Trust

One of the most important lessons I have learned in the 71 years that I’ve been alive is never trust anyone ever.

When we are born we have no choice about whether to trust. We have no way of even understanding the concept. As we grow up we are taught to trust others and, we learn, to almost always be let down by others. Sometimes we also let ourselves down. We make promises or commitments to ourselves and to others and are often disappointed in our own inability to remember what we promised, let alone remain true to the forgotten promise.

We become cynical. We begin to assume that promises will not be kept. We begin to experience no surprise whatsoever when it transpires that teachers have told us the wrong information or that politicians have failed to deliver on their campaign pledges.

By the time you get to my age you know without doubt that everything important must be double checked and closely monitored to ensure that you won’t be let down again, like all those other times.

We experience a social pressure to remain naive and continue to trust others. Professional people like politicians, priests, teachers, therapists, doctors, lawyers need us to trust them so that they can do their job.

To bully us into trusting them they invent the concept of “Trust Issues”. Anyone who refuses to maintain a childlike naivety gets labelled as having “Trust Issues”. By this trick they turn it around so that they are not the bad person for asking you to trust them. Instead YOU are now the bad person for not trusting them. YOU are the one to blame because you have “Trust Issues”. But it makes no difference. They are still just as likely to let you down again.

They even go so far as to invent “Trust Games” like the classic closing your eyes and falling backwards trick where someone will (probably) catch you, just for the purpose of the game. Don’t expect them to still be there for you once the game is over.

All of these strategies are simply put in place to keep the world being run by self proclaimed experts and mutually proclaimed experts and to ensure that you will always live as a client to these people. They want you childlike and simple minded. They want you to ask them for their services and they want to tell you what to think how to think it.

Don’t just take my word for it.

Seriously.

It is still free to subscribe to this book and it is still my intention to keep it free.