Lucid
Trust

Trust is one of those rare concepts, like freedom, justice, or happiness, that are as hard to define as they are necessary for understanding what is human, though trust is curiously more complex than they are. Trust is an invisible energy, diffuse yet real, that integrates and sustains the fundamental structure of personal relationships, from the intimacy of one's relation 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 society possible and, beyond that, personal identity. Trust is the condition of coexistence.

Sociologists, economists, political scientists, career and vocational politicians, stockbrokers, and specialists in marketing, human resources, and management know that their work depends radically on trust. They know that anything they set out to manage, do, or analyze has to 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 or a project, and the forming of any kind of relationship all depend on trust, both internal and external, meaning trust within the team and the trust they project toward others.

Trust serves as a reference point and a measure across the social sciences and in every field of human knowledge and action, yet its internal structure, fundamental as it is, has been largely neglected. Its philosophical importance exceeds the attention it has received over time. In practice it is taken as understood, obvious, self-evident, as if it were a transparent concept, when in fact it is very hard to grasp in itself, in its internal dynamics, its conditions, its possibilities, its essence.

Other value concepts close to trust, such as justice, truth, or power, have been the subject of hundreds of works. The difference is no accident. First, all these concepts presuppose trust and rest on it. For there to be justice, truth, or power, there must be trust. Without trust, one cannot even speak of these concepts. What sense would it make to speak of truth, for example, if one did not trust its veracity? If people do not trust justice, its rulings will be seen as sheer arbitrary violence, and it will cease to be justice. Second, trust shows itself in these concepts. A people's trust shows in its capacity for justice, that is, its capacity to act effectively when its fundamental norms or founding contracts are broken. Trust also shows in a public that is properly and transparently informed about the decisions of those in political power and about what happens in the country. Third, all these concepts are worked out on a purely rational plane, that is, the logical conditions for their application are established, and then one checks whether those conditions are met. The logical conditions of rational truth (non-contradiction, the principle of identity, and so on) are what determine whether or not there is truth, and they do so very clearly. The same holds for justice and power. Trust is very different, because its logic goes beyond the strictly rational plane and settles in the affective and emotional, without, of course, denying the rational. Establishing the conditions of truth, justice, or power rationally, so that they can be applied, is a relatively easy or at least clear task. Trust follows an entirely different logic, one that includes the affective and cannot be translated into strictly rational laws. There can be no true syllogism or algorithm of trust. The ones that have been sketched are only probabilities, a play of risks and opportunities, and in the end they have nothing to do with trust. This is what makes the concept of trust both rich and difficult. Without denying strict reason, trust goes beyond it, transcends it, and even orients it within and from an affective plane. The logic of trust is a logic that integrates the affective, the emotional, and the rational. The difficulty is that in the West we are not used to accepting that integration as natural. We are used instead to separating thinking, feeling, body, and soul.

Our Western education, rooted in classical modernity, has tried to get rid of, sidestep, or repress emotions and affects. Objective truth cannot admit the intrusion of affects, passions, or emotions. When the subject is truth, which is supposed to be absolute, they are treated as subjective impurities.

From the seventeenth century on, with the birth of the New Science and the spread of the scientific method, there was an effort to bracket emotions, feelings, and even the senses, which were considered erratic and ambiguous in the pursuit of certain and true knowledge. To know what is objective, it was thought necessary to eliminate every subjective residue, or at least to treat it with suspicion. The sciences thus confirmed the old suspicion of the body as a source of temptation, sin, and disordered passion, and now also of error. This suspicion and contempt for the subjective led to an almost definitive split of man from himself. To know the truth, whether spiritual or scientific, he would have to purify himself of his subjectivity and his body, of his senses and emotions. Modern education, on which ours still rests (at least in part), centers on this objectivist and dissociative "purification." This education turns out to be enormously cruel, personally and interpersonally, and emotionally blinding, and it is scientifically wrong as well.¹

The force that built the West, and that brought it to the brink of destruction, came from distrust, fear, and the obsession with security. Many foundational texts of Western modernity are texts of explicit distrust in oneself, in the other, and in the world (for example Hobbes's Leviathan, 1651, and Descartes's Meditations, 1641).² Generalized doubt and suspicion were the climate; distrust and fear, the energy that set in motion the personal and social mechanics of the West. The result of this climate and this energy is great violence by man against himself, against the world, and against the other. We may see this violence at work in the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, in high rates of depression, and in the climate change produced by humanity's irresponsible treatment of the world. We still live with the consequences of a culture built on fear and distrust.

This way of relating to oneself, to one's neighbor, 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 than the natural fear with which men lived, since only fear controls men. To that end the Leviathan, that is, the State, needed an enormous capacity for violence, even if it did not necessarily use it. Under this logic, State power is secured by the constant fear of men. If men lost their fear, power would lose much of its effectiveness and would have to look for a new source of legitimacy. This is why power of the classic kind cannot let us lose our fear and our anxious desire for security. Immersed in fear, we human beings are extremely easy to manipulate, and we accept any abuse of power without question as long as it makes us feel a little safer.

