I am looking at Jo Immig’s article in last week’s Echo, where she said the reasons human have been successful as a species is not down to competition or survival of the fittest, but through the exercise of trust.
She claims it’s because we cooperate and collaborate with each other other based on trust.
This is just my opinion, but if I look at the history of the world, all I see is a history deeply formed by mistrust, by breaking apart of communities, by continuous wars, crises, philosophical differences, and many, many other things that don’t have anything to do with trust.
So I know that’s unpopular – because what Jo wrote is what people want to hear, but is it true? Do we really trust others in a crisis, as she puts it, and is our human nature really to help each other and even risk our lives for each other?
If that is so, how can we relate to things like Gaza and Ukraine or the multitudinous long-term conflicts around the world – so many that a large number don’t even enter our consciousness any longer?
To me, it just doesn’t make sense. What I do feel is that we do use trust to try to manipulate our impressions of safety.
It appears to us that if we trust someone, we are safer, and I would suggest that our primary motivation is not trust but safety, and trust is only an aspect of safety that we try to manipulate to remain safe.
None of us fundamentally feel safe, and consequently, when threatened, we do resort to the very human aspects that I talked about of war, conflict, blaming others, and in many, many different ways becoming once again the victim we all hate.
I have been trying incessantly to understand this extremely fragmented milieu I find myself in today. Trust unfortunately has gone down the gurgler – just as has truth.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
