Lucid
Trust

Trust is one of those rare concepts as hard to define as they are necessary for understanding the human, like freedom, justice, or happiness, though with a curiously higher degree of complexity. 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 feature of human relationships among others but their very foundation, that is, what makes it possible for there to be society, and beyond that: 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 administration know that their work depends, in a radical way, on trust. They are aware that any management, action, and analysis they wish to carry out must presuppose trust as a structural element. The world economy depends on the trust of markets, of 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, internal as much as external. They depend on trust inward, that is, of the team, and on trust outward, that is, the trust they project toward others.

Trust is used as a referent and a measure in all the social sciences and in every field of human knowledge and action, but its internal structure, despite being fundamental, has remained rather neglected. The philosophical importance of trust is greater than the attention it has been paid 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 very difficult to grasp in itself, in its internal dynamics, its conditions, its possibilities, its essence.

There are some value-concepts similar to trust on which hundreds of works have indeed been written, such as justice, truth, or power. This difference is not by chance. In the first place, all those concepts presuppose trust, rest upon 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 one does not trust justice, its measures will be considered pure arbitrary violence and it will cease to be justice. In the second place, trust manifests itself in these concepts. The trust of a people manifests in its capacity for justice, that is, to act effectively when fundamental norms or its constituent contracts are broken. Trust also manifests in a public opinion that is informed adequately and transparently about the decisions political power takes, as well as about the events that occur in the country. In the third place, all these concepts are worked at the purely rational level, that is, the logical conditions for their pertinence are established and then the occurrence or not of these conditions is verified. 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 happens with justice and power. With trust, however, something very different happens, since its logic transcends the strictly rational plane and installs itself in the affective and emotional, without of course denying the rational. To establish rationally the conditions of truth, justice, or power is a relatively easy or clear task for its application. Trust, however, moves in a wholly different logic, a logic that includes the affective, and that cannot be translated into strictly rational laws. There can be no true syllogism or algorithm of trust, and those that have been sketched are no more than probabilities, a game of risks and opportunities, that finally 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 with this is that in the West we are not accustomed to accepting that integration naturally; on the contrary, we are accustomed to the dissociation of thinking, feeling, the body, and the soul.

Our Western education, rooted in classical modernity, has tried to rid itself of, to dodge, or to 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.

Since the seventeenth century and the birth of the New Science and the universalization of scientific method, an attempt was made to bracket emotions, feelings, and even the senses, for being erratic and ambiguous in the process of establishing certain and true knowledge. To know the objective it was believed necessary to eliminate, or at least to suspect, every subjective residue. In this way the old suspicion held about the body was confirmed, now from the sciences: a source of temptations, 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 truth, whether spiritual or scientific, he must purify himself of his subjectivity and corporality, 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 ends up being of an enormous cruelty, both personal and interpersonal, on the one hand, and emotionally blinding, on the other, besides being even scientifically incorrect.¹

The force with which the West was built, and that led it to the brink of destruction, was obtained 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 turns out to be one of great violence of man toward himself, toward the world, and toward the other. We may think that this violence was verified during the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, in the high statistics of depression, and in the climate change produced by the irresponsible treatment men give the world, living to this day the consequences of a culture built on fear and distrust.

This way of relating to oneself, to one's neighbor, and to the world translates also into a very specific vision 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. For that the Leviathan, that is, the State, had to count on an enormous capacity for violence, even if it did not necessarily exercise it. State power is guaranteed, under this logic, by the constant fear of men. If men lose their fear, power would lose much of its efficacy and a new source of legitimation would have to be sought. For this reason a classic kind of power cannot allow us to lose our fear and our anxious desire for security. Immersed in fear, human beings are tremendously manipulable and accept without question any kind of abuse of power so long as it makes us feel a little safer.

Under this logic, not only central power but also the more direct powers and authorities, such as parents, educators, and police, 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 the insistence on the need for security through fear. Fear and the infinite, illusory anxiety for absolute security numb the sense of freedom and even of one's own dignity. They reduce freedom to the possibility of choosing among two or three options of consumption or of security itself.

It must be clarified that fear is an instinctive force which, in its just, healthy, and integrated measure, aims at deploying better possibilities 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. To stoke fear, distrust, and insecurity produces the immediate effect of cohering people around a violently protective power.