Under this logic, not only central power but also closer powers and authorities, such as parents, teachers, and the police, depend on the fear of those in their charge to exercise their small share of power. The most effective propaganda for keeping power unquestioned is to keep insisting, through fear, on the need for security. Fear and the endless, illusory craving for absolute security dull the sense of freedom and even of one's own dignity. They reduce freedom to a choice between two or three consumer options, or security options.

Fear, it should be said, is an instinctive force which, in a fair, healthy, and integrated measure, serves to improve our chances of survival. When it is amplified and used as a political tool, however, 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 immediately binds people together around a violently protective power.

Distrust is then stirred up, amplified, and exaggerated around certain objects of fear: the immigrant, the person who thinks differently, the poor, the foreigner, the drifter with no fixed address, even the neighbor. We humans are quick to get drunk on fear and to reach desperately for threatening, cruelly punitive policies to satisfy our hunger for security, a hunger that feeds on itself. Everything from Nazi propaganda to G. W. Bush's war on terror can be understood through this logic.³

The whole terror of the twentieth century, with its more than a hundred million violent deaths, could be explained as the terror of a century in which fear imposed its way of relating. The pursuit of personal, national, racial, or historical security needs violence to establish itself in all its delirium. The unity that fear of a common enemy produces feels more reassuring than magical everyday coexistence with the uncertain and the foreign. But that unity needs a violence that feeds on itself until it destroys all 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 very power. It would be turned against anyone who disturbed the peaceful and solitary coexistence of men, and so secure social peace. Men, in turn, fear conflict and the disturbance of their tranquility more than they fear power and its controlled excesses. The security of having a power capable of great protective violence led people to overlook that same power's excesses. It was even preferable not to know, to hide, to cover up the excesses and abuses of power, as long as one's spiritual, personal, family, and material security felt intact. In that context, keeping that sense of security meant trusting blindly in those who held power.

Then something in humanity changed abruptly. It may have been social media and their omnipresent light, a spiritual turn, historical fatigue, or awareness of the danger humanity creates for itself by weakening the planet and its resources.

We are living through a change of era marked by an awakening to fear and to the abuse of power. Across the board, humanity seems to be developing a kind of unease, a rejection, I would almost say an allergy, toward abuses of power. The excesses of power, once considered a lesser evil, almost a necessary cost of seeking security, are starting to become unacceptable. The blindness and violence that the mere pursuit of security produces are becoming evident. It was this blindness that allowed truly delusional narcissists to rule over lives and peoples during the twentieth century, leading them to self-destruction, and to be accepted as necessary and in some cases even desirable. Political leaders, caudillos, cult gurus, and violent totalitarian dictators were acclaimed and justified around the world through much of the twentieth century, sustained and fed by the fear and distrust that peoples had built up over a long time.

The way power used to be seen has been changing, and we may be facing one of the most important paradigm shifts in history. Until recently, distrust and the fear produced by the unknown, the foreigner, death, damnation, madness, illness, poverty, or exclusion legitimated a power as violent as it was illusory in the logic of security. Today, by contrast, it is trust that is emerging as an indispensable resource for peaceful coexistence and a guarantor of political stability. The paradigm of violent power that offered a sense of security has shown often enough that it lends itself to abuse, and the absolute security it promises is clearly an illusion. Hence the need for trust as a climate that also provides security, though a different security from the one violent, threatening power offers. The fragility of trust is its own guarantee and protection, because whoever imposes, demands, or manipulates trust destroys it.

Today's worldwide public discontent is a symptom of a deep rupture in the structure of society. That structure is trust. Needless to say, we are going through the worst crisis of trust in a long time, probably the deepest since trust began to be measured. What is worrying is that we know how easily a crisis of trust triggers a political, economic, and social crisis. Indeed, every economic and political crisis begins with a crisis of trust.

Our society has a contemporary mantra, "let's rebuild trust," repeated above all in politics, institutions, and the economy. Trust, however, is not rebuilt by decree. On the contrary, any obligation to trust destroys trust. Trust cannot even be dealt with directly. It is like light, which cannot be caught or enclosed, because doing so puts it out, darkens it. And that is precisely the mysterious guarantee of trust. It is extremely fragile and elusive, and it cannot be forced or manipulated, because forcing or manipulating it destroys it. At the same time, every political, social, personal, economic, relational, even existential project depends completely on it. Fundamental and scarce, critical and urgent, trust must set the national and world agenda. Until recently power and security set that agenda, and from now on trust will.

