Inherent Trust

We place inherent trust in things when we make habits to decide toward risks that we could potentially have made reasonable decisions to avoid.

We have very little control over most things, so we must choose something to trust, even when we don’t want to.

Furthermore, we’re all certain about many things, but to varying degrees. Some things, however, stay consistent over time and permeate throughout much of our understanding and perception.

Trust of any sort directs itself toward an object of trust. We feel peace and empowered when we trust something that proves itself to work. Often, the evidence is through a conflict resolving or a general feeling of empowerment.

Illusion

Even while reality isn’t relative, our understanding of it has many relative components. Whatever we imagine as “reality” is just a generally accurate copy in our minds:

  • The things we touch and experience from our senses
  • The people we encounter, as well as what they do and say
  • the whole idea of cause-and-effect
  • Any expectations that the future will be anything like the present

We may think we see an apple on the table and know it exists, but our minds play a trick on us:

  1. Our eyes take send many mini-snapshots through electrical signals to the brain. Every time an eye twitches, it’s taking in more visual information.
  2. Our brain converts those signals into a composite image that appears to be a complete image, though it’s offset by time.
  3. The brain dissects that composite image into forms and abstractions (in this case, an apple-like shape).
  4. Through associations to things stored in memory, the brain pulls from a network of information, frequently adding more and more information along the way.
  5. For whatever purpose the brain was tasked to, it draws up all the potentially useful or relevant stored information.
  6. Habits, intuition, and decisions dictate the next action or thought.
  7. Barring some form of mental illness, the final thought on the matter will land on some sort of conclusion, which we call “perception”.

Everything we can use to build out our understanding of reality is only somewhat reliable:

  1. Perceptions that come from the world around us, captured in moment-by-moment snapshots and combined into a story
  2. Things we derive from those perceptions, ranging from feelings to legitimate understanding
  3. Whatever our environment tells us, including things we infer and other people
  4. Broad-reaching things made by or for many people

While each person’s methods vary, we only feel “certain” when we attain enough information to fulfill several criteria at once:

  • Enough information to satisfy our sense of curiosity
  • Enough information to get a mental image of the relationship between things
  • Evidence to verify our likely best decision

Near-Certain

To reconcile between reality and our copy, we have a few pathways to fact-check:

  1. Trust our original sensations were accurate
  2. Trust our feelings to the degree we believe we can understand those sensations with intuition
  3. Trust our analytical ability to the degree we believe we can understand sensations with a mental framework
  4. Trust others and our environment to the degree we believe they’re safe to trust over our sensations

Even when we’re 99.99999% certain of things, we still must contend with an unlikely 0.00001%. Much of our identity comes from a few ways we handle that highly unlikely chance we’re wrong, and we must resolve that tiny bit of uncertainty until we feel comfortable with it.

Other people may not see the way we do, and our culture tells us how we’re supposed to think and believe. We will agree with it proportionally to how much our personality is willing to consent to it.

This entire process of declaring certainty happens rapidly and dictates almost all our decisions and needs. The only way we’re usually aware it even happens is because we’re actively trying to slow down to gain that specific form of awareness. Most people are simply habituated to constantly trusting their judgments, and there’s no reason to revisit it.

Trust Issues

Not everyone trusts easily. The first Erikson stage we go through is asking how much we should trust reality itself, and most of the future stages are trusting ideals that come afterward (in order: willpower, purpose, competence, identity, love, meaning, legacy).

However, nobody is ever fully trust-free. We still must trust our pain is real, and that our decisions mean anything. No matter how much we justify it, we can’t get rid of certain trust-based needs.

Our entire framework of thinking relies on trusting indirectly connected elements, even when we don’t perceive it:

  • Fear of sharks will lead to trusting things that can stop sharks.
  • Fear of what a leader may do often requires trusting a different leader (especially in large groups and politics).
  • Logic requires trusting a conclusion derived off a premise, whether from certainty or through fear of an alternative premise being true.
  • Agnosticism, the least trusting religion, gives zero guidance about what to do with ourselves, making it relatively useless.
  • Even the statement “I don’t trust them” is effectively saying “I trust something within myself, which doesn’t trust them”.

Further, any purpose we strive for comes with endless risks. The most stable, predictable task still requires trusting that a memory is reliable enough to replay itself.

We can trust some things more, but must balance a certain “minimum trust” necessary to attain any purposes whatsoever. We tend to automatically trust ourselves, others around us, and authority figures for most things we need, but can train ourselves to shift the trust elsewhere.

To understand how bound to trust we are, try to prove with absolute certainty that insane ideas are completely impossible:

  • Prove that we’re not living in a shared computer simulation.
  • Demonstrate that the words you’re reading aren’t reading your mind and stealing your life force.
  • Verify that death really happens, and that people don’t teleport away at that moment and replace themselves with a sack of realistic-looking meat.
  • The very essence of speculative fiction is to play with the things we often trust, so try to prove that each one of them is either impossible or will be impossible.

Frequently, people with trust issues will attempt to tear down all forms of trust. It’s the same obsession whether they’re trying to manage their understanding of science or religion. They’re powering their decisions by past trauma and don’t want to accept that their need for certainty has been unmet.

The journey to find something “trustworthy” is fruitless. Post-modern philosophers speculate with many ideas on how to do it, but never get it right because trust glues all our understanding together. At its core, we can’t verify where or what our subconscious thoughts are.

Further, the quest to clarify certainty isn’t very reliable. For every question we answer, we’re faced with more questions proportional to our curiosity or fear. We literally believe we understand to the degree that we don’t desire to know about something anymore.

Downsides

When we trust things, we often have trouble seeing adverse consequences of it, for several reasons:

  • We feel comfortable in what we know.
  • We calculate the thing as most likely thing to gamble on.
  • We often, for other reasons, want to believe that thing.
  • Sometimes we are just plain conceited and believe our trust makes a difference in the outcome.

Counter-intuitively, when we’re not certain of something but trust it anyway, we’re often more susceptible to overlooking its downsides because we don’t want to lose our investment of time or thought.

To the degree we trust something, we don’t observe the costs of believing it. Most notably, we lose the power to move our opinions around about that trusted element without a major inner conflict.

One of the largest indicators of over-trust arises when we see something that doesn’t conform to our view of the world. When we’re immature or suffering past trauma, we’ll try to “fix” that thing to make it conform, but we’re usually misunderstanding reality and often creating problems for ourselves.

Large organizations are vastly aware of our discomfort with uncertainty and try to give more uncertainty toward things they want us to not do. Further, they may attempt to mishandle our trust subversively:

Application

Since we must trust things constantly, we must never declare anything as 100% certain unless we’d unflinchingly give our lives for that premise.

Even when we act with certainty, we’re always taking a type of risk.

Whether you choose to change your mind about something or not, intimately understand what you are trusting and why.

Be careful when dealing with people in occupations that require trust issues (e.g., cybersecurity, quality control, law enforcement), as well as people with pastimes revolving around survival. They’re all finding useful purposes for past trauma, so they may misuse it.

Some of the most brilliant minds on the planet are miserable because they can’t trust basic realities, but over-trusting the wrong things can also lead to utter destruction.

Often, people with trust issues will try to overcompensate with action. Passionate zealots are often less trusting of their beliefs than the declared “moderates” of an ideal, though the storytellers will obscure this fact.

To attain “the good life“, we must balance our trust through decisions and actions toward the correct people and things.

In fact, be careful who you share this essay with. Most people won’t accept this reality. Start with another one instead.