Lucid Trust

“A light is needed to see the light”

Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity

For you, Antonia, and for our daughter Juana

Trust, a concept as elusive as it is necessary

Trust is one of those rare concepts that are as difficult to define as they are necessary for understanding what is human, like freedom, justice or happiness, though with a curiously higher degree of complexity. For trust is an invisible energy, diffuse yet certain, which integrates and sustains the fundamental structure of personal relationships, from the intimacy of one’s relationship with oneself to the most complex social structures. It is not one more feature of human relationships but their very foundation, that is, what makes it possible for there to be society, and further still: for there to be personal identity. Trust is the condition of coexistence.

Sociologists, economists, political scientists and politicians by profession or vocation, stockbrokers and specialists in marketing, human resources and management know that their work depends, radically, on trust. They are aware that any undertaking, action or analysis they wish to carry out must presuppose trust as a structural element. The world economy depends on the trust of markets, consumers and investors; the political stability of a country, the success of a company and of a project, the establishment of any kind of relationship, all depend on trust, both internal and external. They depend on trust inwards, that is, within the team, and on trust outwards, that is, the trust they project towards others.

Trust is used as a reference and a measure in all the social sciences and in every field of human knowledge and action, yet its internal structure, fundamental as it is, has been rather neglected. The philosophical importance of trust is greater than the attention it has received in history. In practice it is taken as known, obvious, self-evident, as if it were a transparent concept, when in reality it is one that is very difficult to grasp in itself, in its internal dynamics, its conditions, its possibilities, its essence.

There are some value concepts similar to trust about which hundreds of works have indeed been written, such as justice, truth or power. This difference is no accident: in the first place, all these concepts presuppose trust; they rest upon it. For there to be justice, truth or power, there must be trust. Without trust, it is not even possible to speak of these concepts. What sense would it make to speak of truth, for example, if one does not trust in its veracity? If one does not trust in justice, its measures will be regarded as pure arbitrary violence and it will cease to be justice. In the second place, trust manifests itself in these concepts. A people’s trust manifests itself in its capacity for justice, that is, to act effectively when its fundamental norms or its founding contracts are broken. Trust also manifests itself in a public opinion that is informed adequately and transparently about the decisions taken by political power, as well as about the events that take place in the country. In the third place, all these concepts are worked out on a strictly rational plane, that is, the logical conditions for their relevance are established and then whether or not these conditions occur is verified. The logical conditions of rational truth (non-contradiction, the principle of identity, etc.) are what determine whether or not there is truth, and they do so very clearly. The same happens with justice and power. With trust, however, something very different happens, since its logic transcends the strictly rational plane and settles in the affective and emotional, though without, of course, denying the rational. Establishing rationally the conditions of truth, justice or power is a relatively easy or clear task for their application. Trust, however, moves in an entirely different logic, a logic that includes the affective and cannot be translated into strictly rational laws. There can be no true syllogism or algorithm of trust, and those that have been sketched out are no more than probabilities, a play of risks and opportunities, which in the end have nothing to do with trust. That is the richness and the difficulty of the concept of trust which, without denying strict reason, goes beyond it, transcends it and even orients it in and from an affective plane. The logic of trust is a logic that integrates the affective, the emotional and the rational. The problem is that in the West we are not used to accepting that integration naturally; on the contrary, we are used to the dissociation of thinking, feeling, body and soul.

The West and distrust

Our Western education, rooted in classical modernity, has tried to get rid of, evade or repress emotions and affects. Objective truth cannot admit the intrusion of affects, passions or emotions. These are considered subjective impurities when it comes to speaking about truth, which ought to be absolute.

From the seventeenth century, with the birth of the New Science and the universalisation of the scientific method, there was an attempt to place emotions, feelings and even the senses in brackets, because they were erratic and ambiguous in the process of establishing certain and true knowledge. To know what is objective, it was believed necessary to eliminate, or at least to suspect, every subjective residue. In this way the old suspicion of bodiliness was confirmed, now on the basis of the sciences: a source of temptation, sin, disordered passions and, from then on, also of error. This suspicion and contempt for the subjective gave way to an almost definitive dissociation of man from himself: if he wishes to know the truth, whether spiritual or scientific, he must purify himself of his subjectivity and his bodiliness, of his senses and his emotions. Modern education, on which ours still rests (at least in part), would centre on this objectivist and dissociative “purification”. This education ends up being enormously cruel, both personally and interpersonally, on the one hand, and emotionally blinding, on the other, besides being scientifically incorrect as well.

The force with which the West was built, and which brought it to the brink of destruction, was drawn from distrust, fear and the obsession with security. Many founding texts of Western modernity are texts of explicit distrust of oneself, of the other and of the world (for example, Hobbes’s “Leviathan”, 1651; Descartes’s “Metaphysical Meditations”, 1637). Generalised doubt and suspicion were the climate; distrust and fear, the energy that set in motion the personal and social machinery of the West. The result of this climate and this energy turns out to be great violence by man towards himself, towards the world and towards the other. We may think that this violence was borne out in the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, in the high rates of depression and in climate change, the product of human beings’ irresponsible treatment of the world; to this day we live with the consequences of a culture built on fear and distrust.

