> Trust everything. Without trust, you can build no relationships with
> anything. No man is an island.
Ok, so time to expand on the issue of trust a bit: Various famous and not so famous opinions have been offered in response to this issue. Some quick representative examples:
I will spare you the rest I had in mind, because it is clear up to this point that the opinions above have a high insanity propagation tendency.
Instead, I will summon the most representative example I can think of, and try to draw some conclusions therefrom.
I was lucky enough to have had access to facilities that could produce emission spectra of various elements.
Emission spectra serve as a complete and accurate id, identifying the excited element and giving the examiner an idea of what the constituents are whenever the element undergoes electronic excitation. The details are not really the issue here.
What's the issue, is the very process of spectroscopic identification. You lump a bit of metallic mercury in a discharge tube, lower the pressure to a few milli-torr, zap the thing with electricity and you get an electric discharge, whose emitted light passed though an appropriate spectroscope forms the characteristic spectrum of Mercury.
Let's expand a bit on this: What is it that you are really doing here, by looking through the spectroscope? You are having Mercury itself proclaim loudly to you: "I am Mercury!".
The above process becomes infinitely more interesting whenever the underlying elements are essentially unknown.
You zap two pieces of an unknown metal compound with 100 Amps, pass the light through a spectroscope and what you see inside the eyepiece is a series of statements:
"I am Sodium",
"I am Iron",
"I am Calcium",
...
The actual compound elementals, id themselves to you, provided you have the proper equipment to actually decode the information that gets emitted.
You could have repeated the above experiment under suitable conditions with any element, properly prepared chemically so that it could participate in the discharge and in every single case, the corresponding element will yell at you, through the spectroscope: "I am X".
In all the above cases, each appropriate element uses light as the absolute information carrier that it is, to communicate to you its very essence. Its very nature. Akin to Jehovah himself, who, in the Bible proclaims with excess self-confidence and authority: "I AM THAT I AM".
You torture Mercury by forcing it to keep losing its electrons for 4 hours in a row, you raise its temperature up to 1,600 degrees, you make it illuminate Wrigley Field so you can watch your favorite Cubs game and what does it do? It screams to you, "I AM MERCURY!!".
You force Sodium to illuminate your entire city, every single night. In parking lots, in highways, in airports and outside your house. And all Sodium can do is scream uncontrollably but silently back to you, 8 hours a day, 365 days a year: "I AM SODIUM".
This is trust. Sodium doesn't really know you. It has no clue whatsoever about what you are going to do to it. You might decide to have it interact chemically with water. You might decide to throw it into your local waste disposal apparatus. It has no way to know in advance what this huge intelligent creature will do to it for its own amusement.
All it will do, all it can do, is keep repeating its identity to you: "I Am Sodium".
How many of you reveal their identity this easily? How many of you when you meet another unknown participant or a possible torturer or mugger out in the streets, tell the carrier of the prospective danger, "I Am Dennis"?
None. You all hide your identity so that you will not be caught off guard. People can use your identity to defraud you. So you better watch out. Privacy of personal information. Possible impersonation. All those goodies you learn gradually as you start discovering the meaning of "trust".
One day, you end up trusting only your tv, simply because it consistently offers you extravagant lies and faulty misinformation. At least you know this much. Your tv offers you lies at a consistent and constant rate, therefore it is trustworthy.
On the contrary, your fellow humans are not really trustworthy, because you can have no grasp on their truthfulness/lying ratio. Some say the truth, some lie, some do both. And certainly most of them don't proclaim first thing, "Hi, I Am Dennis, and this is what and who I am, really".
And even if they proclaim "I Am Dennis", they may not be really Dennis, but some conniving fraud who's interested in how much money you've got or in fucking your pretty wife while you are off at work. It's like Sodium being electrically excited and emitting the spectrum of Mercury. Ha! You fucking fools, I am really Sodium, but I've got you fooled now. Here's a fake spectrum for ya...Fucker.
An entirely similar situation presents itself openly, subject to spectroscopic scrutiny, when one looks up in the sky.
Every single star's light you see up there, every single speck of light, can be efficiently subjected to the very same process, effectively allowing a complete and accurate identification of the exact elemental constituents (at least on the surface) of the source you are looking at.
When you look at Sirius, you've got some of the more common elements screaming again at you:
"I am Hydrogen, Helium, Calcium, Iron, Sodium,..",
whereas, when you look at certain parts of the interstellar medium, you've got different and more elaborate screams:
"I am Methylidine, Ammonia, X-ogen or Formamide...".
It's like a divine trust-dance of sorts: Everywhere you look, everybody presents their id to you, telling you, "Trust Me, I am Methane" or "Trust Me, I am Silicon", almost asking you to go there and visit them.
Every single light source out there, opens its arms to you in a huge array of celestial hugs, ready for you, ready whenever you are, to go and join it. It's as if the entire Universe is one big, cuddly papa bear, saying, "Son, I am here, here's what I am, whenever you are ready, come to me. Come explore me, for I am giving you the very essential details of my identity this very minute!...".
Now, before any of you start fantasizing about divine hugs and excess celestial love, humbly reverse the situation and place yourself at a planet orbiting Sirius.
Taking a look at the solar system from out there, you'd probably see a very faint, probably fainter than sixth magnitude humble yellow star of type G. No planets would be visible from this far out, but you'd still get the Sun's spectrum, with all the familiar absorption lines of Hydrogen, Helium, Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Calcium, Potassium, etc.
This very faint spectrum, the Sun's, would be again a divine invitation for you to come explore this tiny star. Heck, this star would be so faint from out there, that chances are you wouldn't even bother with it. You'd be much happier visiting Vega or some other nearby star which would probably attract your visual sensory organs much more.
If you by mistake choose to visit this faint, unimportant star of type G, what horror awaits you and your peers. You'd better be equipped with a technology that would be much superior to the one we have, because once you determine what lurks here, on the third planet that orbits this humble star of type G, you'd want to run, like there is no tomorrow.
Humans would like to fuck you up the ass to see if it feels better than fucking the local males or females or make slaves out of you. They would love some extra slaves, particularly at this point in time. We could use some extra helping hands.
Deviousness and fraud rule here. We excel in the art of defrauding our fellow human beings. We have murder, religious torture, pederasty, killing entire poor nations, exterminating entire races, building entire empires on blood and other people's money, property and values. We have war, we have famine, we have terrorism. What is it that you want? We've got it.
Now, reverse again the situation and place yourself on this humble little blue planet's abode, looking at the welcoming message from the spectra emitted by some of the closest galaxies. Perhaps the Andromeda galaxy, the Triangulum galaxy, or the one in Coma Berenices. The one you always liked so much.
The message will always be there. The spectra of the distant light sources will always invite you to go out there. Because that's your destiny. Your destiny really is out there. In the stars. And the message will always be the same: "I Am Sodium. Trust me. Come to me and explore me".
The entire universe celebrates. The entire universe identifies itself constantly, every single minute you look up there. From every single light source, a custom personal invitation is being sent to you: " I Am THAT, which I AM. Trust me. Come to me..."
The apotheosis of fraudulent trust. The entire Universe invites you to a Sunday brunch using the absolute message of trustworthiness: Emission Spectra. Whether you accept the invitation is of course up to you. Don't forget to bring your own food, cause you risk being eaten by the BBQ cooks themselves.
If you by any chance accept the invitation, we would like to hear your story when you come back and then, naturally, we can reexamine the issue of "trust".