a question of trust
a question of not letting
what we’ve built up
crumble to dust—depeche mode, a question of lust
as an erstwhile child of the 80s, depeche mode constitutes a significant portion of the soundtrack for that time of my life. another of their tunes, somebody, was the song to which my wife and i danced at our wedding, as did a number of couples i imagine that were married around that time.
trust is important: it’s one of those gifts we give others that signal belief, a topic about which i blogged previously. when you believe in a thing or person, you trust that thing or person conforms to your understanding of him/her/it and that this is a good thing. and certainly you trust that whoever or whatever you trust won’t hurt you.
sadly, it’s not exactly an unusual experience to have your trust betrayed. sometimes, it’s done in small ways: a careless word or sentence at the precise wrong time that causes a terrible wound. sometimes, it’s done in big ways—a drunken episode that ends a marriage. these betrayals happen every moment of every day around the world. broken faith is something of an epidemic in the human experience.
yet we continue to trust. and we do it b/c we must.
trust is the basis of how we communicate. and it doesn’t matter what language we use, if we even use a language to do it—trust is given sometimes with a gesture or action more deeply and fully than a word.
if i trust you, this means that if i tell you something, i have reason to believe that you will not repeat to all and sundry. and that is the heart of trust: expecting behavior consistent w/ your experience. just as surely as you know that fox news will spin a story to benefit a conservative point of view, just as surely as you know that the new york times will spin a story to benefit a liberal point of view, you have experience which tells you that this person or institution will behave in a way that conforms to your expectations.
in a sense, trust is based on logic for the most part. fox news has an obvious pro-conservative bias. the NYT has an obvious pro-liberal bias. have you ever compared a news item covered by both sources? the facts are generally the same but where in the story various facts appear, how they’re emphasized or played down, the headline, how prominently the story is displayed—all of these things demonstrate the biases of both organizations. and anyone who’s read either can see this: it’s what they do with every single story. so the experience of anyone who’s examined either source would lead them to conclude that any future such news items would be similarly slanted. you can reliably trust either news organization to do those things.
that’s a form of trust, to be sure, but let’s face it, that’s a pretty superficial form of it.
trusting people—that’s the kind of trust that’s more interesting to me. and just as w/ institutions, trust is in part a function of logic: your previous experiences w/ a given person tell you whether he or she is trustworthy. and as they continue to repay that trust, you will be disposed to trust him or her more in the future. while we all earn trust from others in varying increments that are dependent upon how we’ve been trusted and how the person who trusted us perceives how well we’ve honored that trust, most of us continue to accumulate that trust every day.
as i said: we trust b/c we must. we need to talk sometimes about the things that are on our minds. some of us do it more, some of us do it less, but we all do it.
trust matters. trust is important. and we should recognize that we need to do this.
so how easily do you trust? does it come easily or hard? or is it not at all important to you? comment and let me know.
ed