Until very recently, most political and social discourse took the original clay of trust for granted as a basic material beyond question. Today only someone delusional could take the trust of their audience for granted. An "empowered," informed, lucid public, less fearful and allergic to abuse, wants to go back to the foundations of the social contract and question the paradigm of trust. This is why trust has to be problematized, its hidden processes and dynamics unraveled, its mystery and its miracle examined. For the same reason it is urgent to confront this new social disease of sorts, the crisis of distrust, as a source of violence and of social deterioration at every level.

Every study that tries to account for social realities around the world runs into a generalized crisis of trust, personal, interpersonal, and institutional. I insist that the economic and political crisis the world is going through is basically a crisis of trust, and on this there is no debate. Trust has fallen to its lowest levels since it began to be measured. But why? The clumsiest and most shortsighted explanation would be to blame people for being less able or less willing to trust. The problem is not ability or willingness. We could say, rather, that the paradigm of trust itself is changing, and that what we face is not a new threshold of trust but a new paradigm.

Fear and insecurity, at the social and existential level, served for a long time to induce people to trust blindly in powers and authorities, but this is changing. For some reason, blind trust no longer has a place in contemporary society, or has less and less of one. Trust urgently needs to be analyzed at every level, and not only from the point of view of traditional institutions lamenting that they have lost the trust of people, of their members, their congregations, and their teams. To do this we must enter the mystery of trust, its elusive but real and radical logic, its fragility and its necessity, both existential and social.

We are clearly at a historical juncture, and I propose to understand it through trust, its crisis, and its new perspective. Perhaps it is social media, globalization, and the transparency of information on the internet, or something else, but something has set the structure of society changing.

Just as writing made the great civilizations possible, and the printing press supplied the tools for a sweeping critique and questioning that created a new way of looking at the universe, modernity, something is happening today with the internet. Its transparency and universality are generating a crisis, but a crisis that reaches the very heart of civilization and its internal cohesion: a crisis of trust.

But one must not be afraid of crises. The word itself means discernment and decision. Crisis comes from the Greek krinô, which means to judge, to separate, and one separates and judges precisely in order to discern, orient oneself, value, change, and transform. A crisis of trust is an unavoidable juncture, and so one must look again at trust, take its crisis seriously, judge and discern.

It is this crisis that has led me to think of a new paradigm of trust. If the current crisis of trust coincides with the extreme transparency that today's media demand, with the internet, and with the ever more immediate connection between people through social media, perhaps it is because this transparency has exposed something. Transparency has let light into the dark places where things happen that some want kept hidden and silent: abuse.

Every kind of abuse, whether in the workplace or economic, sexual, financial, or social, draws its strength from secrecy, from being silenced. The cornerstone of abuse in any form is secrecy, silence, ambiguity, darkness. For this reason the worst enemy of abuse is light, transparency, clarity, lucidity.

If abuse destroys the capacity to trust, transparency and light create the conditions to trust again. This is the turning point that makes the crisis of trust an opportunity. The crisis has to be taken to its extreme so that trust can become transparent, luminous, lucid.

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

No one can live a human life in distrust, nor within the old paradigms of blind trust. This is why I propose a paradigm of trust grounded in lucidity, one that differs clearly from both distrust and blind trust.

Someone might think that trust with a qualifier attached is really distrust in disguise. People often say that you either trust or you don't, with no middle ground and no conditions. Trust, they also say, can only be broken once. This is the binary logic of trust and distrust that we want to question, and in its place we propose a concept of trust set within mutual recognition, responsibility, and care. It is an active trust, committed to itself and to the conditions that make it possible. For this reason I call it lucid trust. (It is true that conceptually we could call it simply trust, trust in its strongest sense, since I am convinced that true trust is always lucid. But since trust is so often confused with blind trust, the distinction is needed.)

The need for a trust built on a different paradigm from blind trust arises precisely from its crisis. Alarmist propaganda that raises distrust as its final banner is reassuring in the short term, but in the medium and long term it is deeply destructive, distressing, carcinogenic. No project, company, or country, no family or relationship of love or friendship can survive in distrust. Even a person's identity disintegrates into madness if the person cannot rebuild trust in themselves.

But neither can one live in the blindness, both practical and emotional, of blind trust. Relationships and projects also fail under blind trust, because people who are blinded cannot really count on others. They cannot see them, and no one sees himself except through the other, who serves as a mirror. A person who trusts blindly in himself likewise cannot see himself, know himself, feel his own limits and possibilities.

Lucid trust is committed to itself, because it knows it cannot become a place of absolute certainty or a value won once and for all. It is a constant challenge, and it takes courage to keep returning to build and rebuild 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.

Lucid trust is not a natural way of relating to others or to oneself. It is an ethical model that I propose we create and keep forging if we want integrative human and institutional relationships, shaped and sustained by active care and respect.

The ethical proposal of lucid trust rests on no ideology, whether political, religious, or scientific. It is an ethics that arises simply from being in the world, a shared world, that is, in a space alongside others and shaped by them.

