I Trust You Understand This

Nobody asked but …

One of the most frequently used words in human exchange is trust, and to me it is one of the most misunderstood ideas.  An example — to drive on the roads requires you to trust other drivers.  Well, no such thing applies.  You must actually have reasonable expectations of safety in the driving system, a complicated environment of myriad subsystems, and those reasonable expectations are built, layer upon layer, by experience with the evidence that you observe in using the system.  We are asked to trust, most of the time, in anticipation of no evidence, and eventually we may actually come to trust the idea of trust.  Instead, we should always be testing the watersBasing judgment on evidence is called learning.  It is what we do best if we will allow ourselves to do it.  There are places where faith (not trust) is appropriate, but these places are not in the concrete world.  The idea of trusting others to attend to your care is at best careless, but usually worse, narcissistic.  The idea of evaluated care for yourself is individualism, voluntaryism.

Kilgore

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