The verb “trust” basically can’t be conjugated in the imperative case, in my view. When people attempt to trust, the means by which they achieve this tends to be something more like “pretending” or “ignoring” or even “compartmentalizing”. And that’s a move you can make! But in my view if you do such pretending without realizing, then you’re confused, and I’d rather be honest about what’s going on.
When I hear people saying things like “trust this” / “he should trust me” / “I know I should trust…”
…I ask “but do I trust?” / “but does he trust?” / “but do you trust?”
I aim to get people in touch with the sense of what they can tell for themselves. Not trust as a thing that you try to declare or choose. And I orient towards the question of how that trust might be built.
Unpacking each of these examples:
If someone says “trust me/this”, I will comment to them something like “hm, well, conveniently I do trust that, although I wouldn’t pretend to if I didn’t” or I’ll say something like “well, I don’t currently trust that, but here’s what I would need in order to trust it…”. This is always only a guess—someone might be able to satisfy the letter of that constraint, but something would still feel off to me, at which point I’d go “huh, I still don’t trust it. interesting.”
If someone says “he should trust me”, then I’ll inquire eg “why do you think he doesn’t already trust you?” / “what do you think he’s concerned will happen?” / “what do you think you could do to earn his trust?” …and if someone protests that they’ve already done what they needed to do to earn his trust, but he still doesn’t trust them, then I’ll highlight that it’s not up to them what earns his trust, it’s up to him.
If someone says “I know I should trust…” then the whole reason this is coming up is because they don’t have what they need to trust whatever this is. So to some extent I’ll investigate where the should is coming from—have they been memed into thinking that trust is a virtue, in the abstract? And I’ll investigate whether that trust can be built, or if not, what to do about it.
“Trust” and “distrust” come through experience. It’s part of my basic sense of things. In other words, when someone says the world is a particular way, I can tell how much I trust their word by the extent to which my sense of the world changes as a result. When someone says they’ll handle something, I can tell how much I trust their followthrough by the extent to which it then seems to me like it’ll be handled without my needing to manage it. When someone says “that won’t be an issue”, my trust is the degree to which I am in fact no longer concerned as a result of them saying that.
the ground is kind of cold on my bare feet
but I trust I can handle it and this does not produce an objection
I don’t choose to trust—I listen and observe that I do trust
I listen and observe, and I may observe that I trust, or I may observe that I do not trust.
Why do we ever think otherwise? Why do we think we could choose it?
Sometimes the compartmentalization move sort of works temporarily—the social pressure is great enough that it reshapes the psyche to produce a new persona running the show that DOES exhibit something resembling trust even though the distrust has been merely repressed. And what’s trippy about this is that the nature of trust is that this system will optimize for feeling like nothing has been repressed—for you to not be able to tell the difference.
A system set up this way will have some friction, but for most of history such fractured selves have been the norm and it’s been advantageous for certain powerful forces (memes, not just people) to maintain the popular idea that one can and should choose to trust in certain ways, because that keeps the inner coalitions in line with particular outer coalitions. This is a historical reason why people think that “trust me” is a reasonable thing to say.
A different reason is that by its nature, our trust in ourselves is something we tend to feel very confident about, so if we’re not sufficiently differentiated then we may be inclined to think that it implies others should also trust us… but that’s simply not true. Others have different data, and a different situation for which the trust is required. Our words may not make the same sense to them that they do to us.
Trust can be thought of as a sense organ—perhaps a meta sense-organ.
And just like it would be weird to tell someone, including yourself, to perceive an apple instead of the orange they’re looking at, or to perceive a twenty dollar bill where there isn’t one, it’s the same kind of weird to tell them to trust something or someone.
Constantly consciously expanding the boundaries of thoughtspace and actionspace. Creator of Intend, a system for improvisationally & creatively staying in touch with what's most important to you, and taking action towards it.
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