Lucid trust steps outside the Western choice between the atomized individualism of competitive capitalism and the communitarian mystique of fusion found in classical socialism. Both destroy the space people need, the space that both separates and unites them. Atomized individualism destroys that space through the infinite distance of distrust, and communitarianism destroys it through 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 to see without merging, and so to respect and recognize one another without losing sight of each other, whether far apart or close.

Lucid trust is ethical in the most literal sense of the word. Ethics comes from the Greek éthos, which originally meant a space, a dwelling place. And every space exists thanks to the limits it establishes, recognizes, and respects. In this sense trust is ethical without being ideological, political, or religious. Its ethics arises from the very fact of finding oneself in the world alongside others. This finding oneself is a way of feeling and feeling oneself, of thinking and taking a position, in a concrete, spatial way. That is why ethics brings to awareness the limits within which one feels. It makes them explicit, moves through them, finds itself in them, and respects them in order to recognize itself in another and to recognize others, and from there to give one's own life a concrete direction.

When people talk about trust they usually mean blind trust, and this is a serious mistake. Blind trust is closer to distrust and fear than to trust in the proper sense, or at least to lucid trust. Blind trust is a kind of distrust, because it does not dare to see or to ask that limits and conditions be made explicit, and it does not dare to demand respect and care in the relationship. Fear and distrust of the other, of oneself, and of the world push people into relationships of blind trust, under the illusion of total security, absolute certainty, and invulnerability. In reality these illusions are the other side of the coin of fear and distrust. Blind trust is pure blindness, an inability to see, to hear, to feel and respect limits, roles, intimate spaces, private spaces. And when there are no clear limits, then roles can easily be confused, swapped, blurred, that is, they can be per-verted.

Blind trust and distrust do not oppose each other but complement each other in their violence. They are violent because they do not treat the other as truly other, nor do they treat the self as a being who is worthy, free, and able to see the other, who respects the limits needed to see and be seen and makes others respect them. Blind trust is a very clear and common form of aggression against oneself, as unacceptable as aggression against others.

Trust can never be blind, because trust exists only within a relationship with another, that is, with someone recognized as worthy of trust. This holds even for institutional trust or trust in politics. Although we do not know personally those who offer trust (or ask for it), there is a space of recognition where that trust is at stake, such as the media, the internet, or social media (new forms of the Greek agora).

When someone asks for or demands blind trust, what they are really proposing is blindness, and a space that invites some kind of abuse. Even if no abuse is ever actually committed, asking for or demanding blind trust is already a form of abuse, because it limits autonomy and the freedom to see, and it inhibits the capacity for self-care.

Blind trust is passive trust. It simply waits for the other not to do harm, or at least not to do harm willingly. Strictly speaking, this is not a relationship but an almost anonymous expectation, a game of probabilities, of statistics. This is why I say that if trust is blind, it is not really trust. Trust is active because it is a relationship. It does not rest on a relationship but is itself a relationship, that is, a context or space of light in which people can meet and recognize each other.

Lucid trust is neither a feature of certain relationships nor their result. It is a space that makes a relationship of trust possible. To be lucid, this space has to be a space of light (lucidity comes from lux, light). Building relationships of lucid trust therefore begins with creating and defending spaces of light between people. A space of light stands for the possibility of seeing and being seen, of recognizing and being recognized.

Lucid trust is also a space that favors active listening. There is a kind of silence of light in the space of lucidity that allows one to hear the other and to be heard. Just as silence is the condition that makes it possible for someone's voice to be heard, light is the condition that makes it possible for forms to appear and be recognized.

The space of lucidity that relationships need in order to be relationships of trust is a space that asks, questions, invites a response, and calls each person to give an account of themselves to the other and to become responsible. The light and silence of the space of lucid trust press one to answer for the other and for oneself, that is, to be responsible.

Every space is created by its limits. Without limits there is no space, only chaos and indeterminacy, ambiguity and confusion. Limits mark out the space people need in order to recognize and respect one another, to care for and commit to one another. These limits gain their legitimacy when we feel the natural space that we are, a living body that finds and orients itself through 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. I do not mean an easy, fleeting sensuality driven by impulse, which ends up producing dissociation and anguish. I mean meaning, the attunement of my horizon with the horizon of the other, from the lucid force of a body that is consciously lived.

The limits of the space of lucidity arise in the encounter with the other, even the limits that will later be transgressed. Without another person to show me limits, I disintegrate and lose myself, whether in the chaos of blindness or in the chaos of distrust. The other sets limits, and through the other's presence I recognize my own. I insist that even if these limits are transgressed, they must first have been set in the actual encounter. This is why limits are not a rational conclusion. They reveal themselves in the affects, above all in early childhood. Although we rationalize them as adults, they always keep an affective character that cannot be reduced to a geometric, logical, rational space. Even a baby a few months old keeps a certain distance in order to see and feel what is happening around it, and so orients itself by the person who matters most to it emotionally. That relationship, the relationship par excellence, the model for every other relationship and the source of what some call attachment, is a relationship of recognition, not of blind fusion and not of cognitive knowledge either. It is a relationship of affective recognition.