Power and fear

This way of relating to oneself, to one’s neighbour and to the world also translates into a very specific view of power. Power, following the model of Hobbes’s “Leviathan”, had to be capable of instilling far more fear even than the natural fear in which men lived, since only fear controls men. For this, the Leviathan, that is, the State, had to have an enormous capacity for violence, even if it did not necessarily exercise it. The power of the State is guaranteed, under this logic, by the constant fear of men. If men lose their fear, power would lose much of its effectiveness and would have to go in search of a new source of legitimacy. For this reason, a classical kind of power cannot allow us to lose our fear and our anxious desire for security. Immersed in fear, we human beings are tremendously manipulable and accept without question any kind of abuse of power, so long as we feel a little safer.

Under this logic, not only the central power but also the more immediate powers and authorities, such as parents, educators and police officers, will depend on the fear of those in their charge in order to exercise their small portion of power. The most effective propaganda for keeping power unquestioned is to insist on the need for security through fear. Fear and the infinite, illusory longing for absolute security dull the sense of freedom and even of one’s own dignity. They reduce freedom to the possibility of choosing between two or three options of consumption, or of security itself.

It should be made clear that fear is an instinctive force which, in its right measure, healthy and integrated, serves to open up better chances of survival. However, when it is amplified and used as a political tool, it blinds and enslaves.

Blinding fear is effective in the short term and destructive in the medium and long term. Stoking fear, distrust and insecurity has the immediate effect of binding people together around a violently protective power.

So distrust is encouraged, amplified and exaggerated towards certain objects of fear, such as the immigrant, the one who thinks differently, the poor, the foreigner, the wanderer with no fixed abode and even the neighbour. We human beings are quick to become drunk on fear and to search desperately for threatening, cruelly punitive policies to sate our hunger for security, a hunger that feeds on its own hunger. From Nazi propaganda to G. W. Bush’s war on terror, everything can be understood from this logic.

The whole terror of the twentieth century, with its more than a hundred million violent deaths, could be explained as a century in which fear imposed its way of relating. The search for personal, national, racial, historical security requires violence in order to establish itself in all its delirium. The unity generated by fear in the face of a common enemy gives a sense of security more reassuring than the magical everyday coexistence with what is uncertain and with the stranger. But that unity needs a violence that feeds on itself until it destroys every possibility of establishing free and constructive relationships, that is, relationships not enslaved to fear.

For a long time, power existed to preserve an apparent social peace through fear of that same power. It would be used against all those who violated the peaceful and solitary coexistence of men, thus securing social peace. Men, in turn, fear conflict and the disturbance of their tranquillity more than they fear power and its controlled excesses. The sense of security that came from having a power capable of great protective violence led people to overlook the excesses of that same power. It was even preferable not to know, to hide, to cover up the excesses and abuses of power so as to keep the sense of spiritual, personal, family and material security intact. In that context, to preserve the sense of security, one had to trust blindly in those who held power.

But something changed abruptly in humanity. Perhaps prompted by social media and their omnipresent light, or by a spiritual turn, a historical weariness or an awareness of the danger in which humanity is left as it makes the planet and its resources fragile.

From the power of violence to the power of trust

We find ourselves at a change of era marked by an awakening with regard to fear and abuses of power. Across the board, it would seem that humanity is beginning to develop a kind of unease, rejection, I would almost say an allergy, towards abuses of power. The excesses of power, which used to be considered a lesser evil, almost a necessary cost in the search for security, are today becoming unacceptable. The blindness and violence produced by the sheer search for security are becoming evident. That is the blindness that made it possible for true narcissistic madmen to govern lives and peoples during the twentieth century, leading them to their own destruction, and not only that, but being accepted as necessary and even, in some cases, desirable. Political leaders, strongmen, cult gurus, totalitarian and violent dictators were acclaimed and justified for much of the twentieth century all over the world, sustained and fed by the fear and distrust that peoples forged over a long time.

The way power was seen has been changing, and we may be facing one of the most important paradigm shifts in history. Until recently, the distrust and fear produced by the unknown, the foreigner, death, damnation, madness, illness, poverty or exclusion legitimised a power as violent as it was illusory, in the logic of security. Today, on the contrary, it is trust that is gaining ground as a pressing resource for peaceful coexistence and as the guarantor of political stability. The paradigm of violent power that gave a sense of security has already shown enough signs that it lends itself to abuse, and the absolute security it promises is clearly an illusion. Thus arises the need for trust as a climate that is also one of security, but a security different from the one offered by violent and threatening power. The fragility of trust is its own guarantee and security: if someone imposes it, demands it or manipulates it, then they destroy it.

The power of violence

It draws its legitimacy from fear of the unknown and from the search for security. It lends itself to abuse, and the absolute security it promises is an illusion.

The power of trust

A resource for peaceful coexistence and the guarantor of political stability. Its fragility is its guarantee: if someone imposes it, demands it or manipulates it, they destroy it.

Trust and politics

The current discontent of citizens around the world is a symptom of a deep rupture in the structure of society. That structure is trust. It hardly needs recalling that we are going through the worst crisis of trust in a long time, probably the deepest since trust became something to be measured. What is worrying is that we know well that a crisis of trust easily triggers a political, economic and social crisis. Indeed, every economic and political crisis begins with a crisis of trust.

