Opinion | Importance of Trust

Trust is important, but it is also dangerous. It is important because it allows us to depend on others—for love, for advice, for help with our plumbing, or what have you—especially when we know that no outside force compels them to give us these things. But trust also involves the risk that people we trust will not pull through for us, for if there were some guarantee they would pull through, then we would have no need to trust them. Trust is therefore dangerous. What we risk while trusting is the loss of valuable things that we entrust to others, including our self-respect perhaps, which can be shattered by the betrayal of our trust.

Someone who asks, “When is trust warranted?” might be interested in knowing what the point of trust is. In other words, what value does it have? Although the value it has for particular people will depend on their circumstances, the value it could have for anyone will depend on why trust is valuable, generally speaking. Trust can have enormous instrumental value and may also have some intrinsic value. In discussing its instrumental value, this section refers to the “goods of trust”, which can benefit the trustor, the trustee, or society in general. They are therefore social and/or individual goods. What is more and as emphasized throughout, these goods tend to accompany justified trust, rather than any old trust. Like the other sections of this entry, this one focuses predominantly though not exclusively on trust; it also mentions recent work on the value of distrust.
We often come across instances where we find two persons, who once were best friends have turned foes; a couple who were happily married have turned into two perfect strangers; an employee who once was praised by his employer is suddenly fired. One of the causes is breaching trust. In fact I can say that many of us have become victims of such dreadful experiences sometimes in life. The younger generation is particularly prone to such occurrences. Whenever such an incident happens to any of us, the result is we feel let down and land in depression. The question now is: why trust binds us together, why relations break in its absence and what should we do to save our relations.
Trust is like letting others know our feelings, emotions and reactions; having confidence in them that they will respect us and won’t take any undue advantage. Or it may be like placing confidence in others so that they will be supportive. We all open ourselves to others, be it our friends, parents, relatives etc to share our problems, concerns and fears. This is where trust finds its place in our respective lives. Just like a truss which is a sort of frame that provides support to a roof or a bridge, similarly as long as trust exists in any relation, it supports and nourishes it and prevents it from sinking.
A wealthy person leaves his entire riches into the hands of a servant; two friends share their topmost secrets, just because of trust. Similarly a bigwig has his trust on his bodyguards, who carry the same arsenal as that of his assassin but the guards use them for the safety of their cardinal. This inner sense of acceptance we have of others with whom we are able to share secrets, knowing they are safe is trust. Quite often we find ourselves in ambivalence when our heart or brain is unable to decide whether we should trust an outsider or not. This feeling always creeps in from the past bitter experience that we might have had where our trust has been broken. So being human we always try to avoid such circumstances again where we might hurt ourselves. But in spite of all the bitter experiences that one might have, we still find ourselves trusting again on a friend or a person.”You may be deceived,’ Frank Crane said, ‘if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you don’t trust enough”.
We repose our trust in our friends and other relations in one way or the other. In the case of blood relations trust is inherent. But the other form of trust which builds up gradually with time between two persons who don’t share a blood relation is where we are at risk. This trust exists between two friends. If this trust continues to exist in friendship, it is a blessing and we feel like on top of the world.

– The author is MSC Chemistry and can be reached at banghushunter8491@gmail.com