Trust

I drive for hours in the dark on a two-lane highway, squinting to avoid being blinded by on-coming headlights. 

I stand near the tracks of the New York subway, watching my train roar into the station.  Having a headache, I borrow some ibuprofen from a friend's medicine cabinet.  I trek in remote areas of foreign lands, whose language I don't know and about whose dangers I know little, relying on the expertise and good will of guides whose poverty and beliefs contrast sharply with my own Western lifestyle.

These kinds of conduct may seem a bit risky, but for the most part we take our response to risk for granted.

We assume that the guy standing next to us on the subway platform won't -- on sudden impulse -- shove us onto the track as the train approaches.  But we know it's happened.

We assume the ibuprofen is pure and has not been tampered with.  But we know of cases where unknown persons for unknown reasons have contaminated ibuprofen with deadly amounts of cyanide.

We trust our trekking guides. But we know of cases where guides have, at best, been thieves, or, worse, have betrayed hikers to terrorists. 

These thoughts are prompted, of course, by what now appears to be the suicidal crash of the Germanwings flight in southern France.  The co-pilot apparently had no reservations about taking 150 passengers' lives with him when he died, anymore than the suicidal automobile driver cares about the lives of those in the on-coming vehicle.

We know that these criminal acts occur, and that they are largely unpreventable.  We can sometimes minimize the risks slightly -- stand away from the subway platform edge, choose guides carefully, examine pills for signs of tampering -- but we can't guarantee our own safety.

And so we base our lives on trust.  We know rationally that bad things can happen; but we also know that these bad things happen relatively rarely.  And so we choose to assume they will not happen, and act accordingly.

Some people cannot trust.  They cannot trust other people; they cannot trust the law of averages; they cannot trust themselves.  In extreme cases, they lock themselves in their homes and rarely venture out.  They don't enjoy travel, it goes without saying.  Their inability to trust often extends to other areas of life; in effect, they spend their lives merely existing.  They don't live, for fear of dying.

I suspect that there will be a drop in the number of people flying in the next few months.  I suspect that Germanwings, especially, will suffer from cancellations.  But most of us will shudder at the fate of all the passengers, young and old, who died; then we'll shrug it off, push the incident from our minds, and continue to fly.  We will continue to trust that our pilots and crew value their own lives, as well as the lives of their passengers.

A meteor (or piece of a satellite, or a falling safe) dropping from the sky and hitting us would be every bit as fatal as an airline crash or a head-on collision.  We don't live from day to day in terror of meteors or other falling objects. 

That's the way our minds work.  That's the psychological defense mechanism that allows us to live interesting and productive lives.   It works for me, and I'm glad it does.