Reposted from August 21, 2013:
Trust is a delicate thing, and yet it makes the world go round.
We can’t live without trust.
Our economy is built on trust.
Relationships live or die on trust.
Marriage, peace treaties, and trade agreements all are made possible by trust that the parties involved will honor their agreements.
We desire to be trusted, and to trust.
“You fool me once, shame on you. You fool me twice, shame on me,” is a saying about trust.
We say a person is gullible if they are easy to fool or make a habit of trusting someone who is untrustworthy.
We say a person has been gulled or fooled if their trust has been abused.
We have to be careful of where we place our trust. Just because you trust someone, doesn’t mean that they’re trustworthy.
Just because you “feel” something should be true, doesn’t mean it’s true. Emotions can lie and facts can be deceiving. We should never trust our emotions, and we should, whenever possible, double-check our facts with an independent source.
When you’re a writer, trust is important in holding a reader’s interest. A reader of fiction trusts the author to weave a story with believable elements, no matter how outlandish the setting. Break that trust, and you lose your reader.
A reader of non-fiction trusts the writer to stick to the facts and not twist the truth for their own ends.
It takes consistent effort to establish trust, but only one lapse to break it.
Distrust is contagious. This is why the stock market reacts so negatively to bad news, and why there were runs on the banks at the start of the Great Depression.
We say that someone who is trustworthy is also reliable.
We call someone who doesn’t trust easily cynical.
A person who makes a habit of doubting everyone and everything is called a cynic.
I’ve been thinking a lot about trust lately…
I used to be very trusting of those whom I knew well, who were closest to me. People usually are until someone they trust abuses that trust, and forces them to realize that not all people can be trusted.
Due to life circumstances, I have been forced to redefine what trust meant for me. I used to mentally view people as trustworthy or untrustworthy. Either I knew them and could trust them, or I did not, and could not. Now, I don’t do that. I have had to redefine trust in terms of what I can expect from each person I know, and what I know or don’t know about that person which might introduce unexpected complexities into our relationship.
I can trust certain people close to me for many things, but I have learned that there are situations in which I might not be able to rely on them at all. There are others I can reliably trust to disappoint me every time. This is still a form of trust, although it is more commonly understood as distrust. I now trust people in varying degrees based on the consistency with which they have shown themselves to be reliable or unreliable.
One last thought on trust:
Here in America, we print on our money, “In God We Trust,” but as a nation, that is becoming less and less true. The irony is that, the more I have seen of life, the more I have come to understand that God really is the only one we can absolutely trust!
What role does trust play in your life? Have you ever trusted someone you should not? How do you define trust?