Distrust is then animated, amplified, and exaggerated over certain objects of fear, such as the immigrant, the one who thinks differently, the poor, the foreigner, the wanderer with no fixed address, and even the neighbor. We men are quick to get drunk on fear and to seek 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, all can be understood from this logic.³

One could explain all the terror of the twentieth century, with its more than a hundred million violent deaths, as a century in which fear imposed its way of relating. The search for personal, national, racial, historical security requires violence to establish itself with all its delirium. The unity generated by fear before a common enemy gives a more reassuring sense of security than the magical daily coexistence with the uncertain and with the foreigner. 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.

Power existed for a long time in order 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, ensuring social peace. Men, in turn, fear conflict and the disturbance of their tranquility more than they fear power and its controlled excesses. The sense of security of having a power capable of great protective violence made the excesses of this same power overlooked. It was even preferable not to know, to hide, to cover up the excesses and abuses of power, so long as the sense of spiritual, personal, familial, and patrimonial security was kept 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 motivated by social networks and their omnipresent light, or by a spiritual turn, a historical fatigue, or an awareness of the danger in which humanity is placed by fragilizing the planet and its resources.

We find ourselves in a change of era marked by an awakening regarding fear and the abuses of power. Across the board, it seems that humanity is beginning to develop a kind of malaise, a rejection, almost an allergy toward the abuses of power. The excesses of power, which before were considered a lesser evil, almost a necessary cost in the search for security, today begin to be unacceptable. The blindness and violence produced by the pure search for security is becoming evident. That is the blindness that made it possible for true narcissistic deliriants to govern lives and peoples during the twentieth century, leading them to the destruction of themselves, and not only that, but being accepted as necessary and even, in some cases, desirable. Political leaders, caudillos, sectarian gurus, totalitarian and violent dictators were acclaimed and justified during much of the twentieth century all over the world, sustained and fed by the fear and distrust that peoples had forged over a long time.

The vision once held of power has been transforming, and it is possible that we find ourselves before 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, on the contrary, it is trust that is imposing itself as an imperious resource of peaceful coexistence and a guarantor of political stability. The paradigm of violent power that gave the sense of security has already given sufficient proof that it lends itself to abuse, and the absolute security it promises is clearly an illusion. Thus is born the need for trust as a climate also 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 current citizen discontent, worldwide, is a symptom of a deep rupture in the structure of society. That structure is trust. It goes without saying that we are passing through the worst crisis of trust in a long time, probably the deepest since trust has been an object of measurement. The worrying thing about the case is that we know well that a crisis of trust easily triggers a political, economic, and social crisis. More than that, every economic and political crisis begins from 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 level. 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 treated directly, like light, which cannot be caught or enclosed, for to do so is to eliminate it, to darken it. But there lies precisely the mysterious guarantee of trust: it is extremely fragile and elusive; it cannot be forced or manipulated, for these are ways of destroying 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. As until recently it was power and security, henceforth it will be trust.

Most political and social discourses presupposed, until very recently, the original clay of trust as a basic and unquestionable material. Today only deliriants could take for granted the trust of their interlocutors. An "empowered," informed, lucid citizenry, less fearful, allergic to abuses, wants to return to the foundations of the fundamental social contract and to question the paradigm of trust. So it is necessary to problematize trust, to unravel its hidden processes and dynamics, its mystery and its miracle. In this same sense it becomes so urgent to confront this kind of new social disease that is the crisis of distrust, as a principle of violence and social deterioration at all its levels.

All the studies that try to account for the various social realities, at the world level, meet a generalized crisis of trust: personal, interpersonal, and institutional trust. I insist: the economic and political crisis the world is passing through is basically a crisis of trust, and on this there is no debate. Trust has fallen to the lowest levels in history since it has been measured, but why? The clumsiest and most myopic explanation would consist in blaming people for having less capacity or disposition for trust. But it is not a problem of capacity or disposition; we could say rather that the very paradigm of trust is changing, that it is not a matter of a new threshold of trust but of 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. Blind trust, for some reason, no longer has a place in contemporary society, or has it less and less. 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 affiliates, parishioners, and teams. For this one must enter into the mystery of trust, into its elusive yet certain and radical logic, into its fragility and its necessity, existential as much as social.

It is evident that we find ourselves at a historical juncture, and my proposal consists in understanding it from trust, from its crisis and its new perspective. Perhaps it is social networks, globalization, and the transparency of information through the internet, or another reason, but something has made the structure of society begin to change.

