an increased valuing...............

 

People who depend too much upon the past have become almost useless in many professions.  We need a new kind of human being who can divorce himself from his past, who feels strong and courageous and trusting enough to trust himself in the present situation, to handle the problem well in an improvising way, without previous preparation, if need be.

     All of this adds up to an increased emphasis on psychological health and strength.  It means an increased valuing of the ability to pay fullest attention to the here-now situation, to be able to listen well, to be able to see well in the concrete, immediate moment before us.  It means that we need people who are different from the average kind of person who confronts the present as if it were a repetition of the past, and who uses the present simply as a period in which he prepares for future threats and dangers, which he doesn't trust himself enough to meet unprepared when the time comes.

-Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

On trusting the process..............

 

 . . . I’m about to run into trouble, because I don’t have everything I need (the right arguments, good enough material, whatever) for the bit that’s coming next. This bothers me less than it used to, though, because again and again, the missing insight, anecdote, or angle arrives just in time. I’ll open a book at random, or hear something on a podcast, or a friend will make a comment, or I’ll notice something on a walk, and it’ll be exactly what I need for everything to fall into place. It never seems to arrive until the moment it’s required, though, so that’s more way it’s being constantly hammered home to me that trusting yourself/reality/the process is the whole game here. 

-Oliver Burkeman, from this edition

in trust.................

 

. . . we who pass do not own this land, we but use it, we hold it briefly in trust for those yet to come.  We must not reap with seeding, we must not take for the earth without replacing.

-Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

talent............................

 

Trust....................

 

Trust your own instinct.  Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.

-attributed to Billy Wilder

Starting to think that.......................

 

................Bari Weiss is a national treasure:

What's become clear is the crisis of trust is more accurately a crisis of trustworthiness.

In other words, it's not that Americans have randomly stopped trusting the experts while softening toward the conspiracy theorists.  It's that so many experts have been exposed as partisan and unreliable and stopped deserving our trust.

-as culled from here

safetyism..........................

 

If one cares about safety (and who doesn't), one does well to take a skeptical look at the safety-industrial complex, and its reliance on moral intimidation to pursue ends other than safety.

. . . if left unchallenged, the pursuit of risk reduction tends to create a society based on an unrealistically low view of human capacities.  Infantilization slips in, under cover of democratic ideals.  I will insist, on the contrary, that democracy remains viable only if we are willing to extend to one another a presumption of individual competence.  This is what social trust is built on.  Together, they are the minimal endowments for a free, responsible, fully awake people.

-Matthew Crawford,  Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control

Emptiness.........................

 America’s elites fear and mistrust the American voter. They have lost faith in democracy, a system that in 2016 delivered the power of the presidency to the monstrous Trump, and they dream of a rising class of Platonic guardians, people exactly like themselves, with the right pedigree, the right opinions, the right manners, who rule not because they have won an electoral lottery but in perpetuity, as a reward for their superior virtue.

-Martin Gurri,  from here

thanks Michael

Dots...........................

 

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

-Steve Jobs, as quoted here

Getting into...........................

 

................the nitty-gritty of trust:

It’s not a good idea to warily eye everyone like they’re potential contestants on “Who Wants to Betray Me Next?” Studies show expecting others to be selfish can be a self-fulfilling prophecy: “those who expect people to act selfishly, actually experience uncooperative behaviour from others more often.”

Meanwhile, displaying trust in others from the get-go can create the opposite type of self-fulfilling prophecy: people want to prove your trust in them to be justified. Research shows seemingly irrational displays of trust often prove quite rational because it leads others to trust you and not want to let you down.

an immense treasure.................

      Like Warren Buffett, Munger inherited no wealth.  He built his fortune on the sheer power of his will and his business acumen.

     "While no real money came down, my family gave me a good education and a marvelous example of how people should behave, and in the end that was more valuable than money," explained Munger.  "Being surrounded by the right values from the beginning is an immense treasure.  Warren had that.  It even has a financial advantage.  People trusted Warren partly because he was a Buffett and people trusted the Buffetts."

