2014

Sankalp Saxena
H13103

IPLE: Assignment 1-

NEVER TRUST THOSE WHO HAVE HARMED YOU

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That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.
The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche said this in regard to psychological
trauma a person faces after some kind of suffering or tragedy and how he overcomes. A similar
approach needs to be adopted in case of harm suffered by someone at the hands of other.
Firstly it needs to be understood that people harm each other all the time, whether intentionally or
unintentionally. At some point in our lives, our trust gets compromised. Sometimes what used to
protect us becomes what harms us and stifles the capacity for our lives to be open and full of joy,
love, and peace. The following lines by Oscar Wilde in his poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol
put it succinctly.
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Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard.
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
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Needless to say, these experiences can be very painful. I mention this because it's somewhat
comforting to realize that we're not alone.
Even in mythology especially Greek, there have been many famous stories of betrayal after a
person has trusted someone who has harmed him/her such as Atreus and Thyestes,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Jason and Media etc. The stakes have been different for
different stories. Sometimes they are personal but sometimes they are big enough to put an
entire civilization at risk like in the case of The Trojan Horse. Two of the most popular stories
are mentioned below:



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THE TROJAN HORSE

The Trojan Horse is a tale
about the subterfuge that the
Greeks used to enter the city
of Troy and win the war. The
Greeks had been in an
unsuccessful siege with Romans
for 10 years. Finally, the Greeks
constructed a huge wooden horse,
and hid a select force of men
inside. The Greeks pretended to
abandon, and gifted the Trojans a
horse city as a victory trophy who
trusted them and accepted it into
the city ignoring the warnings of
their priest Laocon who famously
remarked-Do not trust the
horse, Trojans! Whatever it is, I
fear the Greeks, even bringing
gifts." That night the Greek force
crept out of the horse and opened
the gates for the rest of the Greek
army, which had sailed back under
cover of night. The Greeks entered
and destroyed the city of Troy,
decisively ending the war.

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Eros and Psyche
This story portrays the importance of trust in any relationship. Psyche was the most beautiful girl
on earth, even more beautiful than Aphrodite. Because of this, Aphrodite the goddess of love
and beauty became jealous of her. She decided to take a revenge by sending her son Eros to
earth and asked him to use his powers to make Psyche fall in love with the cruellest man on
earth. Eros reached earth with this intention but changed his mind as he looked at Psyche. He
was completely enamoured by her beauty and decide to marry her is she trusts her enough.


By the power of Gods, her parents heard the prophecy that Psyche will marry a brutal winged
serpent who will be more powerful than Gods. To find her husband, Psyche must be left on a hill
alone. With great difficulty, the worried parents of Psyche did the same to follow the prophecy.
Psyche was quite anxious in the beginning but she was tired enough to fall asleep after
sometime. As she woke up in the night she found herself in a beautiful and magnificent castle
and heard a voice, which she believed was her husbands voice. It came from Eros and said,
The house is for you. But I want you to trust me and do not be afraid. Take a bath and we will
immediately honor you with a great dinner. She was mesmerized and at once felt happy. She
has the most refreshing bath and most delicious dinner she ever had in her life. Days and nights
passed like this, but she never saw her husband, who only came at night to the castle when she
was already asleep. Psyche started getting anxious, What if my husband is an ugly serpent? Why does
he never come in day time So the next night, she decided to take a candle and see his face. If he is a
serpent, she will kill him and if otherwise she can go to sleep happily. As she saw in the candle
light, there lied the god of love- the most handsome man she had ever seen. But a while later the
wax from candle fell over Eros and he woke up from sleep. He became angry at betrayal of trust
that she didnt believe him. He at once flew away from the castle and left her. Psyche decided to
prove her love to him. She went to Aphrodite to seek help from her Aphrodite was still jealous
with her and hence decided to seek revenge. She gave her three tough and impossible tasks to
accomplish to prove her love to her son. With great difficulty and suffering Psyche finished those
tasks. Aphrodite was still not done with torturing her, but Eros came to know about this act of her
mother by a messenger and got back to save Psyche. The two went to reside in the heavens and
Aphrodites jealousy also came to an end as Psyche was no more the most beautiful woman on
earth and people had started worshipping Aphrodite again.
What does this story teach? It shows the importance that our scriptures thrust on trust. Trust is
the foundation of all relationships and it is very difficult to regain it once lost or stumbled. The
more important point here is that Psyche shouldnt have trusted Aphrodite again that she will help
her in regaining Eros, as Aphrodite had already tried to harm Psyche. Still Psyche decided to
trust the goddess of love and beauty and suffered atrocities and tortures for a long time until Eros
came and save her.
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The above examples portray that we've all been hurt or harmed in some way, and we're all trying
to avoid that happening again.
Usually the way we try to avoid being hurt in relationships is by holding-off on trusting until we
know we are safe. Trusting becomes a mechanism of protectiona defense mechanism. We
respond to it in the form of survival instinct taking over rational instincts. We get scared to trust
again. We think to ourselves, "Who can I trust? And how do I know I can trust them?
But trust is one of those things that we can't just skip over. It's a crucial ingredient in
any relationship whether it be personal or business-related. Some even call it the foundation of a
relationship. Thus, when we use past experiences as reasons not to trust again, then we are
really only hurting ourselves.
However, it is not easy to trust again after getting harmed. Trust is like a mirror. Once broken,
you can fix it but one would still see the cracks in the reflection. As Nietzsche remarked:

I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.