There is a contemporary mantra in our society that goes “let us rebuild trust”, and it is repeated above all at the political, institutional and economic levels. Trust, however, is not rebuilt by decree. On the contrary, any obligation to trust destroys trust. Trust is not even a reality that can be dealt with directly, like light, which cannot be caught or enclosed, for to do so is to eliminate it, to darken it. But that is precisely where the mysterious guarantee of trust lies: it is extremely fragile and elusive; it cannot be forced or manipulated, for those are ways of destroying it. At the same time, every political, social, personal, economic and relational project, even every existential one, depends on it completely. Fundamental and scarce, critical and urgent, trust must set the national and global agenda. Just as until recently it was power and security, from now on it will be trust.

Until very recently, most political and social discourses presupposed the original clay of trust as a basic and unquestionable material. Today only the deluded could take the trust of those they address for granted. An “empowered”, informed, lucid citizenry, less fearful and allergic to abuse, wants to return to the foundations of the fundamental social contract and to question the paradigm of trust. That is why it is necessary to problematise trust, to unravel its hidden processes and dynamics, its mystery and its miracle. It is in this same sense that it becomes so urgent to confront this kind of new social illness, the crisis of distrust, as a principle of violence and of social deterioration at every level.

The crisis of trust

Every study that attempts to account for the various social realities around the world comes up against a generalised crisis of trust: personal, interpersonal and institutional trust. I insist: the economic and political crisis the world is going through is basically a crisis of trust, and on this there is no dispute. Trust has fallen to the lowest levels in history since it began to be measured, but why? The clumsiest and most short-sighted explanation would be to hold people responsible for having less capacity or willingness to trust. But it is not a problem of capacity or willingness; rather, we could say that the very paradigm of trust is changing, that this is not a new threshold of trust but a new paradigm.

Fear and insecurity at the social and existential level have long served to induce people to trust blindly in powers and authorities, but this is changing. Blind trust, for some reason, no longer has a place in contemporary society, or has less and less of one. An analysis of trust at all its levels is urgent and critical, and not only from the lament of the traditional institutions that have lost the trust of people, of their members, their faithful and their teams. For this, one must enter into the mystery of trust, into its elusive but certain and radical logic, into its fragility and its existential as well as social necessity.

It is evident that we find ourselves at a historical juncture, and my proposal consists in understanding it in terms of trust, its crisis and its new perspective. Perhaps it is social media, globalisation and the transparency of information through the internet, or some other reason, but something has caused the structure of society to change.

Just as writing gave way to the establishment of the great civilisations, the printing press lent the tools for a great critique and questioning, creating a new way of looking at the universe: modernity. Today something is happening with the existence of the internet. Its transparency and universality are generating a crisis, but a crisis that reaches the very heart of civilisation and its internal cohesion: a crisis of trust.

But we need not be afraid of crises. The word itself means discernment and decision. Crisis comes from the Greek word krinô, which means to judge, to separate, and one separates and judges precisely in order to discern, to find one’s bearings, to evaluate, to change and to transform. A crisis of trust is an unavoidable juncture; that is why we must look at trust again, take its crisis seriously, judge and discern.

It is this crisis that has led me to think of a new paradigm of trust. If we consider that the present crisis of trust coincides with the extreme transparency demanded by today’s media, with the internet and the ever more immediate connection between people through social media, it is perhaps because there is something this transparency has laid bare. Transparency has let light into those dark places where things happen that some want to keep hidden and in silence: abuses.

Abuse at work, economic, sexual, financial and social abuse, every kind of abuse draws its strength from secrecy, from the silencing of the abuse. The cornerstone of abuse, in any of its forms, is secrecy, silence, ambiguity, darkness. That is why the worst enemy of abuse is light, transparency, clarity, lucidity.

The cornerstone of abuse, in any of its forms, is secrecy, silence, ambiguity, darkness.

If abuse destroys the capacity to trust, transparency and light create the conditions for trusting again. This is the juncture that turns the crisis of trust into an opportunity. The crisis must be taken to its extreme in order to transform trust into a transparent, luminous, lucid trust.

Faced with a crisis of trust such as the present one, we might think that trust is a utopia and fall into the dark and delirious sadness of distrust. But trust has an insistence equal to our need to trust again. So we will have to demand of it a new light and transparency. We all have the sense that humanity is taking an important step with regard to trust and to the (in)tolerance of abuse.

It is not possible to live humanly in distrust, but neither in the old paradigms of blind trust. That is why I propose that of trust from a perspective of lucidity, marking an important difference both from distrust and from blind trust.

Someone might think that a trust with a qualifier is really distrust in disguise. It is often said that one either trusts or does not, that there are no half measures or conditions. Trust, it is also often said, is broken only once. This is the binary logic of trust/distrust that we want to question, proposing instead the concept of trust in the sphere of mutual recognition, responsibility and care. It is an active trust, committed to itself and to the conditions that make it possible. That is why I call it lucid trust. (It is true that, conceptually, we could simply call it trust, trust in its strongest sense, since I am convinced that true trust is always lucid. But since trust is often confused with blind trust, the distinction will have to be made.)

Lucid trust: an ethical proposal

The need for a trust whose paradigm differs from that of blind trust arises precisely from its crisis. Alarmist propaganda that raises the definitive banner of distrust has a reassuring effect in the short term, but in the medium and long term it is tremendously destructive, distressing, cancerous. No project, company or country, no family and no relationship of love or friendship can survive in distrust. Even a person’s identity disintegrates into madness if they are unable to rebuild their trust in themselves.