Recognition depends on space, that is, on the silence, light, distance, and limits that make it possible to listen to, see, respect, and care for the other. These limits are not the violent limits that block the closeness of love, attachment, and intimacy. Quite the opposite, only distance and clear limits make it possible to form a relationship with another and, within it, for me to shape myself as a free self, open to relating to others, to knowing, listening to, respecting, and loving others who are different from me. Both absolute solitude and the illusion of fusion with the other eliminate this possibility.

Mutual recognition lies at the origin of a democratic human community, but above all it underlies the integration of one's own personality, which arises from the acceptance and esteem that another, an other like me, gives me. In eternal and total solitude I cannot feel myself, in my own skin, individuality, and difference. I need another to see me, name me, and recognize me so that I can become a self and feel worthy of myself. This is the basis of the theory of recognition, which I extend to lucid trust, because recognition can only happen in a context of trust. Indeed, trust is not merely a condition of recognition but its equivalent.⁴

Recognition requires a space and a distance that allow one to see, and so to recognize. Without space there is no difference, and without difference there is no individuality. This is why space must be defended, not only out of a moral imperative of respect or care, but because space is needed for recognition to take place, and so for a personal identity, a self, to exist.

Blind trust eliminates the distance, the space, and the limits that allow one to see and recognize, because the parties (or one of them) come too close, run over each other, blind each other. Without space and clear limits, recognition is impossible, because there is no light to see and recognize by, and lucid trust is impossible as well. In distrust the space becomes infinite and I cannot recognize the other or recognize myself in him, because he slips away into distance or invisibility. Lucid trust requires the right space, a space of light that makes mutual recognition possible. It is always a fragile space and, for that very reason, a space of care.

Lucid trust lets the other be himself and strengthens him in being so. It commits to who he is without trying to change, replace, or manipulate him into what I want him to be, and without drowning him in the paranoia of abandonment, in the violence of abuse, or in fear. Lucid trust defends the space so that the other may be truly other and be recognized as such.

Light between people also means that the relationship and its dynamics are transparent and could be told to others without causing outrage, sorrow, or scandal. If a relationship of trust keeps the other's secrets and one's own, it does so out of respect, care, and commitment, not out of fear or manipulation. That is why the lucidity of trust has to keep stepping back from itself, from its own space, and examine that space critically, as if it belonged to others. This distance, which is simply the space proper to lucidity, allows one to take a stand, to discern reality, to find one's place in the world and one's bearings. This is why lucid trust does not merely leave room for constant criticism and self-criticism but needs and requires them. Distance and critique constitute the force of its lucid commitment.

Trust is lucid as long as the space that makes it possible exists and is respected. Breaking that space breaks the conditions of trust. This space also takes the form of specific roles and positions from which people stand within it: father, mother, son, teacher, student, cousin, priest, politician. Light, lucidity, is needed to see, recognize, respect, and defend each person's roles and spaces. The breaking of the space, of its limits and roles, is called perversion precisely because it per-verts, that is, it turns the limits upside down. Blind trust and blind distrust, like abuse, are ways of breaking the space of mutual recognition, the space of lucid trust.

The body has a wisdom that we need to recover in order to build relationships based on lucid trust. The body is a lucid force that orients us in the world among people and things. It has its own space and its own limits, physical and non-physical, both equally clear. The body possesses a wisdom of its own because it feels, not because it calculates. Through the body we orient ourselves 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, and find where we stand, in the world.⁵ That is why certain everyday questions in Spanish make so much sense: ¿Cómo te encuentras?, literally "How do you find yourself?", which is how Spanish asks "How are you?", or ¿Te hallas en tu nuevo trabajo?, literally "Do you find yourself in your new job?", meaning "Do you feel at home there?" Finding oneself, in this sense, is a way of feeling oneself in the world, and that feeling carries a wisdom we need to listen to. The problem is that we are used to validating only what can be calculated, what can be backed by cost-benefit arguments.

There is a sad illusion that everything, absolutely everything, can be fitted into that economic logic and measured and analyzed by calculating costs and benefits, as if life were a financial or real estate project. Fortunately, this is not so. Except for a few obsessive psychotics, the core of our decisions goes beyond that logic, although we do not always know how or why. And because we do not know, the logic of calculation tries to replace and conceal the logic of meaning, since meaning "is felt" and cannot be proved or demonstrated. The healthiest, most integrative decisions are usually made not because they are convenient or yield more benefits than costs, but because they make sense for one's life.

