Trust and/or Gratification

A lot of times, you’d really want to extend some trust — put yourself out on a limb and do a favor, knowing full well that it likely won’t return. There are times too that, because of those times you foolhardily extended trust, you just don’t want history to repeat. It’s become so difficult lately to tell when it’s genuinely legal, you’d wish Ad Misericordian were made illegal.

Whether the chain of lack of trust had begun from spite are a general lack of morals, you’d like to believe there’s still some good in the world, Mr. Frodo. But believe is only as far as it goes.

Perhaps the difficulty of trust between two parties is that one will always have to go out on a limb to initiate — “as a sign of good faith.” Power shifts to the second party then, free to plunder through open gates to fortress of opportunity and manipulation… or they could return the good faith. Back once again to the dilemma of going out on a limb, or is it walking the plank these days? It’s become quite the vicious cycle.

Third parties, or anyone for that matter, not encroached by the mystery will be quick to point out that moving towards a win-win situation is always what is aspired. But in a country nurtured by classical conditioning, what logic is there in putting yourself through all the trouble of pleasing the other party, when you can just take what you want and screw everyone else over?

My mom always found it curious that I’d suffer through eating the white meat of chicken, before preparing myself for the sumptuous outer skin. She said delaying gratification was a sign of higher intelligence. The fact that many of our countrymen put their own gratification first says a lot then.