Trust [an entry in the taphonomy of worlding]

Working my way into trust while trusting the process, already there, always

I am trusting I have enough sense of the word trust to be able to put it forward in terms of worlding. As this reframing is experimental, or at least playful, there is a smaller risk of over-confidence. In over-confidence, beyond trust, there is dogma, where labour’s effort is a directed imposition on the world/s between us, regardless of wisdom’s calm engagement, where in arrow, a value, like trust, is a road sign mistaken for the road ahead.

Neat and tidy

Apparently, there is an association between what I call ‘neat and tidy’ and a conservative outlook. (I’m overloading Apple Pie’s just an idea and discussion of it here, where I am more interested in the alignment than the types of objects/roles/expressions chosen to curate in line with the values.)(Even if his source data is mostly WEIRD).

This association may account for a drive in aligning roles and embodiments across the world’s societies. Despite the lack of other commonalities as to the details of each society’s allocations and expressions. Each traditional legacy provides the first alignment a baby may meet, near at hand to the infant’s carer. Close to hand at least in times of stability, and if stability is yearned for the alignments can be aspirational. (And thus dogmaticism is also close at hand, where the roadsign is mistaken for the road).

Alignment is a ‘betterment’ in living, in that it allows stability, even if it is only a comfort on a rocky road.

You are on the right road.

There is another betterment called progress, which takes this road sign comfort further, and in alignment with worlding more generally, i.e. it often takes the rocky road we travel as a road sign that things should be better, and aligns transgression of the legacy of neat and tidy alignments, with betterment itself. Obviously this error follows the error already mentioned, even if it inverts its vector, (inverses the error of mistaking the road sign for the road). They are the same kind of thinking, or, at least are on the same road going in opposite directions, i.e. unframed by the birds eye view, they are both conservative, even if we have difficulty aligning the transgressive with the traditional on the road we happen to be on. They are not going anywhere we haven’t been or are going to go. (Round and round.)

The road we travel is made of our disputations, which both camps, traditional and transgressive, seek to smooth out by mistaking the road sign for the road, or vice-versa, the road is a road sign. Symbols are easier than reality to control.

The transgressive will reject this framework of equivalence in alignment-seeking more thoroughly, more dogmatically than the traditionalist in aspirational, or peaceful legacy mode.

[neat & tidy = good] versus [change/mess = good]

Both are born in the worlding urge to should the world better, both seek to align signs and their vectors of conscious care and responsibility. [C.F. trust— oh, here we are.]

The key here is the effort involved, and how and who measures that social labour, and how that affects expectations and social engagement.

Fashion

Looking after one’s appearance, spending effort on it, or in maintaining its correct social form, all work to express that urge to align us and our things as roles in the world we are negotiating. Sometimes this is more world and less self, other times more self and less world.

Fashion is an effort of values, that effort is generated in a feeling to world the self, even if it is just a ritual cocoon. There is even effort in ritually maintaining some default standard as there is in rejecting that uniform for a change. Our values are always in a conversation of effort.

That is their job, the excuse to talk to each other.

But we mistake the effort for the road/roadsign interplay.

A job is not always a role we can align or transgress, as much as (our) will wants or (their) will dances that threshold in shoulding our alignments/transgressions and the fashion for valuing our efforts thus.

So to talk about values will often end up handwaving about values, each to their own: subjectivity, POV, etc.

The roadsign will be taken down and put i a pocket like a coin, or stuck like a medal on a chest, The gold coin of tradition, the iron coin of revolution, they will be held dear, even if we grasp tightly through handwaving.

Axiology

The big word for studying values is axiology. This encompasses those of appearance or sensation in aesthetics (neat and tidy) as well of those of moral values and sensibility (well-behaved).

My research question here is: “How much has the study of axiology considered effort, especially the labour of alignment?” even outside my frameworks of shoulding the world of a self among other selves doing the same.

Some reading to be done there. Meanwhile I keep wiring…

Axiology of alignment

While most of us are aware of the alignment between aesthetic and moral values, each can often be silo-ed by outcomes of the worlding urge (art/religion/polity). Because of this, I reckon no base is needed to explain values if we can recognise and explain alignment in our worlding activities. (Base = moral philosophy since Kant.)

In any case, here I wish to underline that values are:

1. Better thought of as effort/s rather than a coin one holds dear (inherited or authorised).

2. All such efforts arise in and are engaged in a roiling mess of labours (as we self the world among others)(round and round).

3. As each value arises, other relax back into the roil, but the roil maintains them all, keeps the for later, just as it changes them in keeping them along for the ride.

None of this is clear to us and we get distracted by the roadsigns as the road, or the road as a roadsign, and never see the roil we self in the world.

Regardless of our errors, we align our efforts.

Welcome to history, if not modernity.

