Our presumption that people are innocent until proven otherwise rests on the belief that people are inherently good rather than bad. We have chosen to trust that life is good rather than evil, that people are kind rather than vicious, generous rather than stingy.
But when it comes to trust, we say that trust is earned not given. We are not readily dispersing our trust, because people are more likely to betray it than not. In other words, people are guilty until proven innocent, bad rather than good. Which of course, is the very opposite assumption to the one our legal system rests on.
We default to mistrust because we’d had it broken. Most likely, by our very care providers for a first time and so we carry a degree of hurt from people who lost our trust. And to avoid the hurt from repeating, we fence ourselves off and don’t let our guards down until someone has earned our trust.
But the thing is, when we approach someone with mistrust, they will be mistrustful—least of all of our mistrust. So, to what extend does our lack of trust in someone make them less trustworthy than they’d be in the absence of my mistrust?
I grew up believing that life is out to get me. And I’ve amassed countless evidence that people shouldn’t be trusted. Why? Because I’ve been looking for it. And in the same way in which if I look for lemons I don’t come back with pomegranates, when I look for mistrust, I find it, because it’s what my mind has been primed to see.
So, we go and gather evidence thinking that we’re being most rational in doing so, while in fact we’re most irrational! Because the point isn’t that we don’t have evidence to not trust people. The point is that this isn’t a reason to mistrust them. The only thing evidence proves is that I’ve been looking for it. Evidence is the reflection I see of myself when I look out in the world. Where one sees opportunity, another sees disaster. What we see is what we’d been looking for.
Trust is misunderstood. Trust is granted, not earned. To grant trust is to make a conscious choice to believe in the inherent good of people. To default to thinking that people are good rather than bad. That life is benevolent and generous rather than out to get me.