-Janet Lowe, Damn Right!: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger

Clarity.........................

      When the brilliant ethicist John Kavanaugh went to work for three months at "the house of the dying" in Calcutta, he was seeking a clear answer as to how best to spend the rest of his life.  On the first morning there he met Mother Teresa.  She asked, "And what can I do for you?"  Kavanaugh asked her to pray for him.

     "What do you want me to pray for?" she asked.  He voiced the request that he had borne thousands of miles from the United States: "Pray that I have clarity."

     She said firmly, "No, I will not do that."  When he asked her why, she said, "Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of."  When Kavanaugh commented that she always seemed to have the clarity he longed for, she laughed and said, "I have never had clarity, what I have always had is trust.  So I will pray that you trust God."

-Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin's Path to God

Ouch.......................

 The problem that’s been threatening Western democracies for years, and which is captured in books like Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public, is the widespread loss of faith in institutional authority. At first this was a technical problem, caused by a monstrous new surfeit of information on the Internet, allowing the public for the first time to see warts that were always there. What’s happening now is different. Even those of us who never trusted leaders before at least trusted such people to act in their self-interest. We thought that in emergencies, even the worst officials would suspend their stealing and conniving long enough to do the bare minimum.

As these documents show, however, we can’t even have that expectation.

-Matt Taibbi, from here

Credit.....................

 Credit—the disposition of one man to trust another—is singularly varying.

-Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market

Trust........................

       Trust does not emerge simply because a seller made a rational case why the customer should buy a product or service, or because an executive promises change. Trust is not a checklist.  Fulfilling all your responsibilities does not create trust.  Trust is a feeling, not a rational experience.  We trust some people and companies even when things go wrong, and we don't trust others even though everything might have gone exactly as it should have.  A completed checklist does not guarantee trust.  Trust begins to emerge when we have a sense that another person or organization is driven by things other than their own gain.

-Simon Sinek, Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action

intuit.........................

 All species struggle to survive and strive to reproduce.  A chance mutation about 200,000 years ago made early Homo sapiens more sensitive to social information.  This mutation increased the number of oxytocin receptors in the brain's frontal lobe, enabling out ancestors to not only understand what others were doing cognitively, but also experience the emotions of others.  This helped early humans survive by enabling them to draw on social resources more effectively.

Over time the mutation spread.  Rather than being limited to living in small bands of kin-based groups as our genus had for millions of years, Homo sapiens could live in increasingly larger and more complex societies because they could intuit others' intentions.  The most basic social information is the intention to help or harm.  As culture flourished, societies developed norms in which helpers were embraced and the selfish and violent were ostracized. . . .

We truly became social creatures when the brain network that oxytocin activates allowed us to determine who to trust.  Knowing when to trust strangers led to large-scale societies.  In these communities, an individual's survival depended on many others.  Cooperation among nonkin provided social insurance against a bad crop or an unsuccessful hunt.  Communities began to function like superorganisms in which each segment nourished the other parts.

Paul J. Zak,  Immersion:  The Science of The Extraordinary and the Source of Happiness

If the past few years have taught anything.....

 ............it is do not trust the "fact-checkers."

via

Civilization.....................

 The highest form a civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust.

-Charlie Munger, as quoted here

Not ranting here..............

 The great predicament of our moment in history is the collapse of the public’s trust in democratic institutions. That collapse is long-running, well-established, and catastrophic. Every corner of our fractured political landscape feels compelled to express, vociferously, its anger and repudiation. The default rhetorical posture of the web has become the rant.

-Martin Gurri, from here

Influence..........................

      If you want to make the world a better place, work on being trustworthy, and honor those who are trustworthy.  Be a good friend and surround yourself with worthy friends.  Don't gossip.  Resist the joke that might hurt someone's feelings even when it's clever.  And try not to laugh when your friend tells you that clever joke at someone's expense.  Being good is not just good for you and those around you, but because it helps others be good as well.  Set a good example, and by your loveliness you will not only be loved, but you may influence the world.

-Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life:  An Unexpected Guide To Human Nature And Happiness