Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Trust might be a fool's errand

I'm not sure there is ever any reason to expect anything to be simple. Life, as a biological process and as an experience (both of which we take for granted every day) are anything but simple. The mechanisms behind our basic, physical functions are incredibly complex. From respiration to digestion to locomotion, our physical selves function as biological machines keeping billions of cellular-level chemical and electrical processes in sink continuously across every moment of our lives. The processes behind material existence are so sophisticated that they are not fully understood by modern scientists. These are the same processes that make our physical selves possible.

Saying that our mental/cerebral processes are complicated would be like saying, "The Universe is pretty big and stuff".

So why would ever expect our interactions and relationships with fellow humans to be anything but infinitely complex and puzzling? How many times have you thought you knew someone, only to find out that you didn't know them at all? How many times have you misunderstood or misinterpreted someone's actions or words? Sometimes these misreads have catastrophic outcomes, which puts the additional weight of being critically important on top of the usual encumbrances that burden our social interactions. Particularly powerful and indescribably complicated are the interplay of our emotional and physical selves.

It is really no surprise then that we cannot ever seem to settle into total comfort where other people are involved, particularly other people you have not known your entire life. External and internal complexities make trust so difficult, and then there always seems to be someone threatening to violate that trust, so that it can feel as if our sense of security is always under assault. Inevitably, choosing who to trust becomes more difficult as grow older and find that very few humans are truly trustworthy, especially on an emotional level.

Our only defense is to become skeptical of others and their motives, as life teaches that only a very select few are to be trusted sincerely. Absolute trust appears to be something which is best reserved for family alone, and in some families, even that is impossible. Trust is a brand of faith to be shared only with those who are most close to you, and then only if you are lucky enough to be near honest, honorable individuals. Unfortunately, the world has always been critically short on such souls, so we are left to weed out the liars, the cheaters, and the weak in hopes of finding one or two travelers with which to spend our days. There are times when I wonder if all the time and energy aren't totally futile.

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Posted by Erik @ 10/16/2007 03:17:00 PM