Reprise

The effort to look good, either/both in order to maintain or to change, is always an effort of an axiological approach.

So much so that sometimes aesthetics governs all concerns, because neat and tidy aligns with the betterment of calmness, stability in maintenance, whereas for the emotionally more stable messiness aligns with the good of betterment in melioration and responsiveness to other values outside looking pretty.

Most of the time none of this is clear, let alone clearly spoken in a neat and tidy way. The neat and tidy alignment can be very messy in its relations with of values of effort that are outside aesthetics (pretty green arsenic wallpaper can kill you with beauty).

I feel the best example of values seen as effort is trust.

Trust

All the above is preparation for describing trust is effort and not a coin, a labour not a store. However for this to work I have to argue that trust is a value, and/or all values are best seen as an effort. I feel perhaps trust is the most obvious to see as an effort, especially at its most fraught contexts, when it also requires discernment.

The neat and tidy section above about alignment, is about recognising we often seek to reduce that effort, if not celebrate it aesthetically in many traditional worldings. We can symbolise trust in neat presentations that align with our well-behaved social sensibilities, roles, responsibilities and actions. Something we are keen to world, and in part gives rise to the halo effect of the more beautiful or groomed among us.

As a shortcut this error mistakes the road sign for the road. If conservatives associate neat and tidy with conservative values then they will feel more aggrieved when this shortcut is a worse road. The error here is to attack the lie before them rather than their own judgement, let alone the cognitive shortcut that leads to an abuse of trust. Looking at lazy shortcuts usually requires too much self-reflection when they are worlding to should on others. You can call that projection, but such self-based psychological frameworks are yet to incorporate more worlding social expressions of being a human social animal. In this frame, psychological projection is more worlding maintenance than a defense mechanism. A defense mechanism, however ‘automated’ pivots on agency as a sinful soul, while in a worlding ‘it’ just shoulds it onto the world (somehow). I feel if we talk about it as worlding badly, this would help more than simply attacking defensive lines. It would be less politically fraught.

(gain/loss)

People talk of loosing trust, but are they losing a coin, or just choosing to not make that effort? Trust _is_ an effort, in the sense that it requires effort, as I would argue, all values do.

Some things make trust easy, some things make it very difficult. Those things include appearances and the stability of routine maintenance. Sometimes we trust simply out of that routine, in appearance or stability: friends, family, the face of a monarch on a coin, a uniform. Of course they can all flip into threat, but a lot of our everyday trust takes only the effort of taking it for granted.

This aligns with conservative values that assume that trust by the well-groomed maintenance of social roles and their fashionable indicators, but not fashion as change, fashion as tradition. Safety, security.

I say aligns more than explains because explanations can end up mistaking the road sign for the road, or the road for a road sign.

The point is not to explain the world in order to change or maintain it, but to explain it in order to world better, or at least, not badly.

Effort

Of course every effort has a cost, that we may or may not measure, this is also our choice, and thus it also has a meta-cost we can count, should we choose to do so. And so on.

Of course counting can also lead to error, where we mistake the counting, or the coin, for a value like trust. It seems easier to measure trust than to choose it, to compare piles of trust rather than to promote it with discernment and effort.

BTW Narcissists always count, they only have coin, because they have no access to the world outside the self.

Sometimes we call this context of choice worry or fretting or fear or angst or anxiety, depending on our energy levels and baselines of our ability to judge or choose. The need to choose can freeze us, some more than others, and then we align this lack of movement with the ‘will’ to ignore the need to choose, hoping the world will carry us in our assumptions, as it so often does.

It so often does.

Resentment is a choice to never smile, it is worlding of the worst sort, everything is a coin mistaking your smile for a road sign, or a road.

The story ends with a new baby

Before the new self arrives nurture provides both selfing and worlding for the baby.

One could call this taken for granted, but from the baby’s point of view (which is all they have and is thus nearly nothing at all) these are requirements the rest of us must meet.

POVs are a view on the world from the self, these are not yet distinguished, discernment is a learning effort. The self and world of the baby are separated/composed/made by anguish which, with living support, is a normal growing pain (see worry or fretting or fear or angst or anxiety above). Pain is a choice. Suffering is one such choice, in feeling it or in inflicting it, choices are made, and choices are an effort. Empathy mirrors all of this, as self and world.

Unseparated the narcissist is born, or rather, is kept together and overdone, overdue, often by degrees unique to the unworlded selves, and unselfed worlds, as they are singularities of self=world or sweolrlds.

Over time routines of choice and effort build themselves up, and rituals celebrate, anguish is calmed, and pain grants small wisdoms, just as effort rewards exercise. This moves us into the world until we succeed ourselves as parents and become taken for granted, if not actually dead. Our efforts are rewarded and the baby persons a self from their world. And it begins.

This is a smile.

https://archive.org/details/pict-0092_20200f6