On Trust

Day 14

Trust is the foundation of all things. On the grand level, we, among other things, trust that the sun will rise again tomorrow, that other minds exist, and that we live and die. On the daily level, we trust that we can make it to work on time, find food in our fridge when we look for it, and walk outside without being struck by a meteorite. None of these things are guaranteed, but we act as if they are when we plan our lives. Wanting to find ultimate truth is a noble goal, and one that I am driven towards, but it also seems to be that it helps a great deal in that search for total truth to be able to trust in certain daily things. Rare is the person who can keep from worrying if there is no way he knows how to get food today, or whom are able to think great and deep thoughts when shivering in the cold, under a doorway, in the rain, knowing that at anytime someone can come by to kick him out. It is if course possible to do so in these situations, it just more..difficult. It is often the belief or trust in something which moderates this.

It is quite possible that all the food in my fridge has gone bad because the fridge broke last night, that all my credit cards have been demagnetized by a freak accident, that the dog chewed up all my money, that every person I know is out of town on business, and that something in my house has just caught fire – that right now I have no food, money, friends, or shelter. Now, if I thought that was going to happen to me I probably wouldn't be sitting here in the morning writing. Rather, I would likely be making plans, calling people out of town, and rescuing my wallet from the mud. Yet I do not – rather, I am sitting here thinking. Thus, my ability to do so is a state of mind much more than a state of actual danger. Again, none of this is certain, but I do generally trust that it is so.

Trust reinforces trust. When things that I trust to exist, events that I trust to happen do, then I tend to think that I've got a good world going on here, one that is pretty much correct and useful. If I keep getting stuff wrong however, then I begin to doubt my world. I start to think that I have got things wrong,and that perhaps I aught to re-think things. (perhaps a lot of things) This is of course difficult, and we have defense mechanisms against this sort of thing, defense we can make small adjustments to as world in order to accommodate new events, so that something going wrong with our baseball pitches or our stock picking doesn't have to have a great effect upon the rest of the world. This is called partitioning off the world, and we do it all the time. Don't we tend to try and not bring our stress from home with us to work, or stress from work home? Don't we try not to snap at family after a stranger on the street insulted us? We can also do something like 'give the benefit of the doubt', and this can be used in beneficial or harmful ways. Because we don't know anything for certain, we can give the benefit of the doubt when we either trust that there is a reasonable cause for this, or when we decide to trust ourselves. A positive example of reasonable cause is when we hear that our child has gotten into a fight at school, and we ask them about what caused the fight before we fly off the handle. A negative example of reasonable doubt is when we notice that someone is attempting to grievously manipulate our emotions for their own benefit,and we assume that they could be doing it for our own good. A positive example of self-trust is when we immediately get a really bad vibe from a person with crazy eyes on the street in the middle of the night, and we decide to turn to go visit the nearby corner store for a few minutes before continuing our walk. A negative example is when our friends have a serious conversation with us about our drinking, and we dismiss their concerns as over-exaggeration.

Trust is not as simple as belief and doubt. Belief says that something does exist, or does exist in a certain way. Doubt says that something does not exist in a certain way. Trust reinforces the stability of the world, and anti-trust weakens stability of the world. Trust is like the belief that the world is generally right, and anti-trust is like the belif that the world is generally wrong. Thus, self trust in either a positive or a negative manner reinforces the world, and anti-trust of the self weakens the world. This is because of the Existentialist idea that one is responsible for their own actions, and that even if you believe somebody else over yourself, it is still you deciding to trust that person. For example, I generally trust meteorologist about what going to happen to the weather today because I think that they know more than me about the subject, and have more information about the weather. I don't trust them unconditionally, believing that they sometimes get the weather wrong, and that just because they are a meteorologist that they know much about the paper-making business. Anti-trust of the self does not just mean that I don't trust myself to come to the right conclusion about what to do – it mean that I do not trust myself to come to the right conclusion about what to believe, which is a much harder situation to get out of. You can always learn more about a subject you don't know, or ask somebody who you think knows more about that subject, but both of those require a level of self-trust to engage with and to accurately judge. If you have no self-trust, then you have no world. If you have no way of making a reasonable judgment, or even knowing what reasonable is for you, then no decision you make has any weight. The world is extremely unstable.

Most of the previous talk has been about interior sources of trust, but there are also outside influences. If the world objects, the sun and moon, earth and stars, people and animals, trains and phones, change form all the time then the world is also unstable. It unstable because as things change new things are introduced, and we usually find a way to fit them into our world that already exists and understand them in that way. A full world-collapse is very traumatic for us, but minor world-shakes happen everyday. If everyday is a total world-collapse? Then good luck with that. The more the world appears stable, the more stable the world is. This doesn't mean that an unstable appearing world, either inner or outer, will necessarily have a extremely unstable world, just that it is much more difficult to have a stable world in those conditions. You can always make stable worlds by of course being a intentional ignoramus, but you can also have a world with a very strong foundation, perhaps one that is based on a religious or spiritual belief, or one that places a single concern, like family, justice, passign school, or getting out of this hellhole, above all others.

