Trust is Strategic, Not Emotional

In my last post on cheating and overcoming fear, I noticed a trend in the comments: a lot of TRPers have an allergic reaction to trust. There’s a powerful fear of being betrayed; by women, by your friends, by your family. It’s healthy to be skeptical about others, but this emotional fear of betrayal can cloud your mind and cause your to make bad choices. To best achieve our goals, decisions about trust need to be made as a matter of strategy, not out of fear.

Strategy: Trust Means Playing the Odds

Imagine a casino with a spinning wheel game. Nine spins out of ten, you win and double your bet. Once in ten spins, you lose and get nothing.

Would you refuse to play this game because you’re bound to lose eventually? Of course not, because the odds are in your favor. Even if you lose sometimes, you’ll come out ahead in the long run. You’ll keep playing until the casino changes the odds.

The payout of building relationships of mutual trust can be huge. Professional networking leads to jobs, raises, and promotions. Friendships help you get an active social life and a community that will support you in tough times. Together, these things increase your SMV and make it easier to pick up women.

Trusting people works on the same principle as the casino game. Each time you trust someone, you’re making a bet that they’ll pay out at least as much as you invest. Let’s say you only trust individuals who you judge to be at least 90% likely to pay out. Eventually, some of those individuals will break your trust. Does that mean you stop trusting anyone? No, of course not, because the odds are in your favor.

Similarly, when an individual breaks our trust, we often have an emotional reaction to cut that person off entirely. If we judge them to be unlikely to pay out in the future, this is intelligent strategy, but if we’re simply reacting emotionally to someone breaking our trust in one instance, we will throw otherwise beneficial relationships out the window. No individual is trustworthy 100% of the time. But you don’t have to win every time for it to be worth playing. You just need the odds to be in your favor.

As long as you have a solid understanding of how trust works, you’ll be able to judge when trusting someone is more likely to pay out than not. Instead of letting fear of betrayal make your decisions about trust for you, you can make them yourself on a strategic basis.

How Trust Works: Selfishness vs Self-Interest

Blue pillers divide the world into selfish and altruistic. Bad, selfish people only want to help themselves. Good, altruistic people want to help others, even if it's not what’s best for them. Unfortunately for blue pillers, the world doesn’t work like that, and so they’ll go on choosing to trust the wrong people and getting betrayed over and over because they don’t understand who to trust.

Red pillers know that all people are self-interested. No matter what we profess to believe, we’re all always thinking about what we want. The initial realization of this truth can lead to fear. How can you trust anyone who is self-interested? On the contrary, it is only because people are self-interested that you can actually trust them.

The fundamental principle of trust is simple: because people tend to act in their own self-interest, people will be trustworthy when their interests align with yours. This alignment can be short term, or long-term.

Short term alignment happens when you and another person have the same specific goal. Two co-workers want their project to succeed, two politicians want the same law to pass, and so on. In this case you can reliably trust someone as long as helping you also helps them directly.

Long-term alignment is the real trick. Over time, people can begin to identify their long term well-being as related to the well-being of a larger group; their friends, their family, their social club, their political party, etc. If you can create long-term alignment, other people will trust and aid you even when there isn’t an immediate benefit to them in doing so, because they want you to be in a better position to help them in the future. With long-term alignment, you can generally trust others to act in your interest unless they have a strong, immediate incentive to do otherwise.

Caveat: Liars like to use long-term alignment to gain favors from gullible people. Be wary of groups in which leaders use long-term alignment to get favors from others without really giving anything back.

In spite of the common fear, self-interest does not cause a Hobbesian war of all against all; in fact it is what makes trust possible. It is the source of strong, mutually rewarding relationships, the source of kindness between neighbors. You could say that self-interest is the source real, sustainable love. Remember these truths; trust strategically, and trust without fear.