Almost everyone, in their private or professional lives, has at one time or another been, or is today, confronted with a situation where trust has been shattered by a lie, deception or betrayal. All of us have been, and still are, bombarded with news every day, which we take seriously because we can’t verify it, until we discover that it’s false, and stop believing those who publish it. Worse still, some of us, having put our trust in a smooth talker, have found ourselves swindled, raped or murdered.
And what’s true for private and professional life is also true for public life: almost all peoples, at one time or another in their history, have put their trust in exceptional orators, dream sellers, who have subsequently disappointed them, or worse, ruined them, or worse still, subjected them to a dictatorship.
Each time, after having been the victim of such a betrayal, we tell ourselves that we won’t do it again, that next time we’ll be more vigilant, more suspicious; that we won’t be so easy to trust. Many, however, fall back on it. To the point of becoming skeptical, bitter, suspicious, sometimes even paranoid.
And yet, a peaceful private life, like a livable social organization, presupposes a minimum of trust in others: a family explodes if its members don’t trust each other. A political system collapses if there is no trust in contracts, in money, in the safety of the streets, in the obedience of others to the law, in the truth of the information disseminated by the media.
So how do you know who you can trust?
Some trust the clarity of their eyes, the strength of their arguments, the apparent sincerity of their feelings, the empathy they feel for others. Some trust their intuition and are quick to choose whom to trust. Others need time and proof; they even go so far as to set traps to check if the other is consistent; still others, less rare than you might think, believe because they want to believe, even if, deep down, they have doubts, or even certainties: you can love a liar and refuse to admit to yourself that you know he or she is lying.
Are there more serious ways? Not really: there are no magic recipes or software programs for knowing who to trust. We can, however, put together a set of clues:
In private life, a trustworthy person must be consistent in his words, and his words must be consistent with his actions, in the present and in his past; he must be able to provide evidence that he has been trustworthy in the past, and that he is also trustworthy today with others; and if we don’t want, or can’t, ask him to provide references, we can look for them. But that’s not enough, because someone can be, or have been, trustworthy at one time, and then change and become a liar, a cheat, a thief.
In public life, trust is first and foremost impossible in a dictatorship, which needs only to frighten in order to establish its power. However, it is not guaranteed in a democracy, where political leaders can also, more often than not, lie, betray and deceive.
In particular, how can we trust those closest to us when the apology of freedom is confused with that of the reversibility of choices and the instability of contracts, whether personal or professional? And how can we trust a political class that has led the world into the chaos it finds itself in?
So, don’t rely too much on trust in others to determine your conduct. The only thing that counts, when it comes to making choices, is trust in oneself, in one’s ability to judge. And here’s a golden rule from which everything follows: to have confidence in yourself, don’t lie to yourself. It’s vital. Everything depends on it. And it’s not easy. It requires high standards, lucidity, the ability to tolerate weaknesses and the strength to remedy them. This should be learned at school. There’s so much to be gained…
Painting serene confidence Bron Odile