Trust is one of those funny things that defies logic. It's like faith in that if you really believe in it, you cannot verify it without dispelling it. (see Uncertainty Principle) It's something that is created only by following an unblemished pattern of events that don't directly abolish it. Weird, huh.
I've noticed that I don't trust very much. I'm not sure if I ever did. My feeling is that if it is even possible to be betrayed, well, then you'd better prepare for betrayal. I believe every intelligence agency in the world follows this sort of thinking (aka paranoia?) and it leaves them, and me with a comforting result. If you do not allow someone, or something, the possibility of betrayal, then you find that it never happens.
For instance: I have an embarassing picture of a friend. I want to show it to another friend who doesn't know this person at all. Not only does this other friend not know the person in the picture, but their social groups don't even connect. There is hardly any chance at all that the person in the picture will find out I showed it - and even if they did, the consequence would be minimal to none (as they likely wouldn't really care.)
Result? I don't show the picture. There is still a possibility of the person in the picture to feel their trust has been betrayed, and that's too much. There is also the possibility of the viewer telling someone, and no matter what they say contrary to that, it still scores incredibly low on my Bengal Tiger test*. I just don't trust them if there is any possibility of them talking.
As a consequence of all this it's interesting to see who it is I do trust, and how much, and with what and when. Oddly enough there are only a few people I trust to a very intimate degree, and nobody I trust completely. It reminds me of an old joke I heard, "Friends help you move, real friends help you move a body." How many real friends do you have? And when you have that number, how many of them will give you up when the detectives pull you in?
* The Bengal Tiger test is a concept I came up with years ago in order to have a more realistic perspective on people's strength of conviction, including myself. It's pretty simple and goes like so: You take someone who has stated something they believe and put them into a cage with a hungry Bengal Tiger and you don't let them out until they recant. The key here is not whether or not they will recant, but rather how long it will take. Generally speaking, I've found that the spectrum is anywhere from one to ten seconds for almost every belief I've tested (mentally, of course.) On rare occasion I meet people who I truly believe would go toe-to-toe with the tiger just on the strength of their convictions. I keep both eyes on those people.
Posted by Matt at August 14, 2003 11:51 AM