Nor, however, is it possible to live in the blindness, practical as well as emotional, of blind trust. Relationships and projects also fail in blind trust, since blinded people cannot truly count on others, because they are unable to see them, and no one sees themselves except through the other, who acts as a mirror. A person who trusts blindly in themselves cannot see themselves either, know themselves, feel their limits and possibilities.

Lucid trust is trust that commits itself to itself, because it knows that it cannot be constituted as a place of absolute certainties nor as a value that is won once and for all. It is rather a constant challenge that requires the courage needed to keep building and rebuilding the conditions of trust itself. This is because trust is not a rational conclusion but a dynamic affective bond that knows and feels, and knows and feels itself, from within itself.

Lucid trust is not a natural way of relating to others or to oneself; it is an ethical model that I propose be created and forged constantly if we want to establish integrating human and institutional relationships, marked by and committed to active care and respect.

The ethical proposal of lucid trust rests on no ideology. Neither political, nor religious, nor scientific. It is an ethics that arises from the mere fact of being in the world, a shared world, that is, in a space alongside others and on the basis of others.

Lucid trust escapes the Western alternative between the atomic individualism of competitive capitalism and the fusional communitarian mystique of classical socialism. Both possibilities destroy the necessary space that separates and unites human beings. Atomic individualism destroys that space in the infinite remoteness of distrust, and communitarianism destroys it from the illusion of a blinding fusion.

Distrust and blind trust destroy the necessary space that constitutes and sustains lucid trust. Lucid trust rests on an ethics of the space of light that unites and separates at the same time, creating the right distance that allows us to see without merging, and so to respect one another, to recognise one another without losing sight of each other, whether far apart or close together.

Blind trust

Destroys the space from the illusion of fusion. It does not see the other and cannot see itself.

Lucid trust

A space of light that unites and separates at the same time: the right distance to see without merging, to respect and recognise one another.

Distrust

Destroys the space in infinite remoteness. No project or relationship survives in it.

Lucid trust is ethical in the most proper sense of the word ethical. Ethics comes from the Greek word éthos, which originally meant space, habitat. And every space exists thanks to the limits it establishes, recognises and respects. In this sense, trust is ethical, but not ideological, political or religious; it is an ethics that arises from the very fact of finding oneself in the world alongside others. This finding oneself is a feeling and a feeling oneself, a thinking and a taking up of a position in a concrete, spatial way. That is why ethics makes conscious the limits within which one feels, makes them explicit, goes over them, finds itself in them, respects them so as to be able to recognise itself in another and to recognise others, and from there to project one’s own life concretely.

Blind trust: sheer blindness

When people speak of trust, they generally speak of blind trust, and this is a significant mistake. Blind trust is closer to distrust and fear than to trust properly so called, or at least to lucid trust. Blind trust is a kind of distrust, for it does not dare to see or to ask that limits and conditions be made present; it does not dare to demand respect and care in the relationship. Fear and distrust of the other, of oneself and of the world drive us to establish relationships of blind trust, under the illusion of total security, absolute certainties and invulnerability. But in reality these illusions are the other side of the coin of fear and distrust. Blind trust is sheer blindness: the impossibility of seeing, of listening, of feeling and respecting limits, roles, spaces of intimacy, exclusive spaces. And when there are no clear limits, roles can easily be confused, swapped, blurred, that is, they can be per-verted.

Blind trust and distrust are not opposed; they complement each other in their violence. They are violent because they do not regard the other as truly other, nor regard the self as a being that is worthy, free and capable of seeing the other, respecting and upholding the limits needed to see and to let oneself be seen. Blind trust is a very clear and common form of self-harm, which is as unacceptable as harm to others.

Trust can never be blind, since there is trust only in the context of a relationship with another, that is, with someone who is recognised as worthy of trust. Even in the case of institutional trust or trust in politics: although one does not know personally those who offer trust (or ask for it), there is a space of recognition in which that trust is at stake, such as the media, the internet or social media (new manifestations of the Greek agora).

When someone asks for or demands blind trust, what is really being proposed is blindness and a space conducive to some kind of abuse. Even if that abuse is never actually committed, the mere fact of asking for or demanding blind trust is already a kind of abuse, since it limits autonomy and the freedom to see, and inhibits the possibilities of self-care.

Blind trust is passive trust. It is the mere expectation that the other will not do harm, or at least will not do so voluntarily, and this is not strictly a relationship but an almost anonymous expectation, a game of probabilities, statistics. That is why I affirm that if it is blind, it is not truly trust. Trust is active because it is a relationship. It does not rest on a relationship; it is itself a relationship, that is, a context or space of light that makes mutual encounter and recognition possible.

Lucid trust is a space

Lucid trust is not a feature of some relationships, nor their result, but a space that makes a relationship of trust possible. For this space to be lucid, it is a space of light (lucidity comes from lux: light). The establishment of relationships of lucid trust therefore begins with the creation and defence of spaces of light between people. Now, the image of a space of light is the possibility of seeing and letting oneself be seen, of recognising and being recognised.

Lucid trust is also a space conducive to active listening. There is a kind of silence of light in the space of lucidity that makes it possible to listen to the other and to be listened to. Just as silence is the condition and possibility for someone’s voice to be heard, so light is the condition and possibility for forms to appear and be recognised.

