Thursday, September 21, 2017

No trust

Awhile ago Sthenno came over to my place and asked me an odd question.  By odd I mean the sort of thing normal people consider odd, but it was completely normal for the two of us.  He asked me if I experience gratitude or trust.

I said no.

You might suddenly be wondering how I get by in the world without trust, so I will clarify.  Obviously there are people in the world who I think do things that align with my values, and who I believe will act in my best interests, as long as those don't interfere with their best interests too much.  When I say trust, what I mean is that I think these things about them.  I generally think they have sound judgement and their weighting functions for decision making are ones that don't worry me.

But most people have something else that they feel when they trust someone that I clearly don't feel.  When I think about people going to war who trust their leaders that murdering other people is a good idea, I cannot fathom it.  When religious people believe their clergy who say contradictory or absurd things, it strikes me as preposterous.  They are clearly feeling something they call trust and it is an emotion I either don't have, or have so little of that I might as well not have it.

I think Sthenno is even more extreme in this way than I am.  I have almost no experience of trust, but he has basically zero.  To me trust is sort of like saying "I believe X".  You only say it when it is bloody obvious X is false but you have decided to pretend it is true anyway.  People don't say "I believe in gravity" because we know gravity is true.  They say it about things that we have no reason to believe in, like God, or feng shui, or the Loch Ness Monster.  Trust is similar.  It is often like saying that you believe in a person or what that person says, even when they have not given sufficient reason for you to do so.  There is a big emotional thing there that most people experience but which is mostly foreign to me.

Gratitude is a similar sort of thing.  I think this may actually have a lot to do with my issues surrounding gifts and debt.  It seems plausible that because I don't experience gratitude, and possibly because I don't experience trust, I view many exchanges through an economic lens.  When people do nice things for me I notice and I appreciate it, but when other people talk about gratitude it becomes glaringly obvious to me that there is something they are experiencing that is just not part of my makeup.  When people express gratitude I am often standing there, trying to do whatever is socially mandated, while completely not getting it at all.

If someone says they have gratitude for the great weather, I find that totally baffling.  The weather just happens.  That emotional response is weird to me.  Same with gifts, really.  I can appreciate a gift, but it is clear people are expecting a emotional reaction from me that they never get.  I pretend to have it in order to make social situations work but I have never quite gotten it.

I was bad at this as a kid because I didn't have the reactions most people did and I hadn't yet worked out how to fake it or dodge it.  As an adult I still find this part of the world confusing and bizarre but I have all my systems in place to do the thing that makes people calm, and which keeps them thinking that I am having the internal experience they expect me to.

I do look forward to getting old though, in particular the part where everyone just gives up on me ever changing and accepts that I am cantankerous and bizarre.  Then I can stop doing the stuff that gets me by these situations and just be me and they can all sigh and talk about how there is no point in trying to change me, and they might as well just cope with it until I die.

There are many things about getting old that suck, but I am looking forward to that part at least.

3 comments:

  1. This seems like hyperbolic nonsense.

    You're saying you don't trust institutions. And you're raging on people with nonsense beliefs. But it's hardly as dramatic as "I don't trust anyone".

    Or maybe it's just a matter of definitions. You're saying you don't believe things without evidence. This is not revelatory. Ironically, neither does anyone else, they just have a different definition of what constitutes evidence.

    Gratitude is a bit trickier. Gift giving is nonsense because most of the time it's formalized and a mess. I'm with you there.

    But if someone does something genuinely nice for you, without expecting anything in return, or someone does a favour for you that you ask for but didn't expect to get a "yes", you don't feel anything? You just shrug and say, "cool, I got advantage"?

    I have trouble believing that.

    Fake gifts, gifts that are actually obligations, sure, but I don't think that's where you see real gratitude. When someone takes care of my kids when they have no obligation to (say an overnight playdate!) so that I can have a night off, I'm (often ridiculously) grateful. And I might even try to return the favour, but that's because I'm actually grateful, vs. a calculated exchange.

    Calculated exchanges happen, don't get me wrong. But they're not all like that. Presumably you are occasionally happy that your wife has done something for you, without adding up the equation to see if that means you now owe her.

    Your comment on being grateful for the weather is a bit different. Are you grateful that your family is healthy, you live in the 1st world, your wife has agreed to polyamory, and you have a bunch of privilege? I'm not sure grateful is actually the right word, but that's the one people use. Do you appreciate it? Are you happy you have it? If so, that's what other people call grateful.

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    1. I think you missed my point. By some definitions of trust, like "I think this person will do things I approve of" clearly I trust people. But there is an emotion that is often evoked between people that they call trust, and that emotion is foreign to me. I just don't get it, but I can tell that other people do. The fact that you can't see inside my head to know this doesn't mean it isn't there.

      Grateful is the same. I appreciate things, but when people say they are grateful they sometimes just mean appreciating, but often it implies an emotion that I don't feel much or any of. Again, I watch them act, I see the way they do things, and it makes no sense unless the great majority of humanity experiences an emotion that I don't experience. I get and experience personally most emotions that other people have, so these two stand out as ones that I really don't share the common experience.

      I am good at acting like I do, because I have had to be. This fools nearly everyone, because I got good at it. You are among the nearly everyone.

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  2. Ooh - that last sentence is well phrased and pointed!

    I still don't understand the distinction. You're talking about an emotion between people called trust, but your examples are between people and institutions/distant leaders. Someone could say "I trust the government/religious leader because I was raised that way, and I'm not an expert and I assume most people are working hard and want to do the right thing". Is that an emotion? It feels like a decision/belief. They might be passionate about it, but I feel like that's more a passion of doubling down on their belief and not wanting to be wrong. Or being in an environment where everyone is passionate. Or people express their passion about such topics.

    You seem to be suggesting that you're abnormal in some way, but in this respect, it feels like the majority of your peers would completely agree with you. Can you think of an example of something I might trust that seems foreign to you?

    Despite the nice barb, I'm can't say that I've ever seen you gushing with gratitude, I was just asking how you feel about the situations where people do really great things for you (I'm not one of those people - I give you rotting food to eat, and cheese!). I guess I'm not understanding what you're saying. I get that you don't like the appropriate response to gift giving. And when people say they are grateful for the weather maybe they mean they are grateful to god or something, which brings us back to atheism and that's hardly new. But can you provide other examples? Again, is there a time when I've shown emotional gratitude that you felt was misplaced?

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