Trust can work two ways, as faith (a belief based on the insubstantial, the future and other truths placed offstage) and as considered belief based on onstage facts and past experience. Like many troublesome English words, these ideas are opposites, but they share the same short and slippery designation. Call them, for this essay, faith-trust and fact-trust. ...A good distinction, but why should we consider secrecy, prevarication and promise-breaking as necessary elements of good governance?
Now secrecy, prevarication and promise breaking are, sadly, all necessary elements of governance, whether good governance or bad. Use of force is an essential part of police practice, and religious practitioners work in a realm between worlds, where confidentiality and metaphorical, story-based thought are central, and divine logic can appear to run counter to the worldly.
Given these necessities, how are we to differentiate honest stewards and good guardians from plutocrats and well-spoken thugs? And how, in self-defense, do we detect and detach ourselves from the injurious objects of our faith-trust?
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
Faith and Facts
Two-Faced Trust:
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