Trust Everyone
The world, to me, is a spectacularly confusing and amazing place. I am, admittedly, wildly ignorant to anything outside of my own reality; we all are, save God-like intelligence on the order of omniscience. My ignorance is to such a degree that I don’t even know why I exist and I’ve yet to meet someone who does. The “fundamental question” and we don’t even have an answer!
So, we’re blindly cruising through life with some “feelings” about what we should be doing and from what I can tell there’s a bunch of other people equally clueless about what they’re suppose to be doing. We seem to be born trusting these other people, and over time learn to distrust them (often for good reasons). What’s worse, I’m not even sure what those words mean: to trust or distrust a person…
It seems to me that you don’t “trust” another person, you trust your expectations of that person. That is, that the person will act the way you thought they were going to act. In that case, “distrust” is when you are expecting things from someone where you have knowledge that they will not (or refuse to) comply to your expectations.
Our expectations are often based on those same “feelings” and can even include moral judgments; some notion of a perfect or right way of acting. Our expectation of perfection yields distrust in the world around us.
I would argue that while we have a desire towards perfection we would be silly to expect perfection (and breed distrust). If we release our expectations of ourselves we are free to pursue perfection while maintaining ultimate trust in ourselves, and the people and world around us. It then forces the burden of trust onto the individual, trust becomes a matter of learning and knowing rather than expecting.
In other words, my trust is only a measure of how well I know… my distrust is only a measure of how wrong I was in what I thought I knew.