2011.07.16 Trust

Trust is a funny thing. When you talk about it with other people, the cultural assumption is to apply it generally. People are "trusting" or not, or people are "trustworthy" or not. Does that make pragmatic sense?

With respect to people being "trusting", I suppose it most readily translates into being naive. But why not just call it what it really is: lack of cognition. It could be due to either stupidity or plain old laziness, or possibly having good reason to believe it does not need to be questioned. And when refined in that manner, you can categorize the application of trust to varying subjects. Which, in turn, are defined by means of whether the truster a) knows sufficient relevant information to base that trust on, and b) cares.

Blah blah blah.
The "trustworthy" part is the one that has snagged my thoughts regularly over the years. Mostly because of the tension between wanting to be thought of as trustworthy, but also not wanting to be taken for granted. Though, really, as something of a massive jerk, the trustworthy part is much more difficult than the taken for granted part. So, since I am strongly inclined to try to establish and maintain my status of trustworthiness, I must give credence to the concept - right?

Well, no. I find that I sort of don't.

Derived from my innate cynicism, earning my trust has historically been a difficult proposition (for humans, anyway). I used to say that I only really trusted three people: Dad, Dave, and S. But now that I'm older wiser, I think I can see now how that is really more of a function of knowing them than it is about any single generalized quality about them. By knowing them, I have learned to predict them pretty well in many aspects, and it is this sort of inductive reasoning that I rely on when I trust them.

So, my feeling now is that you can trust pretty much everybody... to be themselves. They reveal themselves by their actions ª, and as these actions are observed you can know them to predict future actions - thence trust them to be true to their identity.

Of course, this says nothing about judging people, or having opinions about what they do. And I think that's the semantic error surfacing itself when people talk about others being trustworthy; it's really more about whether they happen to like what they predict the other person is going to do.

ª For the sake of semantics, I would say that words are a form of action, but of much lesser predictive value than physical deeds.