The space of lucidity that relationships need in order to be relationships of trust is a space that asks, questions, invites one to respond, to give an account of oneself before the other, to become responsible. The light and silence of the space of lucid trust compel one to answer for the other and for oneself, to be responsible.

Now, every space is created by its limits. Without limits there is no space, only chaos and indeterminacy, ambiguity and confusion. Limits mark the necessary space between people so that they can recognise and respect each other, care for each other and commit to each other. These limits are legitimised by feeling the natural space that we are: a living body that finds itself and finds its bearings in feeling and thinking. In the body we feel the world and feel ourselves and, most importantly, through it we seek and find meaning in life. But I do not mean an easy and volatile, drive-led sensuality that ultimately generates dissociation and anguish; I mean meaning, the consonance of my horizon with the horizon of the other, from that lucid force which constitutes the consciously lived body.

The limits of the space of lucidity arise in the encounter with the other, even the limits that are there to be transgressed. Without another who shows me limits, I myself disintegrate, I lose myself, whether in the chaos of blindness or in the chaos of distrust. The other marks limits, and from their presence I recognise my own limits. I insist: even if these are transgressed, they must have been established in the presence of the encounter. That is why limits are not a rational conclusion but are revealed in the affects, above all in early childhood. Even if they are rationalised in maturity, they will always have an affective character that cannot be reduced to a geometrical, logical, rational space. Even a baby a few months old takes its distance in order to see and feel what is happening around it and so to find its bearings from the person who is most affectively significant to it. That relationship, the relationship par excellence, the paradigm of every other relationship, the source of what some call attachment, is a relationship of recognition, not of blind fusion, nor of cognitive knowledge. It is a relationship of affective recognition.

Now, for there to be recognition, space is fundamental, that is, the silence, the light, the distance and the limits that make it possible to listen to, see, respect and care for the other. It must be made clear that limits are not violent limits that prevent the closeness of love, of attachment, of intimacy, but quite the opposite: only distance and clear limits make it possible to establish a relationship with another and, in that relationship, for me to take shape as a free self, open to relating to others, to knowing, listening to, respecting and loving others different from me. Both absolute solitude and the illusion of fusion with the other eliminate this possibility.

Trust and recognition

Mutual recognition lies at the origin of a democratic human community, but above all it lies at the basis of the integration of one’s own personality, for this arises from the acceptance and appreciation that the other gives me, another like me. I am not capable of feeling myself as myself, in my own skin, individuality and difference, in eternal and total solitude; I need another to see me, name me, recognise me in order to constitute myself as a self and to feel worthy of myself. This is the basis of the theory of recognition that I extend to lucid trust, for there can be recognition only in the context of trust. Moreover, trust is not a mere condition of recognition but its equivalent.

For there to be recognition, a space and a distance are needed that allow one to see in order to recognise. Without space there is no difference, and without difference there is no individuality. That is why space must be defended. Not only out of a moral imperative of respect or care, but because space is necessary for recognition to take place, and with it a personal identity, a self.

Blind trust eliminates the distance, the space and the limits that allow one to see and recognise, because the parties (or one of them) come too close, trample on each other, blind each other. Without space and clear limits, no recognition is possible, since there is no light to see and recognise. Nor is lucid trust possible. In distrust the space becomes infinite and I cannot recognise the other or recognise myself in them, for they slip away into remoteness or invisibility. Lucid trust requires a right space, a space of light that makes mutual recognition possible. A space that is always fragile and, for that very reason, a space of care.

Lucid trust allows the other to be themselves and empowers them to be so; it commits itself to their being without trying to modify it, replace it or manipulate it so that they become what I want them to be, nor to smother them in the paranoia of abandonment, the violence of abuse or of fear. Lucid trust defends the space so that the other may be truly other and be recognised as such.

That there is light between people also means that the relationship and its dynamics are transparent and can be told to others without causing indignation, sorrow or scandal. If, in trust, the secret of the other and of oneself is kept, it is out of respect, care and commitment, not out of fear or manipulation. That is why the lucidity of trust must constantly take distance from itself, on the basis of its space, and subject itself to a critical gaze, as if it were a matter of others. This distance, which is nothing other than the proper space of lucidity, makes it possible to take sides, to discern reality, to find oneself in the world and to find one’s bearings. That is why lucid trust not only leaves room for criticism and self-criticism, but needs and requires them constantly. Distance and criticism make up the strength of its lucid commitment.

Trust is lucid as long as the space that makes it possible exists and is respected. The breaking of that space is the breaking of the conditions of trust. This space also translates into specific roles and places from which to position oneself in the space: father, mother, son or daughter, teacher, student, cousin, priest, politician. Light, lucidity, is necessary to see, recognise, respect and defend each person’s roles and spaces. The breaking of space, of limits and roles, is called perversion, precisely because it per-verts, it turns the limits around. Blind trust and blind distrust, like abuse, are ways of breaking the space of mutual recognition, the space of lucid trust.

Lucid trust and the living body

There is a wisdom of the body that must be recovered in order to build relationships based on lucid trust. For the body is a lucid force that orients us in the world among people and things; it has its space, its physical and non-physical limits, equally clear. The body has a wisdom of its own because it feels, not because it calculates. Through the body we find our bearings in the world, because we feel ourselves in it and because we feel the world itself through our body. Through the body we find ourselves; we come upon ourselves in the world. That is why those strange everyday questions make so much sense: “How are you finding yourself?” or “Have you found your feet in your new job?” Finding oneself is a way of feeling oneself in the world, and that feeling has a wisdom that must be listened to. The problem is that we are more used to validating only what is calculable, what can be backed by arguments of costs and benefits.