As writing gave way to the establishment of the great civilizations, and the printing press lent the tools for a great critique and questioning, creating a new way of looking at the universe, that is, 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 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 we consider that the current crisis of trust coincides with the extreme transparency demanded by today's media, with the internet and the ever more immediate connection of people through social networks, it is because perhaps there is something this transparency has left uncovered. Transparency has let the light enter even into those dark places where deeds occur that some wish to keep hidden and in silence: abuses.

Labor, economic, sexual, financial, and social abuse, and every kind of abuse, draws its force from secrecy, from the silencing of abuse. The cornerstone of abuse, in any of its forms, is the secret, the silence, the ambiguity, the 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 juncture that transforms the crisis of trust into an opportunity. One must take the crisis to its extreme in order to transform trust into a transparent, luminous, lucid trust.

Before a crisis of trust like the present one, we may think that trust is a utopia and fall into the dark and delirious sadness of distrust. But trust has an insistence equivalent to our need to trust again. A new light and transparency, then, will have to be demanded of it. We all have the sense that humanity is taking an important step regarding trust and the (in)tolerance of abuses.

One cannot live humanly in distrust, but neither in the old paradigms of a blind trust. For this reason I propose that of trust from a perspective of lucidity, marking an important difference with both distrust and blind trust.

Someone might think that a trust with a surname is in reality a disguised distrust. It is usually said that one trusts or does not trust, that there are no middle terms or conditions. Trust, it is also usually said, breaks only once. This is the binary logic of trust and distrust that we wish to question, and to propose instead the concept of trust within the realm of mutual recognition, responsibility, and care. It is a matter of 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 usually confused with blind trust, the distinction will be necessary.)

The need for a trust whose paradigm is distinct from that of blind trust is born exactly from its crisis. The alarmist propagandas that raise the definitive banner of distrust have a reassuring effect in the short term, but in the medium and long term they are tremendously destructive, anguishing, carcinogenic. No project, company, or country, no family or relationship of love or friendship can survive in distrust. Even the identity of a person disintegrates into madness if it is not capable of rebuilding its trust in itself.

But neither can one live in the blindness, both practical and emotional, of blind trust. Relationships and projects also fail in blind trust, since blinded people cannot truly count on others, for they are not able to see them, and no one sees himself except through the other, who acts 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 the trust that commits itself to itself, because it knows that it cannot constitute itself as a place of absolute certainties nor as a value won once and for all. It is rather a constant challenge that requires the courage needed to return always to build and rebuild the conditions of trust itself. This is so because trust is not a rational conclusion but a dynamic affective bond that knows and feels, knows itself and feels itself from itself.

Lucid trust is not a natural way of relating to others or to oneself, but a matter of an ethical model that I propose to create and forge constantly if one wishes to establish integrating human and institutional relationships, marked and played out by active care and respect.

The ethical proposal of lucid trust rests on no ideology. Not political, nor religious, nor scientific. It is an ethics that arises from the sole fact of being-in-the-world, a shared world, that is, in a space alongside and from 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 men. Atomic individualism destroys the space in the infinite distance of distrust, and communitarianism destroys it from the illusion of 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 just distance that allows one to see without fusing, and thus to respect one another, to recognize one another without losing sight of each other, whether in distance or in closeness.

Lucid trust is ethical in the most proper sense of the word ethics. Ethics comes from the Greek éthos, which signified at first space, habitat. And every space exists thanks to the limits it establishes, recognizes, and respects. In this sense, trust is ethical, but not ideological, nor political, nor religious, rather an ethics that arises from the very finding-oneself-in-the-world alongside others. This finding-oneself is a feeling and feeling-oneself, a thinking and positioning-oneself in a concrete, spatial way. For this reason ethics makes conscious the limits among which one feels, makes them explicit, traverses them, finds itself in them, respects them in order to recognize itself in another and to recognize others, and from there to project concretely one's own life.

