What is trust ...

I finished The Cleansing Flames by R.N. Morris last night (review soon). It has a number of nice observational touches. I liked this one about the relative, provisional nature of trust. A very poststructural argument.

'Can I trust you? Can you trust me? Can he trust us? I mean to say, my dear Kirill Kirillovich, that trust is always relative, always provisional, always unstable. Trust, whatever it is, is a highly volatile substance. I am not sure it even exists at all. And so, there is no meaningful answer to the question you asked. One must act as if there is trust between us, otherwise we could get nothing done. Still and all, at the same time, one must never lower one's guard. In essence, trust no one. Do not even trust yourself, Kirill Kirillovich.'

The problem with thinking ...

I've started to read R.N. Morris' The Cleansing Flames. Only sixty or so pages in, but came across a nice passage last night about the opportunities and dangers of thinking.

To think - to think deeply and honestly and freely - was to make yourself vulnerable. It involved cutting yourself loose from the security of received ideas and laying yourself open to new ones. It was an unsettling activity. Eventually, if one perservered, it led to greater strength. But first there was a period of uncertainty and anxiety to endure, from which some never emerged. They would spend their whole lives in a state of crippling doubt, cowering beneath a shell of cynicism.

One of the joys of being a social scientist, I think, is to spend an entire career intellectually vulnerable and in doubt, though hopefully not of the crippling kind.