Trust; that’s the central issue in this entire
debacle.
It reminds me of a slightly smutty story when I
schooled at the Convent of Mercy. The story goes that a trainee nun spent nine
months as a postulant and then celebrated the next step on her holy way towards
being a novitiate by having a harmless fling with the local Parish Priest. The
inevitable happened and she was filled with more than the Holy Spirit.
A country girl, she was resourceful and
succeeded in keeping her condition secret by virtue of her expansive garb right
up to the time of delivery.
On the night of the delivery she crept along the
corridor and laid the babe on the cot beside the reverend mother. When the
mother woke up next morning and saw the mite beside her the first words were
“you can’t trust your own finger these days”.
Who can any of us trust in this existence? The
obvious first assessment must be self. We all believe we can at least trust
ourselves totally. But can we? Until we are sorely tried or tempted we will
hardly know. Would we lie, steal, assault or even kill? Surely not. Yet men
have been engaged in these activities since the beginning of time as we know
it.
Necessity often overrules lofty principle. If
your children were starving might you not steal a loaf of bread to keep them
alive or if someone insulted your mother would you not deliver a slap in the
puss or a boot in the dangles? Think about it. Trust is generally a matter for
the future often based on past experience. My mother used to say; “you can trust
a thief but you can’t trust a liar”.
When one party is confident that he is prepared
and willing to rely on the future actions of another that stance could be
defined as trust. It has the obvious drawback that one party is ceding control
in a given situation to another party over which the first party has no
control. As a result the trusting one cannot be certain about the expected
behaviour of the one to be trusted.
As Hemingway said;
“The best
way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them”
Certain societal types have traditionally been
given the benefit of the doubt in this matter usually because of the position
they hold in society. Doctors, solicitors, priests and nuns, teachers,
policemen and others have historically been trusted to a ridiculous degree in
the past and experience has taught us that the person in the most trusted
position is the one who can inflict the most damage when they take unlawful or
deceitful advantage of that trust.
To my detriment I am a living example of this
phenomenon.
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