Had a nice long bike ride today. I'm just getting back into it after a long lay-off but quickly realized how much I've missed it. One of my favorite parts is how my energetically my mind wanders. It is almost a day-dream like state and I suspect there is a strong correlation to oxygen deprivation.
One of todays many mind excursions went something like this:
It started with an old conundrum that I've visited many times. In this permutation I was thinking of the state of trust when buying a used car. Let's say you visit a used car lot where you find the car you've been looking for but priced a couple of thousand higher than you think it is worth. To get things started, you offer five thousand under the asking price. The salesman grimaces, but trudges off to talk with his sales manager. To your surprise he comes back with a sign-off on your offer. Is your first reaction joy at the incredible deal? Probably not. Instead your mind will ask two things: First, you'll be certain you could have got the car for less. Second, you'll immediately begin to wonder whats wrong with with the car.
Should you go ahead and make the purchase, you will likely be plagued with concern about the reliability of this car for months or years. You'll never really feel comfortable about the purchase and you might have strong misgivings about the integrity of the person that sold it to you. The bottom line is that you would enjoy the car more and have more trust for the salesman if there was some haggling involved and you paid a higher price for the car.
A second scenario would be that the dealer absolutely will not budge on the price. Having looked high and low for this particular car you grudgingly go ahead with the purchase. Again, your comfort level with the car may be compromised. You find it hard to enjoy the car and you really feel like that salesperson took advantage of you.
In both scenarios it seems like there is a trust deficit. There was no give and take or process to build trust around the transaction and the salesperson is not likely to ever have you return for another car in the future. There needed to be some sense of balance for this to have been a comfortable arrangement.
Remembering that I was in an oxygen deprived state might help explain the "logical" leap from used cars to wars that I then made. I started thinking about the lack of trust that exists between countries and ethnic groups of the world. From there I thought about this concept of a "trust deficit" and how that might apply to some of these situations. In particular, I focused on the events of 9/11 where 2,976 innocent lives were taken by extremist. At that moment, a large part of the world stood behind the United States and understood that this absolutely had to be dealt with at some level. However, as we approach the ninth anniversary of 9/11 it seems that the world's support the U.S activies that stemmed from this event are at an all time low. It began to feel strangely akin to the "trust deficit" scenario above. What if the U.S, instead of fighting a long drawn out war, reacted with comparable violence and sought to take the lives of 2,976 extremist fighters and then be done with it. Well, on its face it sounds absolutely absurd. But to me war is agonizingly absurd. Perhaps it is the lesser of two absurdities.
To simplify this logic, I thought of a situation that might occur between two high school acquaintances. Let's say that something one of them did just plain irked the other. Finally, having gotten in trouble with his parents before school one morning, the irked fellow sees the irksome one and in his fuming state decides to punch him in the shoulder about as hard as he can. The typical parenting advice at this point is to "walk away". This could be sound advice, but it might it also set up a trust deficit that will make friendship between the two impossible.
What if the irksome one decides after school that day to ambush the other student and beats him to the point where he ends up with stitches and a concussion? Again, we now have a huge trust deficit. The final scenario is that at the next opportunity the irksome one levels a well-placed and strong shoulder shot to the original aggressor. Even if he is extremely angry at first, once he settles down he'll have to admit he had it coming. If he can't admit it, perhaps his friends will tell him he deserved it. There is potential in this scenario to build a little respect. Both of the first two scenarios leave one of the students out of balance in relationship to the other.
When we fight a war only to win, are we creating such an imbalance that it will always come back to haunt us? If we "turn the other cheek" are we doing ourselves a disservice? Could it be that a precisely measured response would actually build some level of respect with our enemies?
I'm not convinced one way or the other, but even with the oxygen levels back to normal it seems like there may be some merit to this.
Great post John. The tension between the Biblical concepts of "an eye for an eye" and "turn the other cheek" pose an epic conundrum. I think this is for good reason. The question of whether to war should not be taken lightly. If you choose war, you better have two things: 1) the will to defeat your adversary, and 2) an understanding of yourself capable of quelling the rancor in your soul when your adversary's blood is on your hands.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LIBX7Q70Sc&sns=em
It would be much more
ReplyDeleteconstructive
if people tried to
understand
their supposed enemies.
Learning to forgive
is much more useful
than merely picking up
a stone and
throwing it at the object
of one's anger.
The more so when
the provocation is extreme.
For it is under the
greatest
adversity that there exists
the greatest potential
for doing good
both for
oneself and others.
-HH the XIV Dalai Lama
Sometimes oxygen deprivation can lead to the clearest of thinking. The Dalai Lama operates at a pretty high altitude, doesn't he?
ReplyDeleteI think trust fundamentally underlies all sorts of things, things where people don't think about the role of trust day to day, like the use of spoken and written language.
And money. As Meatball Fulton has one of his characters say: "this is a piece of paper that has been blessed by the treasury wizards" - the value lies not in the paper (cash value 1 mil) but in the trust the giving and receiving parties have in the treasury wizards' system.
One of the tricky bits, though, is that arrangements that increase trust on the part of some people (say, labor) frequently decrease trust on the part of somebody else (say, management). And vice versa.
And building mutual trust can be especially tricky when both sides devoutly believe things that are probably not true (e.g., that national economic conditions are mostly determined by the political approach of the party in power ("it's the economy, stupid"), not by global economic conditions)
Humanizing (rather than dehumanizing) The Other can be a big help, I think. Which would tend to indicate we (meaning the national "we") are headed in exactly the wrong direction right now. If the goal is to increase trust.
It can be useful at times to substitute in words like belief, confidence and faith, which sometimes overlap in meaning with trust. Then you begin to see even more cases where trust is fundamental to an interaction or transaction.
In the particular case, I can't get to square one on the used car trust thing. I agree with the general theory of distrust arising from the feeling of having paid too little or too much. But my solution is to go to a (new car) dealer with a good reputation, show them a description of the (new) car I want with manufacturer's option codes included along with the Edmunds estimates for dealer cost and dealer kickback, throw in a reasonable amount for profit, tell them I'm not bringing a trade-in and say: this is my offer. I've had very brief (1 to 5 minutes) bits of dickering, but no long waits or trips to the salesperson's manager, etc. Some people may think this is no fun at all, but it works for me. I even had a guy knock a few hundred bucks off, once (I'm guessing he was getting more kickback than the average dealer. Or trusted that I was going to use the dealer's shop for maintenance, for which he had some historical evidence. Or both) And then I drive the car into the ground, so I don't have any anxiety about its end-of-life trade-in value:-)
Maybe I should quit rambling now. I trust my welcome has worn out.
Well Hi there unbob! Thanks for the comment(s). I think you had at least another 1000 words before you would have worn out your welcome ;o)
ReplyDelete