When one speaks of trust one generally speaks of blind trust, and this is an important error. Blind trust comes closer to distrust and to fear than to trust properly, or at least to lucid trust. Blind trust is a kind of distrust, for it does not dare to see, nor to ask that limits and conditions be made present; it does not dare to demand respect and care in the relationship. Fear and distrust in the other, in oneself, and in the world drive one to establish relationships of blind trust, under the illusion of total security, of absolute certainties, and of invulnerability. But in reality these illusions are the other face of the coin of fear and distrust. Blind trust is pure blindness: an impossibility of seeing, of hearing, of feeling and respecting limits, roles, spaces of intimacy, exclusive 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 consider the other as truly other, nor is the self considered as a being worthy, free, and capable of seeing the other, respecting and making respected the limits necessary in order to see and to let oneself be seen. Blind trust is a very clear and common way of self-aggression, which is as unacceptable as the aggression of 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 recognized as worthy of trust. Even in the case of institutional trust or trust in politics: although one does not personally know those who offer trust (or ask for it), there is a space of recognition where that trust is at play, such as the media, the internet, or social networks (new manifestations of the Greek agora).

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

Blind trust is passive trust. It is the simple wait for the other not to harm, or at least not to do so voluntarily, and this is not strictly a relationship but an almost anonymous expectation, a game of probabilities, statistics. For this 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 but is itself a relationship, that is, a context or space of light that allows mutual encounter and recognition.

Lucid trust is not a feature of some relationships nor their result, but a space that makes a relationship of trust possible. This space, in order to be lucid, is a space of light (lucidity comes from lux: light). The establishment of relationships of lucid trust begins, then, with the creation and defense of spaces of light among people. The image of a space of light is the possibility of seeing and letting oneself be seen, of recognizing and being recognized.

Lucid trust is also a space propitious for 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. 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 recognized.

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

Now, every space is created by its limits. Without limits there is no space but chaos and indetermination, ambiguity and confusion. Limits mark the necessary space among people in order to recognize and respect, care for and commit to one another. Those limits are legitimated by feeling the natural space that we are: a living corporality that finds and orients itself in feeling and thinking. In the body we feel the world and feel ourselves and, most important, through it we seek and find meaning for life. But I do not refer to an easy and volatile pulsional sensuality that finally generates dissociation and anguish, but to meaning, to the consonance of my horizon with the horizon of the other from that lucid force constituted by the consciously lived body.

The limits of the space of lucidity arise in the encounter with the other, even the limits to be transgressed. Without an other to show 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 his presence I recognize my own limits. I insist: even if these are transgressed, they must have been established in the presence of the encounter. For this reason limits are not a rational conclusion but reveal themselves in the affects, above all during early childhood. Although in maturity they are rationalized, they will always have an affective character impossible to reduce to a geometric, logical, rational space. Even a baby of a few months takes its distance in order to see and feel what happens around it and thus to orient itself from the person most affectively significant to it. That relationship, relationship par excellence, the paradigmatic relationship of every other relationship, 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.

Now, for there to be recognition, space is fundamental, that is, the silence, the light, the distance, and the limits that allow one to listen, to see, to respect, and to care for the other. It is necessary to clarify that limits are not the violent limits that impede 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 configure myself as a free self disposed to relate to others, to know, listen, respect, and love others different from me. Both absolute solitude and the illusion of fusion with the other eliminate this possibility.

Mutual recognition is at the origin of a democratic human community, but above all it is at the base of the integration of one's own personality, for this arises from the acceptance and valuation the other makes of me, an other like me. I am not able to feel myself, in my own skin, individuality, and difference, in eternal and total solitude; rather I need another to see me, to name me, to recognize me, in order to constitute myself as a self and to feel myself worthy of myself. This is the basis of the theory of recognition that I extend toward lucid trust, for there can be recognition only in the context of trust. More than that, trust is not a simple condition of recognition but its equivalent.⁴

For there to be recognition, a space and a distance are necessary that allow one to see in order to recognize. Without space there is no difference, and without difference there is no individuality. It is for this reason that space must be defended. Not only from a moral imperative of respect or care, but because space is necessary for recognition to take place, and thus for there to be a personal identity, a self.

Blind trust eliminates the distance, the space, and the limits that allow one to see and recognize, because the parts (or one of them) come too close, trample each other, blind each other. Without space and clear limits, no recognition is possible, since there is no light to see and recognize. Nor is lucid trust possible. In distrust the space becomes infinite and I do not manage to recognize the other or to recognize myself in him, for he escapes into distance or into invisibility. Lucid trust requires a just space, a space of light that makes mutual recognition possible. A space always fragile and, for that very reason, a space of care.

Lucid trust allows the other to be himself and empowers him for it, commits to his being without trying to modify, replace, or manipulate him so that he be what I want him to be, nor to drown him 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 recognized as such.

