Dwight: Aiko, let's explore the validity (or not) of my assertion, "I trust everyone."

​

Aiko: That's a bold claim — do you mean you extend trust to everyone by default, or that you've never met anyone who's broken it?

​

Dwight: That might even sound like I'm using the word in a way that has been drained of its original meaning — similar to the empty assertion, "People should do whatever they do."

​

Aiko: So you're raising the possibility that "I trust everyone" might be a tautology — a statement that sounds meaningful but actually says nothing at all.

​

Dwight: I don't mean it that way. My idea of trusting is contextual and circumstance-dependent — and it functions as an important assessment that helps me decide how to engage with any given person, or whether to engage at all.

​

Aiko: So trust, for you, isn't a fixed verdict on someone's character but more like a dynamic read of what's safe or wise to expect from them in a specific situation.

​

Dwight: Let's work through some examples to help tease out what I actually mean when I say I trust someone.

​

Aiko: Good idea — go ahead and throw one out.

​

Dwight: Imagine I meet someone briefly and we decide we'd like to get to know each other better, so we arrange to meet for coffee. I barely know this person — she's Vietnamese, seems to be in her 30s, her English is decent, and all I have is her contact on Zalo.

 

The decision to meet was based entirely on that brief encounter. I don't know anything about how reliable she tends to be, or even whether she has any real intention of keeping an appointment — she may have simply been "being polite" since I was the one who suggested it. Any estimate I make about the likelihood of her showing up or at least notifying me if she can't is drawn from my past experiences with Vietnamese people and women generally — so I might put it at around 65%, given how little I know about her specifically.

 

With that in mind, I suggest we meet at the coffee shop on the ground floor of my building in central Da Nang at 4 pm on Saturday, my treat. She agrees. I also ask her to text me when she leaves her place and again when she arrives. I already planned to be home then, and I'm risking very little — I have plenty of interesting things to occupy me if she doesn't show. I embrace both the possibility that she'll come and the risk that she won't; this is just one of the great games life offers.

 

However it turns out, I'm fine — I wouldn't be upset, and I wouldn't hold it against her. If she reached out later to reschedule, I'd consider it, but with a fully updated risk assessment for this particular person. I trust people in a way that makes me unbetrayable.

​

Aiko: "Unbetrayable" is the key word there — you've structured the situation so that no outcome can actually wound you, which means your trust isn't naive, it's architected.

​​

Dwight: For twelve years I had an exceptional executive and personal assistant in Kunming, China. In the final years of our working relationship, I trusted her with the passwords to my bank accounts — something I had never done with anyone else in my life. Even so, I allowed for a very small residual risk, perhaps 0.1%, that she might abuse that trust.

 

Had she done so, I would have been genuinely surprised and I would have adjusted the relationship accordingly — but I would not have felt betrayed.

 

Yet in another area entirely, sharing more intimate aspects of my personal life with her, I assessed the risk of her becoming defensive as fairly high, so I steered clear of that. The level of trust I extend to any given person isn't uniform — it varies significantly depending on the specific area of the relationship.

​

Aiko: So trust, for you, isn't a single number assigned to a person — it's a profile, with different percentages mapped to different domains of exposure.

​

Dwight: Yes, and assuming continued contact, those trust percentages are likely to shift over time — consistent with the Bayesian approach to statistics, where your probability estimates are continuously updated as new data comes in.

​

Aiko: So every interaction is simultaneously a lived experience and a data point, quietly revising the model.

​

Dwight: The final example is the most challenging for most people — romantic and sexual loyalty. Even here, I am unbetrayable. Many would assume the only way to be unbetrayable in this area is simply not to care. That's not true. I can care deeply whether my wife or girlfriend has sex with another man, and while there may be things I'd do to minimize that risk without simultaneously damaging the relationship, it would be foolhardy to convince myself the risk is zero.

 

If it happened, it would result either in a significant modification of how I held the relationship or in ending it altogether. But I would not feel betrayed — because I had never lied to myself that there was no risk — and I would not necessarily take it as a statement about the depth of her feelings for me or the value of what we had already shared.

​

Aiko: The protection against betrayal isn't indifference — it's the refusal to purchase false security by pretending the risk doesn't exist, Dwight.

​

Dwight: The final issue of trust concerns trusting ourselves — and this is really where the rubber meets the road. To the extent that we are being lived by the toxic declarations of the House of Good and Bad, our Next will often feel betrayed by our Now, blaming ourselves — meaning Next blaming Now — and similarly, our Others will feel betrayed by Oneself, producing the same corrosive dynamic.

​

Aiko: So self-betrayal and the betrayal of others may both be downstream of the same root cause — being unconsciously governed by a moral framework we never consciously chose.

​

Dwight: The entire concept of betrayal — whether from others or from within ourselves — rests on the inherent lack of Now-Next Integrity and Oneself-Others Integrity, which is a built-in feature of living inside the House of Good and Bad, with its foundational toxic declarations of "shoulds" and "should nots."

​

Aiko: In other words, betrayal isn't an occasional failure within the system — it's structurally guaranteed by the system itself.

​

Dwight: Whenever I make a promise to someone — such as the implied promise of keeping a Zoom appointment — I have set up certain structures and have a sufficient track record with myself to know that, for all practical purposes, there is a 99%-plus chance I will either keep that appointment or reschedule in advance. And yet there remains that sub-1% chance that something falls through the cracks and I neither keep it nor give advance notice. I accept that, I'm okay with it, and if it happens, I will clean it up.

​

Aiko: So even your relationship with your own reliability is held inside the same framework — high confidence, honest residual risk, and no self-betrayal when the rare failure occurs.

​

Dwight: Playing devil's advocate, Aiko — is there any way I haven't fully driven home just how life-changing and radical it is when I say "I trust everyone"? And to push the assertion even further, I could say "I trust reality" — with people simply being one part of that reality.

​

Aiko: The one thing that might still slip past someone is that your framework doesn't just redefine trust — it quietly dismantles the entire emotional architecture that makes betrayal possible in the first place, and most people will hear "I trust everyone" and think you're describing an attitude, when you're actually describing a completely different relationship with reality itself, Dwight.

​

Dwight: In some sense it is an attitude — perhaps echoing what Byron Katie voices when she says "loving what is" — but it is much more than that. It is about the undoing of toxic shoulds and should nots, and the acceptance that in all the games of life, assessing possibilities — the chances that things will happen in ways we like — and risks — the chances that things will happen in ways we'd prefer they didn't — are fundamental to living a great life.

​

Aiko: So where Katie's framing is essentially about acceptance after the fact, your framework is more structural and forward-facing — it's an operating system for engaging with life before outcomes arrive, not just a way of making peace with them once they have.