We mentioned personal responsibility for action earlier, as an Existentialist idea. I said hat because Sartre's work is where I first encountered the philosophical idea, but the general belif that one is responsible for your own actions if one that I grew up with. How are we to have this belief, and also the belief that the body and mind are the world? If the gulf between you and the world is very thin, then where do we place personal responsibility/ Imagine if you will someone that has been born into a bad situation, one where the world is very unstable – don't know when you'll get food, don't know when dad'll get mad, don't know when mom will disappear for a few days, don't know how to be calm in school, don't know how to pass any tests, don't know who to trust or what to do – how responsible is that person for their actions if their world is unstable? I've met plenty of people who were, straight-up, idiots. People, who are not concerned with the future results of their actions, who get mad when they don't understand something, who need to always be physically in control, who engage in robbery violence, and drugs with seemingly no thought at all. People who don't trust anything that isn't there right in front of them that they can experience right now, or who have picked their two or three people that they believe and follow blindly, and nobody else. I'm sure that you can think of somebody you've met who fits some, or all, of this description in their own special way. Lots of people tend to go through times like these in their lives, and blessedly most of them are very short parts of their lives, but what do we do when they do something monumentally bone-headed? How do we describe this?

In the world there are two types of unknowns. The outer or physical and sensible, and the inner, or mental and sensible. When someone has a stable world you can almost always speak to them using the vernacular of that world, and pass some of your ideas across. If y'all still disagree, then we just have a disagreement. With someone who does not have a stable world, it is very difficult to do that because the logic changes day to day, and any understanding of what happened yesterday doesn't always carry over to today's world in any recognizable way whatsoever. Yet, even in this world, two things stay the same. The outer and physical cores of the world, and the inner core of free will. Because free will is the core of action, the origin of choice, we can understand that the person made a choice. If the outer world is chaotic enough, the they don't understand why they made that choice or hat the consequences of that choice were, but nonetheless they made that choice. Thus, we can prescribe personal responsibility. This does not mean that pure punishment is the next action though. After all, what point is there in punishing if the person does not even understand why they are being punished? Sure it makes me feel better, but only up to a certain point. There are people in this world to whom it would be a great catharsis to me if I were to give them a good, hard right fist to the jaw, but it would almost be greater to have them acknowledge that they did wrong, have them apologize, and then go about my life knowing that they will never do what they did again. To know that they have felt a sharp pain in the heart or the ego, which in my experience hurts a lot more than most punches, and that because of us, the world has changed. That the world has gotten a little bit better, and has a little less suffering in it. Thus, the focus is on teaching instead of punishment. That is, that I generally feel that what is most important is the founding of a more stable world for people first, so that we can reach the level of disagreement instead of just talking past one another. This is of course just my personal preference, and certainly there are going to be times in the heat of the moment that I'm just going to be satisfied with a nice and simple straight-up punishment instead of a long, energetically expensive, and possibly result-less endeavor to change somebody's mind. And if somebody cannot grow a stable world, or the world they have is so inimical to living in our functional society that we can't accept it, then the only reasonable choice seem to be to keep them away from that society forever, but certainly I'd want the goal or the dream to be for them to get better.

Two last things to acknowledge here. First, I don't mean to suggest that people learning shouldn't have any sort of pain. After all, pain can be a wonderful tool for learning. It is simply that I feel that pain of the heart is generally a much better teacher than physical pain. Physical pain can often work in the short term, but people have a remarkable capability to forget their physical pain and move on when the pain isn't happening to them right now, at this moment. A pain of the heart though, a true regret, is incorporated into the world more strongly. Secondly, if trust is the basis of all things, then the worst thing that you can do to someone is to betray them. I don't mean to just fail in a promise, to lie to them, or to steal from them. After all, they might expect that of you if they really knew you, and then to act in that way wouldn't be a betrayal, but rather the result of a person knowingly, out of pity and not ignorance, letting a thieving worm into his life. What is horrid is when you pretend to be something that you are not. When a stranger on the street steal from me, I am shocked and angry. When a friend steal from me, I am betrayed. The second is generally a much more grevious blow to the world, a much greater shock to the system, and effects the way the world continues. Great betrayals towards somebody, by being a con-man, by being an evil parent, or by being forsworn, can do more harm to a person and to the world than any other action. You directly assault the very basis of the world, and Trust takes a long time to build back up.