The reality is it takes time and effort to trust again. It takes the courage to acknowledge how you
feel and willingness from the other person to hear and honour it. It takes a mutual commitment to
move beyond what happened instead of reliving and rehashing.
You have to believe someone can treat you with respect and considerationeven if it takes you
a while to get thereor else youll never let your guard down. Thats a painful place to be.
The thing about being defensive is that everything becomes a battle, and no one ever wins.
TRUST IN BUSINESS

In business as in private life, all successful relationships run on trust. Yet we often get trust
wrong, giving it either too readily or too stingily.
Two types of relationships in businesses exist- One between the company and the customer and
the other among the employees. In both cases trust has to be mutual. In one of the examples of
the companies trusting their customer, Netflix, American provider of on-demand Internet
streaming media has built a thriving movie rental business based on trust. Netflix trusted all
customers to mail back their DVDs, occasionally eliminating unreliable customers as a cost of
doing business. If Netflix hadnt extended this original trust, they wouldnt have nearly as many
subscribers. Less happily, Netflixs business suffered last year when it abruptly changed its
pricing structure, which many customers viewed as a violation of trust.
Similarly, the companies need to make efforts in order to maintain the trust of customers. A lot of
companies in a pursuit of making heavy bucks in short term employ untrustable practices. Rohit
Bhargava, in Likeonomics, tells us: The first and most basic reason for distrust is because there are so
many companies and people who choose to lie to us either by making misleading claims or simply by hiding the
truth. However, to give breathing space to companies it needs to be mentioned that it is not such
that the business is getting less trustworthy.
The real problem might be that, as time goes on, consumers are increasingly being placed in
situations where they are forced to trustand they resent that. One driver of this is the large-
scale shift from a product- to a service-based economy. If what youre buying is a chair or a
wristwatch, quality checking and price finding are straightforward. No particular leap of faith is
required. But if youre hiring a pest-control company to save your house from termites, or a
security service to fend off identity thieves, or a college to educate your child, you have no option
but to trust. Thats where a breach of trust in a particular case coming from a faulty
product/service, resulting in monetary losses, forces customers to form a defense mechanism
(as mentioned earlier in the cases of personal relationships) where they start suspecting each
and every move made by the companies. If this suspicion keeps on building the whole pillar of
free-market capitalism would fall flat on its face.
Thus, companies need to exhibit a bit of transparency to its customers to gather trust. By giving
people a window into its workings, a company can show it has a sound process that its adhering
to. It can avoid asking customers to have faith in a black box. The greater the transparency, in
other words, the greater the trust.
However, some caution needs to be taken so that the issue of blind trust doesnt arise. Stephen
M.R. Covey in one of his books- SMART TRUST: CREATING PROSPERITY, ENERGY AND JOY IN A
LOW-TRUST WORLD remarks Those who live in blind trust eventually get burned; those who live with
distrust eventually experience financial, social, and emotional losses. In the pursuit of maintaining an
equilibrium between the two, successful companies and people are continuously finding a new
way that Covey and co-authors Greg Link and Rebecca R. Merrill call smart trust. For
example, eBays 0.15% 235 million registered users are mostly strangers to each other. Yet
they engage in one million financial transactions a day. According to former eBay CEO Meg
Whitman: More than a decade later, I still believe the fundamental reason eBay worked was that people
everywhere are basically good.
In other case, it is important that trusting relationships exist between the employees at a
workplace. Employees find it difficult to develop trusting relationships if a peer has his own
interests in mind, acts selfishly, is quick to pass blame and judgments, gossips or does not
accept responsibility for his own decisions. One of the experiences from my professional work
was when one of my team members always made an effort to go home early, even when a
pressing team project was due the next day. What resulted was that nobody trusted him in
important matters and any delegation of responsibility to him was avoided. However if such
feelings keep on harbouring at workplace, it loses any productivity. Thus it becomes important to
regain trust. To begin rebuilding trust in the workplace, all parties need to be aware of how the
betraying actions affected others and acknowledge the experiences of others.
By allowing feelings to surface and supporting the needs of those in the workplace, positive
change can start to occur. Efforts should be made to make offenders accept responsibility for
betraying actions and helping employees work through feelings and see the big picture. Only
then people can begin the process of putting the past behind them and a healthy environment
can be generated.

CONCLUSION

The only way to know if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
~Ernest Hemmingway

When it comes to trusting each other, we have to accept that our past is not our present. We
have to be able to recognize that what hurt us before is not necessarily what is currently standing
before useven sometimes when the situation looks frighteningly similar, and sometimes even
when its the same person.
It needs to be understood that this certainly doesnt mean we wont ever get hurt again. We
would. Thats a part of life. People will let us down, and we will let them down, but that doesnt
mean our efforts to disassemble our defense mechanisms are in vain.
If we never allow ourselves any vulnerability, we lose out on the opportunity to make incredibly
deep and meaningful connections that open up our lives in ways that couldnt happen any other
way.
Those connections draw out the very best within and create a new realityone where we learn
that the only way to know if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
I could have written further about how to overcome harm inflicted by a person and whether to
trust that person again or not. However, in my opinion the below picture exhibits everything about
trust accurately in a nutshell.