*disclaimer – a lot of this post was taken from a couple different Jordan Peterson biblical series lectures. They aren’t exact quotes, I would blend his sentences and his words with mine, it would of been impossible to accurately cite his work. Just know much of the main body of this post comes from his mouth. I just combined a lot of different points he made, in my own way, into one cogent post for the thought I had about trust.

I’d like to talk about trust. I’m seeing the erosion of trust happen in many different aspects of society right now (personal/private/individual, institutions, government, corporate, etc.). I think this is an ignorant, naive, ego inflated, and dangerous trend. I’m not saying there isn’t good reason for the erosion of trust in theses various areas, and I’m not saying to trust naively.

Let me clarify here. Many people think that putting trust in strangers or with individuals and/or institutions that have warranted a lack of trust is dumb and naive. I agree that blind trust is naive and am not recommending that. But placing trust in someone, while understanding how you can be hurt in the situation is not dumb or naive, it’s brave. This is the sort of trust I’m advocating for.

Placing trust in individuals (while understanding/preparing for how you can be hurt) is partly how you “walk with God”. It’s to take part of the transcendent aspect of Being. To understand this, there is a few things I need to explain. It has to do with with how you interact and conduct yourself towards the “strange” (so stranger(s), strange people, strange ideas, and/or that which is not you, etc. – so interacting with things that your first instinct isn’t to trust).

To walk with God means to elevate your aim and to move towards Him, or the highest ideal you can possibly think of. As you do this you create a judge, the “new you”/the new ideal becomes the judge, because it’s above you, directing you. This thing that’s above you, judging you, is useful because it tells you what’s useless about yourself so that you can dispense with it. As you keep doing this you create a higher and higher judge, which means more and more of you is being dispensed with. The idea here is that you eventually come up with the ultimate judge. The archetypal imagination of human kind has come up the ultimate and perfect judge, and man, which is Christ. This judge tells you to get rid of every part of you that isn’t perfect.

This is what God tells Abraham, to be perfect, to pick an ideal high enough and move towards it. Whats great about this idea is that this is something you can do on your own terms, although you do have to have some collaboration with others. You don’t have to pick an external ideal (such as Christ), you pick an ideal that fulfills the role of ideal for you. You ask yourself “If things could be set up for me the way that I need them to be,  and if I could be who I needed to be, what would that look like?” In doing that you instantly form a judge, this is partly why people don’t look up and move ahead. Because it’s easy to feel intimated in the face of your own ideal. This is what Cain does to Abel, it’s easier to try and destroy the ideal instead of moving towards it, because then you get rid of the judge. This is why you lower the judge if you need to, because maybe the ideal you created is crushing you and is playing the role of the tyrant. Tap down your ambitions if needed, not destroy them.

I think this idea is beautiful, because this process of recapitulating yourself over and over again is a Phoenix like process. And as you’re doing this you are shaping yourself ever more precisely into something that can withstand the tragedy of life and as a person that can act as a beacon to the world. This turns you into someone that can be reliable in a crisis, someone to look up to. The people you know that are like that and you look up to, you can consider them partial manifestations of the archetypal messiah.

So if you want to thrive in life, to not live in isolation inbittered, lonely and resentful, this is how you treat or interact with the “strange” and/or unknown. Ask yourself what do I want make friends with more? What do I want to be more comfortable with? Do I want to be more comfortable with that which I already know? (The circumscribed territory you have already mastered) Or do you want to be comfortable with all the things you don’t know? The right answer is that you want to be more comfortable with the things you don’t know.  Because you are going to encounter a lot in life that you do not know. You want to be the person that can act where they don’t know.

You don’t know who the stranger is when you encounter them. And It depends on if you’re thinking about it in the normative or transcendent manner. With each person you meet they’re just a person, people like to shield themselves, so what you know about who they are is what they choose to reveal to you. But then they’re also something of great metaphysical potential. You may ask if this is something you actually believe, and the answer is yes. Because you generally expect alot out of people and get very upset if they betray you.

Our entire culture is predicated on the idea that each person has an indefinite intrinsic worth, and I’m not talking about self esteem. “What I’m talking about is the implicit presupposition in our legal stucture that no matter who you are (even if you’re a condemned murderer) that there is something about you that is of transcendent value that has to be respected, by the law and by other people. You may not think you believe that but you do, because you follow the law.”

So this is where trust comes in again. Abraham, in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, when strangers come to his door he welcomes them with open arms. The lesson here being this is how you should conduct yourself. In doing so, you hold out your hand in trust to someone and you evoke the best from them, if that’s there to give. It’s an act of courage, it isn’t just me meeting you, it’s the transcendent part of me making a gesture to you that allows the transcendent part of you to step forward.

This happens all the time in normative discourse. Because sometimes you can have a real casual conversation with someone that is shallow and just goes no where. Or now and then you can actually make contact with someone, where you’re both enlightened and enobled by the conversation. And for reasons we don’t quite understand we call that a “deep conversation”, because we made a deep connection, whatever that means. We know it doesn’t mean shallow, we aren’t sure what these metaphors mean. But it atleast means that it reaches deep inside of you, you make direct person to person contact. These sorts of conversations are replenishing, they provide you with that sort of “bread” that isn’t material bread. That’s the information you need to thrive and put yourself together. So it does matter if you extend out your trust, and how you first meet people and treat them.

You have to trust and act on the presupposition that people have something of great interest to reveal. When people tell you their idiosyncratic stories they tell you something you didn’t know. So that means you can treat the landscape of strangers as and endless vista of places to learn things you didn’t know. If your life is insufficient and you’re suffering more than you want to, and everything isn’t what it should be, then you need to look where you haven’t looked, for what you don’t have. So you can look outside, beyond yourself, and make friends with what you don’t understand.

People get what they evoke, so ask yourself, if you’re not getting from people what you need (others are not honest, distrustful, mean, etc.) then there is some possibility that it is you. Especially if the same bad thing keeps happening to you across multiple people, then it most certainly is you. It’s either you or the world, and better it be you, because you aren’t going to change the whole world.

Being the person that extends out trust first, that can act in the unknown, that takes the best part of themselves and invites out the best in others, will live a fuller life in every way imaginable. It will equip you to prevail over the tragedy and suffering of life. I see this as a requirement in life to trust others, to take part in the replenishing, transcendent aspect of Being. Without that we will live a lonely, bitter, and paltry life. So be courageous, “walk with God”, and act as a beacon of light to your family, friends, and thus, the world.