Trust, Betrayal, and Too Many Analogies Involving Apples

“Trust me, that apple’s rotten”, says person X.

Person X can be anyone – hence the name – and the phrase he uses is ubiquitous. But when we hear this sort of thing in our daily lives, how many times do we say “no, I don’t trust your judgement, let me see it for myself”? Even if we have any doubt, we either acquiesce to all knowing X or check discreetly when X has left the kitchen. Do we then not trust X? That still seems like a stretch, right? We trust X to tell the truth as he sees it – the doubt surrounds the relation of what he sees to reality.

What, then, is it to trust someone beyond this level? After all, I personally choose to assume that most people are not telling deliberate falsehoods about most things most of the time – it’s a subjective choice, but I think it holds good as a general assumption (unless you’re in the mafia). Hence, I believe that to truly trust someone is to trust their judgement to be sound, and to accept their beliefs on their perception of the truth with almost as much credibility as you accept your own, while simultaneously believing in their willingness to share their true perception.

…but there’s a catch in this conception – if I accept this to be true trust, and decide it is worth giving to anyone outside myself, I necessarily permit a knife to permanently hover behind my back. Hyperbole schmyperbole, but essentially it creates the unavoidable possibility of being very badly hurt when you least expect it. Why?

The problem begins with your own judgment. It follows that the only way to trust others is to trust your judgement of them, and therefore that the only way to trust others is to trust yourself. You have to trust both that your judgement is sound and that you are willing to admit that judgement to yourself. If anyone can have that much complete trust in themselves, it goes without saying that they risk self-delusion, narcissism, hubris, and all the associated vices that follow.

Problemo two is a big one, and it comes from the assumptions I made about trust. Not much harm can come from believing that a person is saying what they believe to be true if you hold back your trust on the validity of their judgement. Nor can much harm come from trusting someone’s judgement as sound and taking it into consideration while not putting one’s whole trust in it. But if you do both simultaneously, and if someone is intelligent enough to convince you that their judgement is sound, can’t they also be devious enough to hide their true intentions? Or, if your own appraisal of the other’s judgement is flawed (as is highly probable), can’t they just feed you an endless stream of well-meaning misinformation?

Of course, it’s important to consider the fact that we generally only ever let a few people into that special zone of trust – but the vulnerability it provides is less an Achilles Heel and more a Pandora’s Box. If someone with not-so-jolly intentions or well-intentioned lapses of judgement makes it into my complete confidence, they can meddle with my very conception of reality. If I totally trust X and they pronounce a rotten apple to be alright, the apple becomes perfectly edible in my reality, and I start to doubt my own sanity or my ability to admit that I’m bad at buying good fruit – in other words, I doubt both my judgement and my ability to state my judgement to myself. Hence, even one bad apple in my circle of true trust leads to me distrusting myself. And once I distrust myself, logically, I can no longer trust any of the people I previously trusted, and my entire sense of social reality collapses.

This conclusion might seem overly logical or extreme, but I don’t think it’s that farfetched. I think a lot of people can relate to a betrayal of some kind in their life – big or small, intentional or unintentional – that causes them to reconsider their basic ability to make choices. This is just my way of rationalising why that happens, of categorizing its effects and trying to fight the disorientation that comes afterwards.

But then, of course, the question changes – if this is the state of affairs as I see it, what’s the best response? If we’re going to stick with logic here, you can see it as being dependent on how inherently good you think people are – i.e. just how many bad apples you expect to find per barrel of humanity. But when you consider each bad apple to not just be rotten but poisonous – considering how much damage they can do – is it worth ever actually letting your guard down?

In the end, there’s no straight answer. The truth is, as with all things, pain is inevitable. Whether or not X is there to tell you that the apple is rotten, there will be rotten apples, and the odds are high that we’ll eat at least one of ‘em in the span of our lives. On the other hand, the rewards of having true trust reciprocated are invaluable, the benefits of a dependable friend at your back near priceless. And the apple, poisoned or not, won’t be fatal so long as you have some foundation of certainty to fall back upon, whether it be family or therapy or friends who have never yet let you down.

But there’s another, more positive consequence: it means that the value of giving someone that trust is immense. By giving a friend your complete trust, you’re practically giving them your credit card information, or the keys to your house – I think that kind of trust is the greatest gift you can give someone. The very recognition of how potentially dangerous complete trust can be can help us truly appreciate those who have held and honoured it, and especially those who have given us their own trust.

In the end, as with my previous post, the question becomes one of risk – are you willing to accept the possibility of being poisoned to have true, meaningful relationships with amazing people? The answer will wax and wane through hardship and happiness, through betrayals and meaningful bonds of trust. My answer for myself at this point of time is to lay low and guard my trust for a while – events speak for themselves. As for your answer, if anyone is reading this, I wish you nothing but the best for whatever lies ahead. And I’ll stop with the analogies about apples.

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