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Can A World Without Trust Be A Better World?
We failed trust long before it failed us. Time to fix this relationship.
There is hardly anything I treasure more than trust, but it might be time to let go of most of it.
Trust has been at the heart of human societies from beginning of time. Before society was a thing, it was viable not to trust anybody when we lived in the wild. In the wild, trust isn’t needed. Survival instinct is enough. I hunt, you sleep, we both eat. You hunt, I sleep, we both eat. No need to get our hands dirty with trust.
Once we chose to live in a community, though, things changed. We needed to barter, we needed to split the tasks, we needed to make ourselves interdependent with individuals we did not know. Trust was necessary for survival. Our instincts didn’t suffice.
So we create stories, develop beliefs, impose laws and rely on punishment. Then we create tokens of trust, such as flags and coins and uniforms. The same ingenuity that allowed us to create the fabric of society will aid us in tearing holes in it for our individual gain. What is the reason behind theft or murder? I think it all boils down to vestigial instinct running wild.
Armed with our ability to tell stories, we convince ourselves that this hole here and that hole there…