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Question I want ask about our trust to others, how we can thoroughly trust to others? How we know that we trust to right people? Why we must trust to others and what impact if we hard to give a trust to others?

Accepted:
August 21, 2014

Comments

The topic of trust is very, very important on all sorts of levels, from everyday exchanges, to contributing to this website, to ordering food at a restaurant, signing a loan to buy a car....In fact, it may be that TRUST of some kind, even if it is the minimal sense of having to trust your own thinking, may play an important role in virtually all our waking hours. I will put to one side whether there is trust in dreams! First consider a few observations about what is trust...

At least in English, the word trust may be used widely; I might trust my computer to work, trust that it will not rain when I have to work with the homeless this afternoon as part of a charity project, and so on, but I suggest that its principle use is in terms of persons. In this sense, when you trust someone or something someone has made, you are doing something more than RELYING on the person to be predictable or EXPECTING a persons work to function as it has in the past. Trusting my students or them trusting me seems to involve a whole array of matters: They trust me to be a professional, to faithfully practice the discipline I am trained in....and I trust them to be honest, to be receptive to new points of view and so on. Trusting friends, children, other drivers on the road, the pilot flying your plane, involves assuming and counting on the friends and so on to act in collaborative, respectful ways. That is why I believe that when a professor is biased, when students cheat on exams, when a friend commits an act of disloyalty... we feel *in a personal way that we have been let down or betrayed. When we trust a person who seems trustworthy but, instead, abuses our trust to steal our property or time or ... it is as though a sacred promise has been broken or, perhaps worse, there was no real promise to begin with and the supposedly trust-worthy person simply pretended to make a promise.

So, to get to your particular interests, if we are living in a society in which there is little trust between persons, I wager that we will be living in a society that is in some ways dysfunctional. It might be difficult to have any stable infrastructure or market place or relationships within families or between persons of any kind. On the other extreme, if we are in a society in which IT SEEMS that everyone is always trust-worthy, we are probably in some kind of ideal integrity paradise or, sadly, knowing human nature, this ultra-trustworthy garden of Eden will probably experience a fall at some point. So, what to do? Most places on earth are somewhere in between, though extremes do exist. Probably there is little trust right now if any between Israel and Hamas. There is probably the opposite of trust: both parties think the other CANNOT BE TRUSTED to keep promises because of their deep hatred for one another. So, if you are not in such extreme conditions, I think that one simply has to resort to what the Ancient Greek thinker, Aristotle, called PRACTICAL WISDOM. I know that recommendation might seem quite abstract and unhelpful, but I recommend that you give Aristotles book on ethics a try. He begins with some reflections on happiness, which may seem odd at first, but keep reading and see how things get interlinked. So, in the spirit of Aristotle, practical wisdom probably will mean *in non-war zones- being careful whom one trusts, but avoiding a rigid skepticism. In most matters, I suspect wisdom means trusting other persons until you have a positive reason to distrust them.

Trust me, for a start. I have tried my best for 40 minutes to give you an honest, non-deceptive reply. I may have failed to satisfy, but I ask you to believe that I did my best so that if I failed, trust was not broken. Trust would chiefly be broken if I was not honest or I was and am trying to mislead you. Those are the last things on my mind.

With the sincere hope I have given you some helpful observations about trust! CT

Question I want ask about our trust to others, how we can thoroughly trust to others? How we know that we trust to right people? Why we must trust to others and what impact if we hard to give a trust to others? Accepted:August 21, 2014

Question I want ask about our trust to others, how we can thoroughly trust to others? How we know that we trust to right people? Why we must trust to others and what impact if we hard to give a trust to others?

Accepted:
August 21, 2014