When I think about trust, I think of two kinds, but maybe there are more or less – I don’t really know how to define them, but I’ll call them “instinctive trust" and “personal trust”
Instinctive Trust – An act of trust that one commits without thinking about it
Examples:
Eating food prepared by someone else (a restaurant) > trust that whoever prepared the food knows what they are doing and didn’t put any harmful substances in it
Riding on an airplane > trust that the pilot is properly trained and in the right state of mind to fly, the plane is well-built and won’t break-down mid-flight, etc.
There are a countless number of these.
With instinctive trust, we often risk our lives without doing any research, without personally knowing, meeting, or talking to whoever is providing a service for us, and without calculating the dangers we might face. For whatever reason, we don’t like to live in fear. When we walk outside amongst a crowd of people, the idea of one of them flipping out and killing us doesn't typically cross our mind. Our instincts are shaped by past experiences, we build habits and we establish confidence. In reality, anything could happen at any time.
Personal Trust
Trust is interwoven into our day-to-day actions; however, when it comes to personal matters, we are far less trustworthy. We keep secrets. Relationships are strained because one person doesn’t trust another. We identify certain people as “bullshitters”. We’re not sure if a person is right when they are giving us a piece of information. Some people only reveal information to a small group of friends, the “circle of trust”. People keep diaries because they need to vent but don’t want anyone reading their thoughts. Some of us “don’t trust anyone”.
It’s an interesting phenomenon when you think about it because you are instinctively trusting people you have no contact with everyday, but you can’t trust people you have known all your life.
Life Decisions and Trust
Some of the most important aspects in life come down to the element of trust. Do we trust our teachers? Do we trust our religious leaders? Do we trust the story of Jesus? Do we trust our textbooks? Do we trust that we know who wrote the Bible? Do we trust presidential candidates? For a lot of these matters, we can’t actually meet the person we are attempting to trust. I would be interested in going back in time to meet Jesus, but I can’t so I have to rely on others or my own beliefs. I don't even know if Jesus existed, but I may trust that he did based on what I have read or been told.
A story I like which relates to trust is presented in the book "The Black Swan":
A farm animal is raised by a human all of its life. The animal gets treated well by the human only to one day be killed for food. From the farm animal’s perspective, it might have thought it had a pretty stable life and nothing could go wrong. The animal trusted the human, but in the end, the human had a different idea in mind all along.
Ultimately, I think skepticism is a healthy emotion but trust is embedded in every decision we make.
I wanted to think about trust a little bit because I am going to write about miracles soon (not today and maybe not this week because I am moving and won’t have Internet access). If you don’t have any inclination to believe in supernatural experiences, trusting someone’s story about a supposed miracle is a difficult thing. I never believed that a miracle was possible throughout my life, but when someone I trusted and respected presented me with the story of a miracle a few years ago, it changed my perspective.
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