The Open Matt Project

Abort, Retry, Trust

Trust has become the number one top-o-the-charts topic with a bang for me. In the past few months I've seen trust fostered, questioned, inversed, broken, and reborn. There is an inevitable degradation that occurs which taints everything that came before and everything that follows when something as pure as trust is sullied by scrutiny. I remember my father hearing Ronald Reagan say, "trust - but verify," and arguing with him about the value of that statement.

For him, it was a part of building trust to check and make sure. For those of us who remember the game of the same name, this would be akin to not fall back into your partners arms, but rather lean back. For me, trust intrinsically involves a degree of faith. You can check if you like, but if a failure occurs it is not going to occur because you failed to check.

Perhaps there is a connection between his 1950's sense of diminished certainty, fostered by severe political scandal (Nixon and JFK), the death of his wife and raising kids alone, and my more current non-existant certainty. For someone like me, who has been raised under the spectre of potential total annihilation since birth and whose schooling focused its attention on relativity (culminating in part with the ironic Uncertainty Principle) the allure of faith is almost irresistable. Faith requires no proof, and to some extent demands it.

Trust -
From Old Norse traust “confidence” and treysta “to trust.” Ultimately from an Indo-European base meaning “to be solid,” which is also the ancestor of English true, tryst, and tree.

Faith -
13th century. Via Old French feid from Latin fides “trust, belief” (source of English confide and fealty). Ultimately from an Indo-European word that is also the ancestor of English federal.

(Etymology is a tricky business, so I won't go into the great many thoughts that occurred while researching trust and faith. However - the mind reels.)

Trust is always grown over time. Typically, it is given in insignificant amounts to begin with, where a failure will cause little or no damage. It is then granted in larger amounts with each subsequent success. Again, verification only serves to let you know when a failure has occurred - it does not safeguard you from the failure. Each moment of trust stands on a iced lake of faith and this is what makes its successes so invigorating and its failures so catastrophic. The building of trust is a synergistic activity for the participants, rewarding partners with more than their investment. The breaking of trust is a recursive destruction that steals from each partner not just more than they invested but also from each following investment.

It is the foundation of faith under trust that cannot bear the weight of scrutiny and with only a moderate investigation it becomes the more mundane 'understanding' - and understanding changes with the winds. This is precisely why, after my experiences recently, I have come to understand trust so well and as a bitter consequence have so little of it.

Posted by Matt at November 14, 2003 12:34 PM