The problem is that meaning is something felt, and what feels it is the integrated self, body and soul, not a dissociated, divided self immersed in a purely economic logic. Our education overlooks, despises, or distrusts this integration of thinking and feeling, and that distrust has done us real harm. Trust, friendship, love, and joy are not decisions made by pure cost-benefit calculation. They arise from, and reflect, the integration of thinking and feeling, of mind and body. We urgently need to recover the body's orienting wisdom, to listen again to what listens to the world, the body in which I find and orient myself, in which I trust, feel, fear, and distrust.⁶

Lucid trust integrates the wisdom of the body. It is like the natural light of reason that medieval thinkers spoke of (lumen naturalis rationis), joined here with that other divine sense, the body. The body experiences and manifests trust and fear; it knows when a touch is friendly, filial, loving, or sensual. With its own gaze the body recognizes other gazes, silences, gestures, respect for limits, and their transgression and breaking. The body can invite another into its intimate space and can also push him out. For that, we need to learn to feel, to identify and recognize what we feel, and to orient ourselves lucidly from that feeling. But I insist that we have not been educated to integrate the body's wisdom. We have been taught the opposite, to suspect it, despise it, deny it, or cultivate it as an instrument. Feeling, naming what one feels, examining that feeling with respect, stepping back from it and taking a position on the basis of it is integrative work, a way of breaking with the modern dissociation in which we have indeed been educated and of recovering the most natural tool we have to discern, orient ourselves, and decide.

I want to stress the distance one must keep from the other in order to recognize him, but one must also make space between oneself and one's own feelings, because the point is not to follow every passing bodily impulse but to orient oneself from that feeling. Orientation requires distance, questioning, integration, and taking a position, as well as recognizing meaningful reference points, and acting. It means feeling oneself and feeling the other, and stepping back from that very feeling in order to discern, take a position, and so act in the world.

We need trust because we are fragile and vulnerable, because we can be hurt or killed simply by being alive. We can be deceived, swindled, manipulated, abandoned, or abused simply by coming into contact with other human beings. We need to relate to others in order to become human, but relating to them opens the possibility of betrayal. That is why we create trust.⁷

We are made of fragility and so we will always need to trust. If we were all-powerful we would not need to trust anyone, because everything would already be settled. Trust is needed wherever there is uncertainty, fragility, risk, vulnerability, that is, wherever there is life. We can trust or not, but we cannot stop being vulnerable. Fragility is the material we were forged from as human beings, and we have to face it somehow. One way to face it is to distrust everything and everyone, either by closing off every chance for others to wound that vulnerability or by predicting that harm in advance.

If I distrust everything and everyone and convince myself that everyone will hurt me, I eliminate the uncertainty, and the freedom, that trust involves. When harm comes from someone we trusted, it is even greater than harm from someone we distrusted. The betrayal of trust, and the chaos it causes, can hurt even more than the harm itself, as if trust were a reality in its own right.

And trust is indeed a reality in its own right, almost tangible. I would venture that trust has more reality, more substance and weight, than many of the physical things we encounter every day, even though it is harder to define. Trust is like the climate, like silence and light. It is taken as obvious and natural, and it is hard to look at, listen to, or analyze directly. We do not look directly at light, just as we do not listen to silence. They are conditions for hearing and seeing, which is why they are a good image for speaking of trust. Trust is hard to define and to think about directly, yet its absence is overwhelming, chaotic, and ultimately very violent.

Distrust and violence, mute and blind, are one way of facing vulnerability, but they face it by denying it. They turn the fear and anguish that fragility causes into the anger that distrust causes, and into the wish that the other would disappear, because then one's own vulnerability, exposed in the other's presence, would disappear too. It 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, to stay out of sight, or at least not to confront me with my fragility. But how can a person be made to disappear without direct, explicit violence?

One way to make the other person disappear is to objectify him, treating him as an object, a thing, a statistic, mere productive force. These are forms of violence, though they are not always perceived as such. Physical or psychological violence is the easiest to notice. Treating a person as a thing, even subtly, is a kind of violence that is highly destructive and distressing but is rarely perceived as violence.

Another way to face the fragility inherent in life is trust. But, once again, it cannot be blind trust, which is another way of not seeing, of disappearing or making the other disappear by removing the distance that recognition and mutual respect absolutely require. Lucid trust is not violent, because it keeps the other in sight, not to control or threaten him but to remind him of the fragility the relationship exposes. The presence of vulnerability should push us first toward responsibility, commitment, and care for oneself and for the other, and not toward harm.

When lucid trust is made explicit, brought into view, and named, it becomes a call to care, commitment, and responsibility for the other, grounded precisely in fragility rather than in blindness, violence, or omnipotence. Lucidity demands that the space be made visible and respected through its limits, that light be shed, and that ambiguities be cleared up.

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.

