https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Ymr1lXhKD7w
Hello and welcome to Navigating Patterns. What I’d like to talk about today is the web of trust. How trust works, why trust is a web that we can interface, that interfaces with us, and how there can be an element of antitrust contagion that can break down that web in a very global way without us realizing exactly what’s going on. As always, these are my definitions. Feel free to adopt my definitions or if you don’t like them, throw them out. Or better yet, modify them to match your own worldview. I think it’s important to define trust as a web or think of it as a pane of glass because it seems to be a global phenomenon in our heads such that if our trust is broken, it seems to be a little bit less, even far away from the event. So one example of this that was introduced to me by some friends as I was trying to explain this, they were doing a much better job in this case, was if you’re in a marriage and your spouse cheats on you, and let’s suppose you’re the wife and it’s the husband that’s cheating just because there’s some easy off the top of the head examples, and he gets caught, the wife’s obviously trust is broken, she’s pissed, understandably so. The example that was given was just, it was great. If he goes and says, well don’t worry, I’ll take out the trash, she’s going to be like, yeah, you’ll take out the trash to go see your hussy across the neighborhood there that you cheated with. And this is a real example, now she doesn’t trust him to take out the trash. He’s always taken out the trash, why would she not trust him all of a sudden? Because the wider web of trust has been disturbed, or the top level pane of glass has been tapped and now there’s cracks throughout the whole thing, either way you want to think of it. And so what is it about trust that causes it to work this way? I think trust is related to intelligibility. The trust is a tool that we use to make sure the world is going to work the way we expect, to make things more predictable for us. As such, it’s not a local phenomenon, it’s a phenomenon that helps us understand everything and it’s in short supply sometimes. Sometimes we can move all our trust from one place to another, that can be very bad because if you’re relying on something too much then maybe it’s got too much of a burden and once that trust is broken all the things associated with that structure are also broken. But again the wider web of trust is still affected and this is what you see in trauma a lot of times too. So an incident happens to you, you’re out at night, you’re walking across the crosswalk, a car stops just in front of you, like almost touching you, nearly takes you out. And now every time you walk across any street, even the daylight, even a street where there’s not a lot of car traffic, you’re constantly traumatized with it because your trust has been broken and not just in that context. A lot of people develop things like agoraphobia from one single incident outside where they can’t rely on the world anymore, they feel they can’t rely on the world anymore. And so that seems to be how the web of trust works. And then what can happen is that there are these antitrust contagions that can sort of spread out through the web, right, or keep breaking that pane of trust, that glass of trust. And they’re very pernicious because we don’t always understand trust that way and then we don’t always see the little things, the little cracks in the trust, the little breaks in the web, the little ways in which we can’t navigate the world anymore because trust has been broken. And once this starts happening, it can be very hard for us to reverse it. And that’s why we have things like agoraphobia, fear of going outside, right, or, you know, fears around certain things being outside at night or fears around letting somebody do something for you, right? I mean, suddenly you get very narrowed, very reciprocally narrowed on your own point of view and trying to control everything. And really a break in trust causes you to ruminate on control, right, because you want to get that trust back. Once it’s sort of disturbed, it can really grow and really spin you out of control completely where you think you’re gaining more control, but actually all you’re doing is making yourself anxious and getting less and less control over the things around you. And the only solution to that is to let go of the control. And that’s one of the more difficult things to do, especially since we’re very egoic. We like to think we can have control and that when we exert control, that things are going to go the way we expect and that when things go the way that we expect, our predictions about what will happen as a result are also true. So that’s three different things that are tied up in this one little trust chain. And because trust is this web, this interwoven way of understanding and being able to predict the world, we get into trouble once that web starts to unwind and we have to strive to rebuild those structures somehow or to relate to them differently. And maybe it’s the relation to trust that actually matters. But I think it’s important to understand this breaking of trust. It happens a lot too in politics, right? So you vote for a candidate, whether it’s local or federal, and then they do the one thing, the one thing that says, wait a minute, I thought for sure that this is something that they felt passionately about that they could get done and they didn’t get it done. And the next thing you know, you’re suspecting your neighbors of being terrorist sympathizers. And that how I’ve seen people do that. It happens all the time. People get very paranoid very quickly when trust is broken and they stop trusting their own senses. And that’s really what’s at the heart, I think, of trust problems is that because you’ve lost predictive power, because a prediction you made didn’t go your way, your trust in yourself is broken. And that’s why it’s global. That’s why it’s a pane of glass that gets shattered. That’s why it’s this web that can very quickly unravel or unravel in unexpected and unseen ways. And regaining that trust is all about the ability to make better predictions and let go of the predictive results. Because a lot of times we make good predictions and we’re right about what’s going to happen. But the result of that is not what we expect. And this is just a human condition, basically. It’s something that you’re going to build up your trust and get it broken over and over again. It’s a perennial problem to use John Vervicki’s term. I think this idea of having too much trust and then having too little trust and that there’s no real right answer. It’s got to change with your conditions around you because you get better and worse at predicting things over time. Popular music is a good example. I mean, you look at what became popular at different decades or during different five-year periods or something. And it looks like there’s a pattern, but at the time you didn’t know what was going to become popular. Even within a specific genre, nobody predicted that Nirvana was going to be part of grunge rock. Really? Come on, that’s crazy. And a lot of people were very big on, well, everyone’s going to listen to dance music and EDM and not everybody listens to that stuff either. And we get very caught up in our own little worldviews. And when that trust unravels, we don’t trust our own predictions anymore, which means we don’t feel safe because trust and safety are tightly coupled. Tightly coupled. So trust is really that feeling that if pressed, our predictions are going to work out the way we want. And then further, that the results of the actions forecasted by our predictions are also going to go the way we want. And letting go of the latter is really important, right? Because oftentimes we can make a correct prediction, but things don’t go the way we want after that. And we often tie these things up together. And it’s just really hard to get it right. And I think that once that antitrust contagion comes in, that lack of self-confidence, that breaking of your will to continue to try to predict the world, that’s when it starts to narrow in on you and things get smaller and smaller. And that contagion really just removes or moves your ability to trust. And this is where we get into things like conspiracy theories. So I covered this in a previous video about conspiracy theories, right? We’re really trying to find intelligibility in the world, not necessarily so that we can control it, but so that we can at least predict it and work around it. And then once that antitrust contagion comes in, we’re looking for more and more ways to find intelligibility, whether it be conspiracy theories, whether we’re engaging in pure fear, right? Fear of going out, fear of going out at night, fear of getting too involved with somebody emotionally, whatever it is. Those are two sort of common reactions. There’s probably more reactions too, but those are the two that sort of seem to go right along with the contagion idea. Once that contagion gets in there, it just rips apart your trust and rebuilding that is very difficult. So I hope that this helps you to see the importance of trust and the way it’s helping us make sense of the world and making sense of the world is giving us the power to predict without betting too heavily on the result of the correct prediction or the incorrect prediction. And at the same time, that ability to sense make and predict is the thing that gives us a sense of safety, a sense of comfort, a sense that we have a place to stand where we can explore. Because once we’re out of exploratory mode in our thought mode, we tend to get addicted and reciprocally narrow on bad things, basically on the negative. And that’s what we’re trying to avoid. So I hope that you can all be more mindful of trust as a mechanism for safety and a mechanism for making you able to go out into the world and experiment and find new things and explore. Thank you very much for your time and attention.