I like to discuss big ideas and big thoughts here, but right now I’m gonna discuss something little. Just a pet peeve of mine. I try to go jogging a couple of times each week, and it’s usually at night. Here in my section of genteel Montclair, people usually try to be nice to each other out in public. And they even do so behind the wheel. When I’m running and approaching a corner, I stop to see if any cars are coming up the side street – the usual thing to do if you want to keep on living. If there is a car coming, I either bolt out in front of it and make a tear for the other side, or, when my rationality is more intact, I stop and wait. But when I wait it out, often the person behind the wheel sees me as an opportunity gain a brownie point in heaven, stops short of the corner, and waives for me to go. OK, that’s a nice thing to do. But to be honest, I hate it – especially at night. I just don’t enjoy putting my body out in front of a ton of metal with a restless engine at its core, with some nameless person behind those klieg lights in temporary control of my fate. I’d rather the driver do the predictable, snarky thing – pull up to the stop sign and make me wait, and then let me have the road back to myself.

I guess you could say that I have an issue with trust. Yea, I suppose that I do. The other night I visited the local Socrates Café discussion group, and trust was the topic for the evening. Trust in general, not just trust in the matter of jogger / driver interactions. What is trust? When and why should we do it? I made the point during the meeting that trust could be looked at in two different ways. On the one hand, trust could be an act of faith, faith that the world is ultimately a good place and people ultimately are good too; evil exists, no doubt, but it isn’t the true nature of things. So even if trust does sometimes backfire, the odds are with you when you trust someone else or trust a situation. It’s just the natural thing to do if that’s the way the world really is.

On the other hand, trust can be seen as a necessary thing even if and even though the world is a random and cruel place with lots of evil at its core. Without some level of trust, things would just stop. You couldn’t write a check. You couldn’t use money – who could trust the government that issues those crummy pieces of greenish paper. You couldn’t drive thru a green light. A bank couldn’t give you a mortgage or a college loan. You couldn’t go to a doctor – he might well give you Vioxx for your aches. So, you’d be on your own for survival. And the world just ain’t set up for individual survival these days. Sure, maybe a billion or two people could survive as hunter / gatherers, but the rest of us depend upon governments and industries and markets and professionals and technology webs. And all those things are based on trust, however imperfectly they fulfill that trust. If they collapse, then a whole lot of people would be left to starve in the cold.

In sum, you’re stuck – either trust and take your chances of getting stiffed now and then, or buy a gun and head for the hills; and good luck when your ammo runs out, cause the factory that made it can’t get credit anymore and had to shut down.

So trust we must, when truly necessary. But as to jogging at night, I’m still not gonna trust those benevolent soccer moms and dads in their SUVs. They’re gonna have to get their points with heaven some other way than by waiting for me to cross. Perhaps they can redeem their souls by not cursing at me when I reject their suburban benevolence.