That there be light among people means also that the relationship and its dynamics are transparent and can be told to others without producing 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, and not out of fear or manipulation. For this reason it is necessary that the lucidity of trust constantly take distance from itself, from its own space, and submit it to a critical gaze, as if it were others. This distance, which is nothing other than the space proper to lucidity, allows one to take sides, to discern reality, to find oneself in the world and to orient oneself. For this reason lucid trust not only leaves space but needs, requires, constant critique and self-critique. 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. The rupture of that space is the rupture of the conditions of trust. This space translates also into specific roles and places from which to position oneself in the space: father, mother, son, professor, student, cousin, priest, politician. Light, lucidity, is necessary in order to see, recognize, respect, and defend the roles and spaces of each one. The rupture of the space, of the limits and roles, is called perversion, precisely because it per-verts, it turns the limits over. Blind trust and distrust, like abuse, are ways of breaking the space of mutual recognition, the space of lucid trust.

There is a wisdom of the body that it is necessary 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 space, its physical and non-physical limits, 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, we encounter ourselves in the world.⁵ So those strange everyday questions make such sense: "How do you find yourself?" or "Are you finding yourself in your new job?" To find oneself is a way of feeling oneself in the world, and that feeling has a wisdom one must listen to. The problem is that we are more accustomed to validating only what is calculable, what can be backed with arguments of costs and benefits.

There is a sad illusion according to which everything, absolutely everything, can enter into that economic logic and be measured and analyzed from the calculation of costs and benefits, as if life were a financial or real-estate project. Happily this is not so. Except for some obsessive psychotics, the center of decisions transcends that logic, although we do not always know how or why. And since we do not know, the logic of calculation tries to replace and hide the logic of meaning, because meaning "is felt," it is not provable or demonstrable. The healthiest and most integrating decisions are generally made not because they are convenient or produce more benefits than costs, but because they have meaning 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, and 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 important harm. Trust, friendship, love, joy are not decisions in the pure logic of the calculation of benefits, but 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 and orient myself, trust, feel, fear, and distrust.⁶

Lucid trust integrates the wisdom of the body. Like that natural light of reason of which the medievals spoke (lumen naturalis rationis), but integrating itself with the other divine sense that is the body. The body experiences and manifests trust and fear; it knows when a touch is friendly, filial, loving, or sensual. The body recognizes gazes in its gaze, silences, gestures, the respect of limits and their transgressions and rupture. The body is capable of inviting another into its intimate space and of expelling him too. But for that it is necessary to learn to feel, to identify what we feel, to recognize it, and to orient ourselves lucidly from this feeling. But I insist, we have not been educated to integrate the wisdom of the body, but the opposite: to suspect, despise, deny, or instrumentally cultivate it. To feel, to put a name to what one feels, to analyze respectfully one's own feeling, to take distance and position oneself from that feeling is integrating 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 insist on the distance that it is necessary to take with respect to the other in order to be able to recognize, but one must also create a space with respect to oneself and to one's own feeling, since it is not a matter of following the bodily impulses of each moment but of orienting oneself from that feeling. For orientation, distance, questioning, integration, and positioning are required, the recognition of significant referents and action. To feel oneself and feel the other, to take distance from this same feeling in order to discern, take a position, and thus act in the world.

We need trust because we are fragile, vulnerable, because we are exposed to being hurt or killed by the sole fact of being alive. We can be deceived, swindled, manipulated, abandoned, abused by the sole fact of coming into contact with other human beings. We need to relate to others in order to come to be human beings, but this relating constitutes the possibility of betrayal. For that 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: everything would be resolved. Trust is necessary there where there is uncertainty, fragility, risk, vulnerability, that is, where there is life. We can trust or not trust, but we cannot cease to be vulnerable. Fragility is the material with which we were forged as human beings, and one must face this fragility in some way. One way to face it is by distrusting everything and everyone: closing off the possibilities that others may hurt this vulnerability, or prophesying that harm.

If I distrust everything and everyone and make sure that all will hurt me, then I eliminate the uncertainty, and the freedom, of trust. When someone in whom one trusted does harm, the harm is even greater than if it is committed by someone in whom one distrusted. The betrayal of trust and the chaos that betrayal provokes can even be more painful than the harm produced, as if trust were a reality in itself.