Behind trust, almost holding it up, there is a promise made by the person who receives trust, even if it is never declared or made explicit. The Spanish word for trust, confianza, comes from fides, and its origin has to do with a request not to do harm. The weaker asks the more powerful for fides, asking to be protected, not harmed, not abused. That is, the weaker party trusts the stronger one and asks to be able to trust him. To trust, to entrust oneself, or to entrust something to someone means hoping that this person will do no harm and will care for, respect, and protect what has been entrusted. He may do harm and betray the trust placed in him, but the one who trusts hopes he 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 go the other way. Trust is implicit in every promise, because a promise always expresses a will to keep one's word. It even presupposes the ability to trust the word given and to trust that it will stay the same. That is why, for some, trusting is a way of giving some stability and meaning to a future that is always uncertain, always unpredictable. The promise also ventures into the future and tries to give it stability, meaning, trust.

Whoever receives trust must become worthy of it, and that worthiness comes from the promise to care and protect. Let us think above all of the age at which trust is born: early childhood. The face and naked fragility of a newborn are a quiet cry for trust.⁸ That fragility ordinarily commits the adult to caring for the child, to tenderness, to raising it. That upbringing can shape the child toward lucidity and lucid trust, or toward emotional blindness, that is, toward a lack of protection, toward paranoia and violence.

For this reason I insist on the promise of care, on the commitment to the most fragile. This promise must be made explicit and kept in view, because a promise that always remains implicit tends to be forgotten and neglected, and no one takes responsibility for it. Trust becomes lucid trust when it is spoken as a promise, a promise of care, that is, a commitment.

We humans are scattered across thousands of dimensions, but all of them rest on a deep personal unity which, though hard to describe directly, is radical. This unity comes from our desire. It is our desire, our affectivity projected toward the world, toward others, toward the future, toward ourselves, that integrates reason and orients our existence, giving us unity and meaning. Desire even gives us the strength we need to live, to be with others, to create and procreate, to start projects, to decide, to fight to carry on with what we have begun. We are integrally an intelligence that feels and a meaning that thinks. To feel without thinking, or to think without feeling, turns us into dissociated, "idiotic," fragmented, delirious, or simply disoriented beings. Our deepest existential orientation comes from that secret, mysterious compass at the center of our affectivity, which is our own center.

Before we are strictly and purely rational, calculating beings, we are affective beings. We feel the world even before we think it, and this is not a defect or an obstacle to clear and distinct thought, as classical psychology believed. This was a fairly revolutionary discovery of the twentieth century, and we have still not grasped all its consequences.⁹ Neuropsychiatrists, philosophers, biologists, and educators are only beginning to understand the consequences of a reality that had been hidden by distrust of the affects, of feelings, of the body. The West forged much of its scientific, military, and industrial power by treating 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 his body an instrument to know (science), to work (industry), or to subdue (religion).

Little by little, mainly by living through the dire consequences of the split between body and soul, and with the help of some philosophers and scientists, we human beings have come to realize that we are embodied beings, and that it is as embodied beings that we find ourselves in the world and orient ourselves in it. The world affects us, and it is affect that guides us among the thousands upon thousands of stimuli we encounter every day. Ultimately, what orients us first is not reason or calculation, nor the survival instinct, but affect.

This is how we choose our friends, partner, profession, job, vocation, projects, and arguments. Affect is what makes us fight for what we want, even to the point of sacrifice, against all calculation and reason and even against the survival instinct. This is why simply taking affects and emotions into account, the integrated way of making 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 decides is the meaning of our decisions, that is, what integrates our thinking and our affectivity.

Affectivity is always a mode of our sexuality. The center of our existence is affective and sexed. We are not sexed because we desire and love. We love and desire because we are sexed in the broadest sense, meaning that we feel others and can commit to them in creating projects and actions, new worlds, new human beings. This power to love, want, and commit is the way in which we orient ourselves in the world and in existence. The erotic is only a 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, and kept in a secret, intimate place of one's own. The center of sexuality is one's own sacred place, an essence hidden within, hidden and secret even from oneself. This is the center of our orientation, and for this reason it is so fragile: it is the most radical manifestation of vulnerability. Through this center we orient ourselves secretly toward what we like, what moves us, what gives us meaning, what we love and what affects us. That is why sexuality is so heavily protected, even in absurd ways. (In Spanish some people still call the genitals las vergüenzas, "the shames.") But that center is also transcendence. It is the place of the most radical transcendence, because the living material that creates new lives is produced there, and, in a woman's case, it is where that intimate stranger springs from or arrives: wholly other, inspiring respect and care, and at the same time wholly one's own, awakening the deepest love a person can feel. That intimate stranger is the child. The child arrives from the center of existence, transforming that center, pure and secret intimacy, into transcendence, a bridge.

This center, this transcendence, is shared delicately and with care in moments of the deepest trust, respect, and freedom. Only then, in that space of trust, of lucid trust, respect, delicacy, passion, and surrender, is shared sexuality fruitful, making our humanity grow and deepen. Otherwise, this center of one's identity stays hidden and protected behind strong limits. The body can, however, also fertilize, reach, and receive another without ever integrating or sharing that center of intimacy, the ultimate secret of the self. In that case it dissociates from itself. One can share sexuality without sharing the transcendent center of intimacy; one can transgress the limits, break the space, eliminate the light of trust, of lucid trust, one can deeply wound one's own center of existence, the personal affective compass that makes trust possible. This possibility of harm, of deep harm to oneself and to others, makes care and lucidity infinitely urgent.