There is a sad illusion according to which everything, absolutely everything, can enter that economic logic and be measured and analysed on the basis of a calculation of costs and benefits, as if life were a financial or real estate project. Happily, this is not so. Except for a few obsessive psychotics, the centre of our decisions transcends that logic, even though we do not always know how or why. And since we do not know, the logic of calculation tries to replace and conceal the logic of meaning, because meaning is “felt”; it cannot be verified or demonstrated. The healthiest and most integrating decisions are generally taken not because they are convenient or produce more benefits than costs, but because they make sense for life.

The problem is that meaning is something that is felt, and the one who feels it is the integrated self, body and soul, not a dissociated, split self submerged in a purely economic logic. Our education overlooks, despises or distrusts this integration of thinking and feeling, and that distrust has done us considerable harm. Trust, friendship, love and joy are not decisions in the pure logic of calculating benefits; they arise from and reflect the integration of thinking and feeling, of mind and body. It is necessary, urgent, to recover the orienting wisdom of the body, to listen again to the one who listens to the world, the one in whom I find myself and find my bearings, trust, feel, fear and distrust.

Lucid trust integrates the wisdom of the body. Like that natural light of reason of which the medieval thinkers spoke (lumen naturalis rationis), but integrating itself with that other divine sense which is the body. The body experiences and manifests trust and fear; it knows when a touch is friendly, filial, loving or sensual. The body recognises gazes in its own gaze, silences, gestures, the respect of limits and their transgression and rupture. The body is capable of inviting another to enter its intimate space and of expelling them too. But for this we must learn to feel, to identify what we feel, to recognise it and to find our bearings lucidly on the basis of this feeling. But I insist: we have not been educated to integrate the wisdom of the body; on the contrary, we have been educated to suspect it, despise it, deny it or cultivate it instrumentally. To feel, to name what one feels, to analyse that feeling of one’s own respectfully, to take distance and take a position from that feeling is integrating work; it is a way of breaking with the modern dissociation in which we have indeed been educated, and of recovering the most natural tool we have for discerning, finding our bearings and deciding.

I want to insist on the distance that must be taken from the other in order to recognise them, but a space must also be created with respect to oneself and one’s own feeling, since it is not a matter of following the bodily impulses of each moment but of finding one’s bearings on the basis of that feeling. Finding one’s bearings requires distance, questioning, integration and taking a position, recognition of significant points of reference, and action. To feel oneself and to feel the other, to take distance from this very feeling in order to discern, to take a position and so to act in the world.

1. FeelFeeling oneself and feeling the other
2. Take distanceFrom one’s own feeling, in order to discern
3. ActTaking a position and acting in the world

Trust and fragility

We need trust because we are fragile, vulnerable, because we are exposed to being wounded or killed by the mere fact of being alive. We can be deceived, swindled, manipulated, abandoned, abused by the mere fact of coming into contact with other human beings. We need to relate to others in order to become human beings, but this relating constitutes the possibility of betrayal. That is why we create trust.

We are made of fragility, and that is why we will always need to trust. If we were all-powerful, we would not need to trust anyone: everything would be resolved. Trust is necessary wherever there are uncertainties, fragility, risk, vulnerability, that is, wherever there is life. We can trust or not trust, but we cannot cease to be vulnerable. Fragility is the material from which we were forged as human beings, and this fragility must be faced in some way. One way of facing it is to distrust everything and everyone: closing off the possibilities that others might wound this vulnerability, or prophesying that harm.

If I distrust everything and everyone and make sure that everyone will wound me, then I eliminate the uncertainty, and the freedom, of trust. When someone who was trusted does harm, the harm is even greater than if it is done by someone who was distrusted. The betrayal of trust, and the chaos that betrayal causes, can even be more painful than the harm done, as if trust were a reality in itself.

Indeed, trust is a reality in itself, almost palpable. I venture to say that trust has more reality, more substance and weight than many of the physical things we come across every day, even though it is harder to define. Trust is like the climate, silence and light: it is taken as obvious and natural, and it is difficult to look at, listen to or analyse directly. Light is not looked at directly, just as silence is not listened to. They are conditions for listening and for looking. That is why it is a good image for speaking about trust. It is difficult to define and to think about directly; yet its absence is overwhelming and chaotic and, in the end, very violent.

Distrust and violence, mute and blind, are a way of facing vulnerability, though by denying it. They transform the fear and anguish that fragility provokes into the anger that distrust provokes and the wish for the other to disappear, because then the vulnerability of one’s own that is exposed in the presence of the other would disappear too. This is a fantasy as common as it is destructive. The presence of another person always makes the fragility of life more evident to me; the fragility of my own life as well as that of others. So I may come to want the other person to disappear, not to show themselves or not to confront me with fragility. But how can one make a person disappear without exercising violence directly and explicitly?

One way of making the other person disappear is by objectifying them, regarding them as an object, a thing, a statistic, pure productive force. These are forms of violence, and they are not always perceived as such. Physical or psychological violence is the easiest to notice. When a person is treated as a thing, however subtly, there is a kind of violence, very destructive and distressing, but one that is seldom perceived as such.