Indeed, trust is a reality in itself, almost palpable. I dare to say that trust has more reality, more substance and weight, than many physical things we meet daily, even though it is harder to define. Trust is like the climate, like silence and light: it is taken as obvious and natural and is difficult to look at, hear, or analyze directly. Light is not looked at directly, just as silence is not heard. They are conditions for hearing and for seeing. For this reason it is a good image for speaking of trust. It is difficult to define and to think directly; yet its absence is forceful and chaotic and, finally, very violent.

Distrust and violence, mute and blind, are a way of facing vulnerability, though by denying it. Transforming the fear and anguish that fragility provokes into the anger that distrust provokes, and the desire that the other disappear, because in this way one's own vulnerability, exposed before the presence of the other, would disappear. It is a fantasy as common as it is destructive. The presence of another person always makes more evident to me the fragility of life; the fragility of my own life as of that of others. Then I can come to want the other person to disappear, not to show himself, or not to throw my fragility in my face. But how to make a person disappear without exercising violence directly and explicitly?

One way to make the other person disappear is by objectifying him, considering him as an object, a thing, a statistic, pure productive force. These are forms of violence and are not always perceived as such. Physical or psychological violence is the easiest to notice. When a person is treated as a thing, even subtly, there is a kind of violence, very destructive and anguishing, but rarely perceived as such.

Another way to face the consubstantial fragility of 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 absolutely necessary for recognition, for mutual respect. Lucid trust is not violent, because it does not lose sight of the other, but not in order to control or threaten him, rather in order to remind him of the fragility exposed in the relationship, because the presence of vulnerability should not push toward harm in the first place, but toward responsibility, commitment, and care of oneself and of the other.

Lucid trust, when it is made explicit, made present, named, is a call to care, to commitment and responsibility for the other precisely from fragility and not from blindness, violence, or omnipotence. Lucidity demands making present and respecting the space from 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.

Behind trust, and almost sustaining it, there is a promise, even if it is not declared or made explicit, on the part of the one who receives trust. The origin of the word trust (fides) has to do with a request not to harm. The most fragile asks fides of the most powerful so that he will protect him, so that he will not harm him, will not abuse him; that is, one trusts in him and asks to be able to trust. To trust, to entrust oneself, or to entrust something to someone means to have the hope that this someone will not do harm but will care for, respect, and protect what is entrusted. He can do harm, can betray the trust that has been deposited in him, but the one who trusts hopes that 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 make the inverse path: behind every promise trust is implicit, because a promise always indicates a will to keep one's word. It even supposes the capacity to trust the word and that this word will remain the same. For this reason to trust is, for some, 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 himself worthy of that trust, and this worthiness is given by 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 the newborn is a soft clamor of trust.⁸ That fragility normally commits the adult to its care, to tenderness, to upbringing. This upbringing can form and integrate the child into lucidity, into lucid trust, as much as into affective blindness, that is, into unprotection, paranoia, violence.

For this reason I insist on the promise of care, on the commitment to the most fragile. This promise must be made explicit, made present, since if the promise remains always implicit it tends to be forgotten, neglected, de-responsibilized. Trust becomes lucid trust when it is pronounced as a promise, a promise of care, that is, commitment.

We humans are beings dispersed in thousands of dimensions, but all these dimensions rest on a deep personal unity that, although it is difficult to describe directly, is radical. This unity is given from our willing. It is our willing, our affectivity projected toward the world, toward others, toward the future, toward ourselves, that integrates reason and orients our existence, gives us unity and meaning. Willing gives us even the force necessary to live, to be alongside others, to create and procreate, to begin projects, to decide, to fight to follow 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 is given from that secret and mysterious compass that lies at the center of our affectivity, which is our own center.

For before being strictly and purely rational and calculating beings, we are affective beings: we feel the world even before thinking it, and this is not a defect or an impediment to clear and distinct thought, as classical psychology believed. It has been a rather revolutionary discovery of the twentieth century, and we have not yet finished understanding all its consequences.⁹ Neuropsychiatrists, philosophers, biologists, educators are only beginning to understand the consequences of this reality that was hidden by the distrust held toward the affects, the feelings, the body. The West forged much of its scientific, military, and industrial power by considering the body a simple tool of the human being, a machinery, a thing among things with respect to which one must distrust, fear, and dominate. 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, above all by living the dire consequences of body-soul dissociation, and helped by some philosophers and scientists, we human beings have been realizing that we are embodied beings and, embodied, is how 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 and thousands of stimuli we meet daily. At bottom, it is not reason or calculation, nor the survival instinct, that orients us in the first place, but affect.

