Trust: a geeky perspective

Well, I feel silly. A milestone birthday arrived today, and in addition to the bother of baking the expected cheesecake for co-workers, I lingered at my post two hours late last night and was in an hour early this morning to thwart any attempts at fitting my cubicle for its "suit of sables". As it turns out, that flavor of hazing is (by recent HR fiat) verboten. I suppose that every great once in a while, the firm's martinets can be a force for good--the law of averages, if no reason else...

The odd thing is the contrast between whom I would have expected to be the instigators and the one--according to my inside source--who was actually plotting it until she was warned off.

The notion of trust has been a dominant theme chez psyche this week, actually. On Monday I had to tell a friend that she had committed a middling breach of my trust, and have yet to receive any reply, much less apology. If there's an upside to being a control-freak, it's that one's feelings are not exempt from the illusion of "controllability". Even building a large fence around the swamp-kingdom of emotion is a form of control. And so the partitions between where someone can and cannot be trusted have been erected. I've done the same over the years with people who have hurt me far, far more deeply. And life, as is its wont, goes on.

In college Psychology 101, I never did quite grok the difference between rationalization and intellectualization. And still don't, even after twenty years and change. To me, intellectualization seems to say to oneself, "If I can find a high-fallutin' explanation for what I'm doing, I don't have to feel guilty about it." Which is still a rationalization to my mind, albeit with a philosophical/scientific pedigree. Yet here I find myself intellectualizing the impulse to throw trust under the bus. In my present mood, trust is less a warm, fuzzy emotion than it is a mechanism for minimizing the amount of information that we have to process. To wit: Streamlining thousands of friend-or-foe decisions each day down to mere dozens. From that perspective, trust can be restyled as mental laziness, something that makes me squirm whenever I discover it in myself.

On the flip side, though, I can also see a complete absence of trust having a corroding effect on the spirit, as well as the practical downside of making one seem less trustworthy. And, perhaps, even become less trustworthy--particularly if one rationalizes bad behavior by projecting one's motives on everyone else. Not good in any number of ways, quite apart from also being another incarnation of mental laziness.

All the same, this week is a good proverbial kick in the shins to start paying more attention to the agendas around me. Obliviousness is a pricier luxury than I thought.