There are three words you will hardly ever hear a person in power use - "I don't know." Why is doubt, which most of us experience every day, virtually unheard of in politics, asks Michael Blastland.
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Doubt seems a dangerous thing in politics. If possible, you don't admit it. Not about your values, nor your analysis, nor the policies that will magically bring about the change that you are certain is needed.
One response to the economic upheaval of the past few months might be to conclude that we know far less than we think we know, and pretending otherwise is rash and damaging. Yet while economic confidence evaporates, another kind of confidence still thrives - confidence in the power of our own analysis, of who is to blame and why, the strident confidence of politicians or business people in their preferred remedies.
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Is this a general, but dangerous habit - that those in public life often drift through events of which no-one is the master, all the while pretending to a false confidence, or even certainty? Are our leaders incapable of saying what all should surely now admit, that often they don't know? Perhaps the wreckage from the past is all the evidence we need, for didn't they speak with certainty then too?