Another way of facing the fragility consubstantial with life is trust. But, once again, it cannot be through blind trust, which is another way of not seeing, of disappearing or making the other disappear by eliminating the distance that is absolutely necessary for recognition and mutual respect. Lucid trust is not violent, because it does not lose sight of the other, though not in order to control or threaten them, but to remind them of the fragility exposed in the relationship, because the presence of vulnerability should not push towards harm in the first place, but towards responsibility, commitment and care for oneself and for the other.

Lucid trust, when it is made explicit, made present, named, is a call to care, to commitment and to responsibility for the other, starting precisely from fragility and not from blindness, violence or omnipotence. Lucidity demands making the space present and respecting it on the basis of its limits, shedding light and clarifying ambiguities.

Trust is a way of dealing with vulnerability, because the opposite of vulnerability is not, as one might think, invulnerability, but care, that is, responsibility and commitment.

The opposite of vulnerability is not invulnerability, but care.

Trust and promise

Behind trust, and almost sustaining it, there is a promise on the part of the one who receives the trust, even if it is not declared or made explicit. The origin of the word for trust (fides) has to do with a plea not to do harm. The more fragile asks the more powerful for fides so that the latter will protect them, will not harm them, will not abuse them; that is, they entrust themselves to the other and ask to be able to trust. To trust, to entrust oneself or to entrust something to someone means to hope that this someone will not do harm but will care for, respect and protect what has been entrusted. They may do harm, they may betray the trust that has been placed in them, but the one who trusts hopes that they will not. Why? Because there is something in trust that creates a promise of protection, a promise that, of course, can be broken.

Let us take the reverse path: behind every promise, trust is implicit, because a promise always indicates a will to keep one’s word. It even presupposes the capacity to trust in the word and in the fact that this word will remain the same. That is why, for some, to trust is a way of giving a certain stability and meaning to a future that is always uncertain, always unforeseeable. The promise also ventures into the future and tries to give it stability, meaning, trust.

The one who receives trust must make themselves worthy of that trust, and this worthiness is given by the promise to care and to protect. Let us think above all of the age at which trust is born: early childhood. The face and the naked fragility of the newborn are a gentle cry for trust. That fragility normally commits the adult to their care, to tenderness, to upbringing. This upbringing may gradually form and integrate the child either in lucidity, in lucid trust, or in affective blindness, that is, in a lack of protection, in paranoia, in violence.

That is why I insist on the promise of care, on the commitment to the most fragile. This promise must be made explicit, must be made present, since if the promise always remains implicit it tends to be forgotten, to grow careless, to shed responsibility. Trust becomes lucid trust when it is spoken as a promise, a promise of care, that is, a commitment.

Trust, sexuality and abuse

We humans are beings scattered across thousands of dimensions, but all these dimensions rest on a deep personal unity which, though difficult to describe directly, is radical. This unity is given by our loving. It is our loving, our affectivity projected towards the world, towards others, towards the future, towards ourselves, that integrates reason and orients our existence, gives us unity and meaning. Loving even gives us the strength we need to live, to be alongside others, to create and procreate, to begin projects, to decide, to fight to carry on with what we have begun. We are, in an integrated way, an intelligence that feels and a sense that thinks. Feeling without thinking or thinking without feeling turns us into dissociated beings, “idiots”, fragmented, delirious or simply disoriented. Our deepest existential orientation comes from that secret and mysterious compass at the centre of our affectivity, which is our own centre.

For before being strictly and purely rational and calculating beings, we are affective beings: we feel the world even before we think it, and this is neither a defect nor an obstacle to clear and distinct thought, as classical psychology believed. This was a rather revolutionary discovery of the twentieth century, and we have still not finished understanding all its consequences. Neuropsychiatrists, philosophers, biologists and educators are only just beginning to understand the consequences of this reality, which was hidden by the distrust in which affects, feelings and the body were held. The West forged much of its scientific, military and industrial power by regarding the body as a mere tool of the human being, a machine, a thing among things, to be distrusted, feared and dominated. The human being had to be pure mind, spirit or soul, and the body an instrument for knowing (science), working (industry) or subjugating (religion).

Little by little, above all as we have lived through the disastrous consequences of the dissociation of body and soul, and helped by some philosophers and scientists, we human beings have come to realise that we are embodied beings, and it is as embodied beings that we find ourselves in the world and find our bearings in it. The world affects us, and it is affect that guides us among the thousands upon thousands of stimuli we encounter every day. Deep down, what orients us in the first place is not reason or calculation, nor even the survival instinct, but affect.

That is how we choose friends, partners, a profession, work, a vocation, projects, arguments; it is affect that makes us fight for what we love, even to the point of sacrifice, against all calculation, reasons and even against the survival instinct. That is why the mere consideration of affects and emotions, the integrated way of taking decisions, is a powerful refutation of the sad economistic belief that everything is a mere calculation of costs and benefits. Weighing costs, opportunities and benefits in every decision is important, but what is decisive is the meaning of decisions, that is, what integrates our thinking and our affectivity.

