Everyone — from politicians to cable TV talking heads down to the voters — seems confident that they know the course for the country ought to take.

But they don’t know. You don’t know. We don’t know. No one knows. Everyone merely has myriad ideas and hopeful intentions.

The fact is, everyone is overconfident in their judgment and truly no one positively knows the right course for the country. Predicting the future is frankly guesswork, even by politicians who brim with righteous indignation.

Don Moore, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley, studies overconfidence. He wrote in USA Today last week that research shows “people express far more faith in the quality of their judgment than it actually warrants.”

Further, he says politicians are even more inclined to be overconfident as a result of the election process — repeating the same statements to crowd after crowd after crowd — and a result of being in a horse race. They have to project more confidence than the other candidate, right? And beating the other guy, naturally, does wonders for one’s self-convictions, even if the candidate had to flat-out lie to win the race.

The lesson is that when politicians or pundits slam another politician for not accomplishing what was said in a campaign, voters have to remember that it is just all part of the same old cycle seen by politician after politician in U.S. history. And it will keep happening. We voters are sold a bill of goods on every election day, and if we are truthful with ourselves, we already knew when filling in the ovals that the campaign promises were just the overconfident talk of politicians in campaign mode.

So don’t be cynical. Be knowledgeable.

Moore gives some good advice:

“Allow me to suggest that boldness and confidence among our elected officials may not be such a bad thing, but that we as voters would do well to understand the dynamics of the political game in our democracy. Candidates will overpromise and underdeliver. The former is why we elect them, and the latter is a consequence of the former. In any case, it is entirely predictable.”