The Trigger Of Trust

"In a world where other individuals are constantly on the alert for opportunities to exploit kin-selected altruism, and use it for their own ends, a survival machine has to consider who it can trust, who it can really be sure of." pg 105. When we decide to trust someone, we usually gather a number of characteristics of that being that make us have some security on whether to trust them or not. It is explained here that some people might take advantage of another person who is willing to give something up, so the person who is having someone else taking advantage of him usually has to decide to trust him or not. Sometimes people deceive us into believing they are worth trusting, and end up taking advantage over us. This is a clear example of what is known as altruism vs selfish intentions, since we do not care about the benefit of the group but rather our own personal benefit. An example of this could be the case of Attila the Hun, who is known worldwide as someone who was almost unbeatable in battle. Feared in battle, no one was ever able to inflict him a wound. He was a man that took safety measures in trusting other people, but by trusting someone who he considered to not represent any danger (his wife) it was she who would end up killing him. For him his wife may have not presented a danger, since one usually gives trust to close family members, but the wife took complete control over the situation by simulating to be someone he could trust only to get the best out of him.

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This is how trust is manipulated, and it is why trusting someone has become so hard. By trusting someone we are becoming vulnerable to that person in some aspect, so when trusting we see all the circumstances that help us decide whether to do it or not. We become scared that if we give too much trust, it can come to hurt us in the future. This might be a trigger to making us become the same as what we are scared of. When we are scared that maybe the trust we give people might be used against us, we sometimes take the measure to assure ourselves that if that person violates the trust pact, we will do the same to them. So by actually doing the thing we fear will be done to us, we are actually keeping ourselves safe from that same thing we decided to give in the first place, and whose purpose is to give us some tranquility on who we can count on. Trusting someone has become a matter of deceiving, an act of calculated actions between the trusted and the trusting, and a game in which our tranquility relies in our ability plan ahead before taking action.