Hypothetical Dichotomous World-View

Suppose with me for a moment. Let's pretend we can break humanity down in a relatively simplistic manner.

There are two types of people in the world.

There are those who can't really trust others, and those who can't really trust themselves.

First of all, this comes off as pretty cynical. Not a single person on Earth trusts both themselves and other people? And there's not a single person who really just trusts nobody?

Well obviously there's a qualification here.  The people who can't trust themselves don't just blindly trust everyone around them.  You're always going to have people in your life whom you can't trust, no matter who you are.

The people who can't trust themselves trust *easier*.  They don't find it hard to let go and rely on other people.

The people who don't trust others tend to do a little more shunning and pushing away of others.  Then they end up facing their problems alone; the problems that led them to push others away. 

The people who don't trust themselves  don't have the same problem. They don't doubt that there are people there to catch them if they fall back; their problem is that they don't trust themselves to handle things on their own.

Now here's something I have written down in my notebook; I'm going to try to rationalize it:

Those who appear outwardly confident are usually one of the latter (those who can't trust themselves).

If you trust others easily and don't worry about what people around you do, that lets you be a little more confident and certain about how things are going to go when you're out and about.  That's because your real crises are not out and about; your crises are internal.  On the inside is where you're struggling and pushing, so you spend your time outside with other people.

If you trust yourself but not others, then your real conflicts will manifest themselves more often externally.  Your crises will appear in your relationships with the people around you.  You spend more time on the inside, because it's nice there.  Of course you've still got internal problems to work out, but it's better than being outside where you're struggling and pushing against the people around you.

Naturally, as with any attempt at dividing and defining humanity, more holes are going to appear the more you describe and detail.  So I will re-abstract and make a tentative conclusion:

Truly trusting and truly self-confident are mutually exclusive qualities.





Happy moment: I got to say dichotomous!


(This post came out of a hastily scribbled paragraph in the notebook I used for just such things this last summer. I think the thought itself appeared on a late night weekend drive between Agape and Raleigh; Probability suggests that Vampire Weekend was playing loudly in the background.)