Can we measure the world?

trust high-low and thick-thin

from internet archive

The world is not only hard to define, the world is hard to quantify. While the hardness itself is not of any practical measure, but of difficulty. A difficulty of perception, entwined as it is with appearances.

So the world appears to us often more like the sky than the earth, a ground more like the moon than a hard reality. The world waxes and wanes, it slides and slips as much as any self that is not dead.

The world is a relationship between the self and all the other selves doing the same. The world is the perception of that— while doing that. This softness is what makes it so hard to see.

The world is composed by all of our selves in the world, holding it in empathy. Usually we talk of this as trust.

Trust varies, so then, so does the world.

Trust is often more than just taking of things for granted. Trust requires an outlook if not a perspective, a prospect. This movement holds but is not a holding pattern, it is not a passive enclosure. Trust requires effort, trust is a labour, that cross-measure of time and energy, but often uncounted except by the longer view survival allows.

The test arrives when this effort is hard to find. Or the trust is trapped within, without a prospect.

---

Learning to trust means learning to trust oneself, to allow oneself into the world, despite the fear one may end up alone and unsafe there. The world is an extended self, and the world is as safe as those worlding feel them to be… when selfing out into the world, worlding the self among others doing the same.

Some say the local worlds have societies of high to low trust. This variation might simply be because the effort wears thin in higher densities of population, spread out over so many people, but it also might be spread thin over the vagaries of geography like distance and topography. Where it is often easier to ignore things that do not concern them “directly”.

I think it is better emotionally to think of these cases as thinned trust rather than low trust, perhaps there is not a lot of trust to go round, but the issue is whatever amount there is, high or low, the trust is thinned out. Like, by a higher density of people, and this worlding measure, may even mean that individuals selfing with high trust run out of go, when they come to the end of their means, when transactional encounters have come to the end of their maximum inclusions of other selves selfing the world.

A confounding factor doubles this thinning out, where societies with a low value on relationship based interactions for selves unrelated, i.e. not ‘family’ and require all interactions to be some kind of transactional deal (as narcissists expect even inside the family). This does more harm than merely taken the world for granted.

I.E. the more relationship-based societies can counter-act the thinning of trust, it can overcome both higher density living and other more geographic factors.

Thus we can see trust as a measure of the world, has at least two dimensions, the high-low of more common studies of society, and thin-thick that demography and geography ground. It is this latter dimension high-low that maps what people often refer to as ‘the real world’.

Both high-low and thin-thick dimensions branch out in an expanding circle from family, to the not-family of the world.

---

See also

Worlding: the minimum standards