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%IDENTIFYING TRUSTWORTHY PEOPLE 790203
Who can you trust? It is risky to trust the wrong
people. Thus, it is important to be able to identify whom
you can trust. We must have trustworthy signs upon which
we can depend to help us identify those people whom we can
trust. If we trust the wrong people we will most likely
be betrayed. We may learn much by taking note of what
signs we regard as trustworthy and as the basis for
identifying which people are trustworthy. Different
people trust different signs, and trust different people
as being trustworthy.
The signs we trust include people's: intentions
(explicit, implicit, evident); sophistication (artistic,
literary, technical, scientific, philosophical, religious,
etc.); doctrines (religious, political, business,
scientific, academic), rituals (family, neighborhood,
ethnic, school, professional, academic, religious,
scientific, business, etc.) We tend to look for congruence
between what we regard as of ultimate importance---and
what others regard as of ultimate importance. We are
inclined to trust those who show congruence with us about
what is important. We look for signs of such congruence,
and tend to trust those people whose signs show
congruence.
Unfortunately people with congruent ultimate concerns
do not necessarily merit each other's ultimate trust. Two
people who share in common the philosophy that it is
"everyone for himself" may trust each other to behave in
calculative devious ways, but that is hardly the kind of
trust upon which to base an intimate friendship. Two
people who believe that God is a jealous, legalistic,
punitive God who has a quota of how many will be permitted
to be "saved"---can hardly trust each other to give up
their seat in the Kingdom of Heaven to make room for the
other---especially if their ultimate concern in common is
a compulsive need or mandate to "be saved" as an
individual who is "good" or "better".
Likeness is not the sure basis for trust. To
identify those who are worthy of trust we need to look for
signs that indicate that their ultimate concern is to be
worthy of our trust, to respond to us in ways which affirm
us even at great cost to themselves---but not at the
expense of affirming the development of perverse
relationships between us and them. There are no
technically reliable signs which identify such real people
in a trustworthy way.
(c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in
www.essayz.com Search for Integrity and Honesty
(On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy)
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