This is why sexual abuse is a form of aggression radically different from all others. What is violated, transgressed, and wounded is not property, a possession, money, or freedom. Nor can what is attacked in sexual abuse be reduced to the physical body. Sexual abuse is an intrusion into the very center of bodily life and of existence, that center 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 still, by deceit, manipulation, authority, or by taking advantage of trust, crosses those limits and enters the most intimate and fragile sphere of a person's identity. That crossing causes a very deep fracture, because it reaches the deepest part of a person, their identity, their capacity to discern reality and find their way in the world. When abuse occurs at an early age, or when the abuser holds some kind of power or authority over the victim (in the family, at work, in a religious community, in the military), the fracture can be even greater. The victim trusted the abuser, and the abuser took advantage of that trust, used it to feel pleasure, transformed his victim into an object of his pleasure, reified her. There are already too many cases of suicide silently linked to abuse, and too many cases of depression, of inability to trust or to form healthy emotional bonds, of psychological breakdown, even of difficulty in discerning reality and finding one's bearings.

Only very recently have we begun, as a society, to realize how grave sexual abuse is: a deep aggression that can blur the line between victim and perpetrator and rob the victim even of the right to be a victim. In some cultures, and even some religions, the gravity of sexual abuse is still not fully recognized, and yet the harm, the trauma, and the dissociation are plainly there. The share of society that has suffered 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, because most of it happens within the family or among people close to the family. It also destroys trust in oneself, because it creates deep confusion about limits and roles, to the point that the victim may come to feel complicit in her own injury. And it destroys trust in institutions, which are not always able or willing to protect, to listen, or to do justice. Breaking trust breaks one's very humanity, because, as we saw above, without trust there is no mutual recognition.

Hence the challenge of building a trust that acts as a protective factor rather than a source of vulnerability. Raising banners against trust because of abuse, of any kind of abuse, only confirms the sentence the abuser imposes on the victim through the abuse: "you will never be able to trust again." Lucid trust breaks with abuse because it redraws one's own limits to create a space of light that another person can enter, where one can recognize him and be recognized within this space and these limits.

Trust is stubborn and resilient, and through the miracle of its resilience it gains the miracle of lucidity. Lucid trust, which feels, recognizes, and respects one's own limits in the limits of the other and demands that those limits be respected, can also be cultivated, taught, and passed on through that same respect, validation, and awareness of limits. Just as abuse can sometimes spread like a virus, so can lucid trust, commitment, and care.

This English edition follows the Spanish text of Confianza lúcida (Uqbar Editores, Santiago de Chile, 2012). The original carried no in-text references; its closing pages listed the works that accompanied the writing without tying them to particular passages. For this edition the references have been placed in footnotes at the points where each work bears on the argument, and the list has been limited to works whose presence in the text can be located. Two of them, Honneth and Trías, have no English translation and are cited in the original Spanish. The conceptual vocabulary kept in Latin and Greek (fides, krinô, éthos, lux, lumen naturalis rationis) is the author's.

Translation note. This English edition was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence—specifically Claude 4.8 (Anthropic)—and then reviewed by the author.

Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes' error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. G. P. Putnam.

Descartes, R. (1996). Meditations on first philosophy (J. Cottingham, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1641)

Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). Phenomenology of spirit (A. V. Miller, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1807)

Hobbes, T. (1996). Leviathan (R. Tuck, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1651)

Honneth, A. (2009). Crítica del agravio moral: Patologías de la sociedad contemporánea [Critique of moral injury: Pathologies of contemporary society] (P. Storandt Diller, Trans.). Fondo de Cultura Económica. (No English translation available)

Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne University Press. (Original work published 1961)

Luhmann, N. (2017). Trust and power (H. Davis, J. Raffan, & K. Rooney, Trans.; C. Morgner & M. King, Eds.). Polity Press. (Original work published 1979)

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1945)

Miller, A. (1983). For your own good: Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence (H. Hannum & H. Hannum, Trans.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (Original work published 1980)

Miller, A. (2005). The body never lies: The lingering effects of cruel parenting (A. Jenkins, Trans.). W. W. Norton. (Original work published 2004)

Möllering, G. (2006). Trust: Reason, routine, reflexivity. Elsevier.

Patočka, J. (1998). Body, community, language, world: Selected essays (E. Kohák, Trans.). Open Court.

Ricœur, P. (2005). The course of recognition (D. Pellauer, Trans.). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 2004)

Trías, E. (2004). La política y su sombra [Politics and its shadow]. Anagrama. (No English translation available)