Now, affectivity is always a modality of our sexuality. The centre of our existence is affective and sexed. We are not sexed because we love and care; rather, we love and care because we are sexed in the broadest sense: we feel others and can commit ourselves to them in creating projects and actions, new worlds, new human beings. This being able to love, to care and to commit ourselves is the way in which we find our bearings in the world and in existence. The erotic is only one manifestation of sexuality: sexuality is much broader. We are entirely sexed beings; our identity is sexed. That is why sexuality is so protected: physically and emotionally it is placed in a secret, intimate, personal place. The centre of sexuality is one’s own sacred place, an essence hidden within oneself, hidden and secret even from oneself. This is the centre of our orientation, and that is why it is so fragile: it is the most radical manifestation of vulnerability. Through this centre we secretly orient ourselves towards what we like, what moves us, what gives us meaning, what we love and what affects us. That is why sexuality is so protected, even in its most absurd forms. (There are people who still call the genitals their “shames”.) But that centre is also transcendence. It is the place of the most radical transcendence, since it is there that the vital material for creating new lives is produced, and in the case of the woman, from there springs, or there arrives, that intimate stranger who is wholly other, inspiring respect and care, yet at the same time wholly one’s own, awakening the deepest feeling of love that can be experienced: the child. The child comes from the centre of existence, transforming that centre, pure and secret intimacy, into transcendence, a bridge.

This centre and transcendence are shared delicately and carefully in moments of the highest trust, respect and freedom. Only in this way, in that space of trust, of lucid trust, respect, delicacy, passion and self-giving, is shared sexuality fruitful, making our humanity grow and deepen. Otherwise, this centre of one’s own identity remains hidden and protected within strong limits. However, the body can also make fruitful, let another in and receive them without ever integrating or sharing that centre of intimacy, the ultimate secret of the self; instead, it becomes dissociated from itself. Sexuality can be shared without sharing the transcendent centre of intimacy; limits can be transgressed, the space broken, the light of trust, of lucid trust, put out; the very centre of existence, the personal affective compass that makes trust possible, can be deeply wounded. This possibility of harm, of deep harm to oneself and to others, creates the infinite urgency of care and lucidity.

That is why sexual abuse is an aggression radically different from all others. It is not property, a possession, money or freedom that is violated, transgressed, wounded. Nor can what is attacked in sexual abuse be reduced to the physical body. Sexual abuse is an intrusion into the very centre of bodiliness and of existence, that centre which marks, conditions, makes possible and orients our being in the world alongside others.

Sexual abuse occurs when someone, by force or, even more violently, by deception, manipulation, authority or by taking advantage of trust, crosses those limits and enters the sphere of what is most intimate and fragile in one’s own identity. That crossing constitutes a very deep fracture, because it reaches the depths of a person, their identity, their capacity to discern reality and find their bearings in the world. When the abuse occurs at an early age, or when the perpetrator has some kind of power or authority over the person they abuse (family, work, religious, military), the fracture can be even greater. The victim trusted the perpetrator, and the perpetrator took advantage of that trust, used it to obtain pleasure, turned the victim into an object of their pleasure, reified them. There are already too many cases of suicide silently linked to abuse, of depression, of an inability to trust or to establish healthy affective bonds, of psychological breakdown, even of difficulty in discerning reality and finding one’s bearings.

Only very recently have we begun to realise, as a society, how serious sexual abuse is: a deep aggression, capable of confusing the boundaries between victim and victimiser, of robbing the victim even of their right to be a victim. There are cultures and even religions in which the seriousness of sexual abuse is still not fully recognised, and yet the harm, the trauma, the dissociation are there; they are plain to see. The proportion of society that has been a victim of abuse is chilling, and therapists, psychologists, doctors, lawyers and judges generally do not know how to deal with it. The consequences are very deep, and recovery is a struggle that lasts years. The main struggle is to trust again. Sexual abuse destroys trust in others, since the great majority of it occurs in the family setting or among acquaintances close to the family, but it also destroys trust in oneself, since it produces great confusion of limits and roles, to the extreme that the person who has been a victim may come to feel complicit in their own wound. And it also destroys trust in institutions, since these are not always able, in a position or willing to protect, to listen or to do justice. The breaking of trust is the breaking of one’s own humanity since, as we saw above, without trust there is no mutual recognition.

Sexual abuse destroys trust

• In others. The great majority of it occurs in the family setting or among acquaintances close to the family.
• In oneself. It produces great confusion of limits and roles.
• In institutions. They are not always able, in a position or willing to protect, to listen or to do justice.

From this arises the challenge of building a trust that is a protective factor and not a factor of vulnerability. The banners raised against trust on account of abuse, of any kind of abuse, are the very confirmation of the sentence that the perpetrator imposes on the victim through the abuse: “you will never be able to trust again”. Lucid trust is the breaking of abuse, because it redraws the limits of oneself in order to create a space of light into which another can enter, recognise them and be recognised in this space and with these limits.

Trust is stubborn and resilient, and in the miracle of its resilience it acquires that of lucidity. At the same time, lucid trust, which feels, recognises and respects the limits of oneself in the limits of the other and demands respect for limits, can be formed, taught and passed on in that same respect, validation and awareness of those limits. Just as abuse can sometimes be viral, so too lucid trust, commitment and care can be.

Bibliography

Supporting, in dialogue with and even questioning this book are many works and authors. Some readers will recognise them, but I have avoided mixing them into the text so as not to burden it with quotations and references, since I have not seen the need. Below I name some of these works and their references for those who wish to continue the dialogue, to refute or to go deeper.

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