This is how we choose friends, partner, profession, work, vocation, projects, arguments; it is affect that makes us fight for what we want, to the point of sacrifice, against all calculation, reasons, and even against the survival instinct. For this reason the simple consideration of affects and emotions, the integrated way of making decisions, is a powerful refutation of the sad economistic belief that says everything is mere calculation of costs and benefits. To weigh costs, opportunities, and benefits in every decision is important, but the determining thing is the meaning of decisions, that is, that which integrates our thinking and our affectivity.

Now, affectivity is always a modality of our sexuality. The center of our existence is affective and sexed. We are not sexed because we want and love, but we love and want because we are sexed in the broadest sense: we feel others and we can commit to them in the creation of 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. It is for this reason that sexuality is so protected: physically and emotionally it is placed in a secret, intimate, own place. The center of sexuality is one's own sacred place, an essence hidden in oneself, hidden and secret even to 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. For this reason sexuality is protected so much, even in its most absurd forms. (There are people who still call the genitals "the shames.") But that center is also transcendence. It is the place of the most radical transcendence, since there the vital material is produced to create new lives, and in the case of woman, from there springs, or there arrives, that intimate stranger, who is wholly other, instilling respect and care, but at once wholly one's own, awakening the deepest feeling of love one can come to experience: the child. The child arrives from the center of existence, transforming that center, pure and secret intimacy, into transcendence, a bridge.

This center and transcendence is shared delicately and carefully in moments of utmost trust, respect, and freedom. Only thus, in that space of trust, of lucid trust, respect, delicacy, passion, and surrender, is shared sexuality fertile and does it make our humanity grow and deepen. If not, this center of one's own identity remains hidden and protected within strong limits. The body can also fertilize, reach, and receive another, however, without ever integrating or sharing that center of intimacy, the ultimate secret of the self, but 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, creates the infinite urgency of care and of lucidity.

It is for this that sexual abuse is a radically distinct aggression from all the others. It is not property, a belonging, money, or freedom that is violated, transgressed, wounded. Nor can what is aggressed in sexual abuse be reduced to the physical of the body. Sexual abuse is an intrusion into the very center of corporality 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 sphere of the most intimate and fragile of one's own identity. That crossing constitutes a very deep fracture, because it reaches the deepest of oneself, identity, the capacity to discern reality and orient oneself in the world. When abuse occurs at an early age, or when the abuser has some kind of power or authority over the one he abuses (familial, labor, religious, 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 suicides silently linked to matters of abuse, depressions, impossibilities of trusting, or of establishing healthy affective bonds, psychological ruptures, even difficulty in discerning reality and orienting oneself.

Very recently we have begun to realize, as a society, the gravity of sexual abuse: a deep aggression, capable of confusing the limits between victim and victimizer, of robbing the victim even of her right to be a victim. There are cultures and even religions in which full awareness of the gravity of sexual abuse is still not taken, and yet the harm, the trauma, the dissociation are there, patent. The percentage of society that has been a victim of abuse is chilling, and therapists, psychologists, doctors, lawyers, and judges generally do not know how to confront 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 occurs in the family environment or among acquaintances close to the family, but it also destroys trust in oneself, since it produces a great confusion of limits and of roles, to the extreme that the one who has been a victim can come to feel complicit in her own wound. But it also destroys trust in institutions, since these are not always able, or do not always want, to protect, or to listen, or to do justice. The rupture of trust is the rupture of one's own humanity, since, as we saw above, without trust there is no mutual recognition.

From here is born the challenge of building a trust that is a factor of protection and not of vulnerability. The banners against trust for reasons of abuse, of any kind of abuse, are the very confirmation of the condemnation that the abuser imposes on his victim through abuse: "you will not be able to trust again." Lucid trust is the rupture of abuse because it draws again the limits of oneself in order to create a space of light where another can enter, recognize him and be recognized 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, recognizes, and respects the limits of oneself in the limits of the other and demands respect of those limits, can be formed, taught, transmitted in that same respect, validation, and awareness of those limits. As abuse can sometimes be viral, so too can lucid trust, commitment, and care be.

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 is at work in the argument, and the list has been reduced to those with a locatable presence in the text. 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)