Are You Trustworthy?

Trust

1. Firm belief in the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing; confidence or reliance.
2. The condition and resulting obligation of having confidence placed in one.
3. One in which confidence is placed.

In case you didn’t know it, the whole world is based on trust. Well, the human world that is. I’m not sure if the animals, insects, fish etc. need to worry about trust, they probably do as my mother always advised – trust no one., and the longer I live, and the more people who deceive me, due to ,y “trusting” nature, the more I’m beginning to think she’s right.

I come from a way of thinking that I want trust everyone and I want everyone to trust me, but much as you are not trustworthy, neither am I.

I will flatter you, then lie to you then cheat you, and maybe you’ll do the same to me.

So what is the truth of trust. Which part of the human brain does it reside in? Is trust a genetic trait? Or are we conditioned to be trusting and trustworthy?

I have recently been cheated out of a large sum of money by someone I considered a friend, and now over 4 years later, he has moved on with his life and my cash, without so much as a “sorry”. I am now in the unenviable position and huge amount of stress, wondering how I will get the money back, if at all.

From the outset, when he convinced me to give him money to start a classic car restoration business, I said to him ” I am trusting you”, and I had no reason to suspect that he was untrustworthy, although thinking back, he had already gone bankrupt owing a lot of money, so perhaps the warning signs were there!

Other people have decided not to pay me what they owe me, or cheated me out of money in recent years. I only have myself to blame. I should never have trusted them.

As my mum used to say “a fool and his money are easily parted”, but I didn’t think I was a fool, I just trusted that these people would not cheat me as I knew them well. More fool me as they say!

I TRUST…

I trust that you won’t lie to me

I trust that you will not be unfaithful

I trust that you will not cheat me

I trust that you will not steal from me

I trust that you will pay me for work I have done

I trust that you have my best interests at heart

I trust that you are who you say you are

I trust that you will pay back the loan I gave you

I trust that you will not betray me

I trust that you will keep a secret I told you

I trust that you care about me

I trust that you will not hurt me

I trust that you will not rape me

I trust that you will not murder me

I trust…

Let’s talk about dogs…

Dogs are great aren’t they? They are lots of fun, and are loyal and very trustworthy… until they turn and maul a loved family member to death… On the other hand, dogs are incredibly trusting. They look to us as their master, to feed them, and to look after them, and for the most part people do, until they decide to beat them, torture them, shoot them, starve them…What misplaced trust!

Dogs are the same as children… they are pretty helpless without us…so imagine a helpless child, beaten, starved, burned with cigarettes, and ultimately murdered by our hand due to the misplaced trust they place in us. Sickening isn’t it?

Let’s try to understand this, shall we? We trust because we believe that others have our best interests at heart. We trust because we have no other option. We trust because we believe in the good of other people. Ultimately, many of us find that our trust is misplaced, and that causes us severe mental anguish. How could that person I loved and trusted have done this to me?

Because they can.

We are very good at pretending to be someone we are not. We are capable of deception, of lies, and that makes for a very fragile society. The fact that you cannot walk down the street without the fear that someone may attack you is very sad indeed. The fact that we are more afraid of each other than of wild animals speaks volumes about the human mind, and what it is capable of.

A mind that is capable of great love and compassion is equally at home as a mind of great deception. Surely there is something fundamentally wrong with the way our minds work. Either this is a flaw due to sin, as the religious lot would have you believe, or merely shows that there is no good or bad in the human mind, it is merely a machine with no moral, ethical, or compassionate compass…

Somedays the mind is compassionate sometimes not. Some days the human mind wants to torture, to cheat, to lie, to deceive, to murder, other days to nurture, to love, to care for….

So what have we learnt here?

Perhaps, as I have found from the person who cheated me out of all that money, that depending on circumstances, we have the ability to be all of these people. I consider myself to be a compassionate loving being, but now I have been cheated, it has hardened my heart, made me think in a bad way towards that person … and that’s not who u really am …Once trust is lost, hurt takes over, then anger, not generally at the other person bit at yourself for being so stupid to have trusted that person…

Talking about dogs … what about thr animals we carefully rear to ultimately murder and then dine on their flesh? Why are they so trusting ? Why do they not know what our intentions are towards them?

I have witnessed live chickens standing next to the butchers block in Nepal where other chickens are having their heads chopped off! Patiently waiting their turn …

I can’t understand it …

When I walk through a field of cows just quietly munching grass I always wan to scream at them…Run! RUN! But they don’t…they just do as they’re told.

It would be so easy for them to knock down the little barbed wire or electric fences, they’re definitely big and strong enough…

But they don’t. They’re quite happy. Same goes for the sheep .. until it’s murder day. And even then they have no idea, that is, until they smell the blood and the fear of the other animals.

I did like the Ricky Gervais film “The Invention of Lying” set in a world where no one lies! Turns out it would be quite a boring place. There would be no words like intrigue. There would be no spies, no cheating on your wife and saying you were at the office. There would be no confidence tricksters, no mind games.

In short, a world without lying wouldn’t be much of a world at all. And if there is no lying there would be plenty of …you guessed it – trust.

It’s such a pity that there is so little of it around but until we stop lying cheating and pretending to be people we’re not, how on earth do you think we can begin to evolve our minds towards creating a better world …

I do not like this thing called trust, it has too many variables.

Maybe we have to remove the word from our vocabulary. We are not ready for it. Let’s try and find out why.