Gullibility, Innocence and Love

Gullibility is seen as a bad trait but it is in fact part of the loving and trusting aspect of humanity. It is to be revered if it is not because of willful ignorance. If a person is a willing student of life yet they can be easily tricked it is simply because they trust people easily.

Part of being a good person is being tricked sometimes. Without a level of trust, you are showing no love towards others and in your defense you certainly offend. That is to say that the best defense is a good offense and you will subconsciously maneuver to screw people before they screw you when you ‘know’ they are up to no good. But there will be times when you ‘know’ they are up to no good and it will turn out you are the one causing pain and taking from another.

We must be at peace with the necessity of being tricked, abused and swindled. It’s part of being a good person. Once you accept this as a price you pay to make the world a better place, you can be at peace with even what seems to the fearful to be the most embarrassing oversights.

“I don’t donate to charities because I heard about how 90% of the money goes to the people who run them”

“I don’t give money to homeless people because they’ll just drink it away and I don’t want to add to their problem”

Policeman: “I shot the bum because he looked like he had a gun! A fourteen year old kid shot someone for no reason just the other day for god’s sake…”

“I can’t perform CPR on that dying man! Do you know that the families of those that die frequently sue and take everything from a person who was just trying to help?”

If you were a man with a prosthetic nose who had been laughed at many times, you might not know that the guy you just punched when you couldn’t take it anymore was laughing at something else. Maybe many of those others weren’t laughing at you after all?

There are so many times throughout our lives that someone says something they are unaware might mean something different to us. Many times we then take the misunderstood slight and hold it against them. Later we then say some passive aggressive remark “retaliating” for the hurt we misinterpreted because of our skewed expectation. We in fact are the aggressor many times because of these subtleties and misunderstandings.

“I don’t mean to be “nosey“, but where did you get that tie? Haha”

To our prosthetic nose wearer it is obvious by the needless emphasis on “nosey” that this fellow just approached him and insulted him, merely using the pretense of asking about his tie. But this is only because he didn’t know that the approaching fellow had just finished telling his buddy that he liked the tie and was going to ask about it and is oblivious to the prosthesis. His friend who knows this “asking people” is a common behavior calls him “nosey” which he frequently does in such a situation. He then walks over to ask, using the phrase above. The emphasis was self-deprecation. The laugh was just a little self-consciousness about approaching a stranger with such a question.

If Prosthesis just punches the guy, eventually someone will figure out the misunderstanding but what if Prosthesis says to Nosey, “I bought it at an expensive store, I’m sure you wouldn’t be interested”? Or “The tie store…” Because of the indirect nature of the responses, they get off on a bad foot, each believing something bad about the other. If this had been in a situation where they might see one another frequently, more misunderstandings will likely escalate into a situation which makes them enemies. Notice that the abused Prosthesis fellow becomes the abuser who is at fault in this relationship. Is it really his fault though?

Justice needs to be served to those who abuse others but not by treating everyone as guilty. I recently was on a trip to Moldova where nobody ever seemed to smile. I’ve found that in cities and depressed areas when compared to rural areas there is an obvious difference in how much someone smiles. It is easy to figure out this discrepancy if the right perspective is given.

When a used car salesman walks up to you with nothing more than greed and exploitation on his mind what does he look like? (Big smile) When a con artist of any kind talks to you what does he look like? When you do not suspect someone of malicious intent who smiles at you, what do you do in return? You smile. Your smile shows trust and signals the success of the con artist. When exploiters abound, smiling is a mark of innocence and ignorance. It marks you as an easy target. In places where there are too many exploiters, (wolves) smiling means you are either a con-man or a dupe. In small rural communities there are no anonymous dealings. Lives are too interconnected for anyone to get away with an abuse without people finding out and it coming back to bite them. However, the flip side of this is that good deeds don’t go unnoticed and those come back around as well. We used to know who made good chairs and gave them the money they deserved for those quality products. In those communities smiling means that the two of you are going to try to cooperate to achieve best outcome for each other and the community.

Without justice, a society crumbles into an untrusting and divided state. It becomes a feedback loop in which abuse -accidental and purposeful- become a norm and true cooperation, love and the deluge of benefits that come from those things are snuffed out entirely.

“Why should I spend more time in hand-crafting a chair that will last a lifetime when my competitor will make one that will last a year for slightly less, make a huge profit and push me out of the market?”

We as untrusting consumers have no choice but buy the cheaper chair because both manufacturers say they have quality construction. There is no way for us -other than to learn chair making- to determine a difference because our trust level is zero from all the lying and liars who are rewarded by those who trust. Therefore we must buy the worse quality product because the price is the only variable we can actually judge. Eventually those who used to trust feel foolish for rewarding evil people and then add to the problem in a more direct way by not trusting.

Deception has become a subtle and fine art which animals have been using for millions of years. Unfortunately for a system of justice, a bird which walks around with it’s wing limp could just as easily have had a cramp in a muscle or could have just felt like stretching repeatedly. It never “said” it was wounded. Deception is a tool of exploitation. It is a tool of pure competition for the purpose of raising one individual above another in some way. Every tiny deception we perform is for personal gain over another.

The second critically important aspect of innocence is the ability to disbelieve what everyone knows is true and to disbelieve in personal experience. Everyone knew the sun went round the earth and everyone knew a man can’t fly. Everyone knew the earth was flat and everything was made of the four elements. Even the gullibility mindset which allows us to believe easily will allow us to believe something else which has more evidence to support it just as easily as we believe something we already know to be true. Innocence and gullibility are a type of humility about our own knowledge which is absolutely essential for invention and innovation.

If you flip a coin ninety-nine times and each time it comes up heads, what is the percentage chance that it will come up tails on the one-hundredth time? It is hard wired in our brains to believe that it will be strongly to one side or the other but the truth is that it is still exactly 50/50. One of the truths of reality is that anything truly random will also stack up at times so that a small perspective will give an inaccurate idea of probability over time. Sometimes you really will flip a coin ten times and it come up one side all in a row but it doesn’t mean anything.

Many of us have a few unlikely bad events happen to us in short succession and it causes us to expect unlikely bad things to happen more frequently than is realistic. By expecting it, we interpret small inconveniences as bad things to prove our theory correct. In turn we lower our mood and miss opportunity because we know it won’t turn out well. The flip side of opportunity is risk. Even if the risk is so small we lose nothing other than the feeling of failure, we begin to steer clear of risks and the opportunities they offer. We create our own bad luck. This is the mechanism of the “Law of Attraction”.

Part of innocence is fearlessness. When we decide to disbelieve past failure as a predictor of the future we open ourselves to possibility. Many times, because we have not struck at rich by thirty(or some better goal), we believe we actually have less possibility of great things happening than younger people. This is an obvious fallacy that nearly all adults fall into. It is fear that holds us back from our dreams. It is the heedless ignorant innocence of youth that empowers people to accomplish the impossible.

Innocence is what allows us to see possibility instead of improbability. Bravery and humility can make you innocent again. Only when we face our fears, deny our misgivings and bravely engage the future with the humility to say, “I might be wrong. Everyone might be wrong.” can we forgive our failures and let go of guilt and inadequacy.

Only when we forgive ourselves and forgive others their missteps and offenses can we reap the limitless rewards of cooperation and love. If you lose your innocence and allow yourself to constantly believe ill of others, you will become one of them. You become an abuser by default.

There is a price to pay for exploitation as a way of life. We pay it on a societal level though, and over time. It is only because others like you stop trusting and stop willingly paying the price of gullibility that a society crumbles. There is universal justice in this world even if it is on a longer time line than you might prefer.