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When I talk to my friends about paranoia, the topics begin to blur together. The nuances and particularities of certain delusions come up just as often as the justified fear of mass surveillance carried out by neofacist states with access to untold power over our epistemologies, both inter- and intra- personal. The reliability of our institutions to accurately describe reality [has been questionable for a long time](link to seeing like a state), but the sundering of the consensus reality they create has thrown many into a trustless environment, adrift on the unsea.
I've seen common advice about this fail to land. 'Model your enemy' and 'check the sources' don't really hold sway over the constant, itching feeling that this, too, could be a lie. The world, regardless of its actual tractability, feels as though it is dissolving under your feet. If the powers that be cannot grasp at the truth of a situation, or perhaps have a vested interest in making sure you cannot, what chance do you have at understanding? Welcome to Naraka, we hope you hate your stay.
From here, there are two choices.
One. You give up on trust. The only thing that you can possibly rely on is yourself, all else is suspect. Potentially enemies first, irrelevant otherwise. Or, maybe you give up on trust by abandoning it for blindness. You commit to go down with the ship, to die like a dog, no matter what. Your trust is broken, and so is your integrity, but your loyalty remains intact.
Two. You decide to try anyway. This essay is intended for those of you who make this choice.
How do you know what to trust, or who? What can you trust beyond the information of your own senses, your own feelings?
What even is this thing we call trust?
- Trust is a thing that can be broken.
- It is not a good thing in and of itself to trust. (Trusting people who mean you harm kinda sucks)
- There's a certain degree of vulnerability
- It depends heavily on your model of their mind matching, more or less, the actual stuff under their hood
- It's essential for any coordination where you hold less than absolute power (ie. essential for all coordination.)