder) path is developing tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity while slowly building genuine, evidence-based self-trust. That allows beliefs to remain flexible rather than turning into prisons. Dogma promises certainty fast; real confidence arrives slowly and doesn't need to scream.