Rousseau_CHN

I got into an argument with someone who claimed that there is still trust among people.

"Without trust, how can anyone get out of the house without fear of being hacked?" she said.

And just then I remember my Hobbes, so I said, "so what's with the door?"

sweep

and what about the window and the chimney?

tronvillain

You talk as if "trust" is something which either exists or does not, rather than something which exists in degrees. She trusts people to not kill her for no reason while she walks down the street, but she does not trust people to not steal from her house if she leaves the door unlocked. Or, more likely, she trusts most people to not steal from her house if she leaves the door unlocked, but worries the few not worthy of her trust will find the unlocked door despite their small numbers.

Rousseau_CHN

From Canada:

Man, you've got to love those Canadians, all courteous and polite. They and their Micky Mouse country are the exceptions, though.

My question is that trust based on man's good nature or man's fear.

Could it be that the only reason why she wasn't hacked is because the would-be assailant was afraid of the consequences, i.e. jail?

It is still vivid in my memory what happened in Indonesia on May 1997. Order broke down and people went on a rampage: killing and burning and looting and raping. The fear of legal punishment dissolve and men turned to beasts.

...even the door then was of no use...

Being a westener, you probably could relate more to the rape of Bosnia. Anyway, trust as we know is too flimsy. So when you visit other countries, just don't "trust" too much.

Strawberry

Interesting, because there are so many violent crimes here.

Case in point: Robert Pickton comes from BC, where tronvillain lives (remember that little pig farm thing where dozens of prostitutes went missing from Vancouver and then a bunch of their remains showed up on his property?).

Or how about the Randal Dooley case, where this 7-year-old kid died from abuse and the coroner found severe brain damage, teeth in his stomach, half his ribs broken, and severe scars covering most of his body?

Maybe Lin Tao, who was murdered by an unknown assailant list year as she was walking down the street in north Toronto, minding her own business.

But I guess "being a Westerner" from a "Mickey Mouse country" precludes me from understanding that people everywhere experience crime. I'm just deluded.

Arrowman

This makes me think of one aspect of "trust". Tourists in foreign countries are routinely advised to pay close attention to their bags etc, for fear of pickpockets and so on. This is obviously sensible advice as in some countries this is based on a known crime problem where tourists are targeted by thieves, presumably because tourists are likely to have valuables like cameras, passports and such in their bags.

But it does make me wonder - when people go overseas, and get all security conscious - much more than they would do in their home town - how much of this is based on common sense, and how much on xenophobia? Especially when the culture is foreign. (For example, would a European feel less safe in SE Asia than they would in another western country) I dunno - just a thought.

Some years ago, when I was travelling in China, I was surprised and pleased to find that you could leave your bag or camera behind accidentally, and local would come running up and return it. But the thing about that is, that would happen most of the time in most places in the world. So I felt a bit guilty about my "surprise and pleasure" reaction when I realised it was probably based on a gut instinct that SE Asia is one of those places where you watch your bags extra closely.

Rousseau_CHN

That clinches it then. (What has the world come to if you can't trust a Canadian?) We should not have any hard time believing the truth that has been echoed through the ages:


TRUST NO ONE

abe smith

1.Trusting others..... for example, deliberately leaving your door open or your stuff lying around, to see if others will steal from you, constitutes the (nothing-to-do-with-religion) anti-social act of PUTTING TEMPTATION INTO OTHERS'S way. My own position is that tempting others thus is *Immoral*; and *religion & Gawd* have nothing to do w/ it.

Not everyone will have had YOUR advantages, don't forget/dammit all. And a propos of that sort of thing, a Nether-lands Catholic? Bishop officially announced during WW2
starvation times there (when, e.g., women stopped ovulating/
menstruating from hunger) that he was now giving them all permission to steal whatever they needed to survive. There're human extremeties that we-here know nothing about, kiddies. ..... Don't wave your damned morality at me.

2. Also, I recall Peter Freuchen ? 's mention in his book about the Inuit (That's what the so-called "Eskimos" prefer to call themselves; because the term "Eskimo" is offensive to them.):
that (at that time at least) no member of the Inuit community/culture would ever pick up & carry away something lost, dropped, left by another person. The Inuit are, or were, (labelled) animists. Evidently the Christians & other more "civilised" cultures have some catching-up to do.

Rousseau_CHN

Today, the Dutch Embassy opened the Anne Frank Museum in our part of the world.

What caught my attention is what Anne Frank said in her diary: "Despite Everything, I believe that men in their hearts are good."

I will never experience half the evil she experienced, and yet for her to muster the courage to say that men are good...I am ashamed of myself.

victorialis

Heya Arrowman... something I was reading recently came to mind when I saw your above-excerpted comment.

For the Chinese, contact with foreigners (and, by extension, their stuff) in China has not always been a politically safe and healthy thing. Your bag may have been returned that promptly because the locals were profoundly aware that you were not one of them, and the return of your property was the expedient thing for them to do. Possession of western goods would be a form of political contamination.

This correlates with an experience I had on a subway years ago in a former Soviet-bloc country. At the time I chalked it up to a keen sense of sympathy, on the part of the locals, with what it's like to lose something when you haven't got much.

The other explanation only occurred to me much later. They knew at a glance that I wasn't one of them.