July 2023
I was fascinated this past Sunday by the Biblioracle’s latest post: Where Did Our Authorities Go?
And fascinated enough to write a response as his final questions were:
“So, tell me, what do you trust? Who do you trust? How do you work through the turbulence when you realize something you believed might not actually be true? Share your wisdom in the comments for the benefit of all.”
I remember interacting with a similar question from Danielle LaPorte years ago when I was reading The Desire Map multiple times a year. It guided me through some personally troubling times.
One of her exercises is to make a “What I trust” list – spoken, written, whatever. The theory is that listing and/or reading that list will help your brain and body calm down and relax your nervous system.
This entire thought of trusting in anything was baffling and anxiety producing for me.
That’s when you realize you are Mulder in the X-files and you really do “Trust no one.”
I wish that was it but it wasn’t. She acknowledged that trusting in people might be a bit dicey. So other options were listed, like “I trust the sun will rise tomorrow” or “I trust that my next breath will keep coming”
I don’t know about you but…I’m not God.
So in acknowledging I’m not God, that means, well, I can’t trust any of that either. I may be gone in my next breath. The sun may not “rise” tomorrow and may instead do something else, start moving away from us, go dark, something.
We all know that some stranger-than-fiction bizarreness can happen in a heartbeat.
I skipped that exercise – her goal with that was to make us feel better and since it didn’t, I was out (and skipped reading about it on all my re-reads.)
So when I found myself compelled to write an answer to Biblioracle’s post about that same question, I was surprised. It was made easier by the context of the article which is about information/writing, how we get it, what was/is the agenda, the whole AI making stuff up (people making stuff up now collected for AI to do so)…we want to trust what we read and we all know now that we can’t. (Sometimes we forget.)
Even if we had people fact checking on everything 24/7 – we all have our own biases and prejudices. You find what you look for. (Otherwise why do we have all these “news” sites that are saying a million different things?)
So the question, what do I trust in this world?
My answer: Nothing.
What you trust, or as I rephrase it, What you believe MATTERS.
What you trust/believe shapes your being – all your thoughts and interactions. And if you trust in a brand, religion, political view, cultural view, etc. odds are good, you are going to look like and be a model of that brand.
We have let ourselves become commodities of all of those things above (and many other things) that make us into their image instead of us making the commodities into ours.
I trust nothing because I am not a commodity to be researched, studied, controlled and manipulated.
I am not a computer program. If you enter “Catholic” or “White Middle Aged Woman” (both things that I am but not in any way that is popularized or understood), my actions NOT match what the program has decided 90% of those people act. I do not let the items, people and society around me define who I am. I am the final decision maker and they are the tools and resources of my life that I use. It’s not the other way around.
I will work constantly against all the data collectors who want to show me “relevant” ads that are anything but. I will constantly confuse and defy the algorithms not because I’m trying to but because I am a human and the technology works for me. I don’t work for it. It doesn’t run me and tell me what to read and watch.
“I have read too much history to have any impulse to idealize the past.”
– Marilynne Robinson What Are We Doing Here? Essays
I’ve done enough living and hurting to know that the stories we tell, the paradigms we live within were created by people with ideas, motives and dreams likely different from ours.
And it is our responsibility to interact with them instead of consuming them.
It’s no different than listening to The Still Small Voice inside of you. Except that these voices on the outside, if you are complacent and filling up with them, could keep you from hearing the only one that really matters.