Mirrors of Perception
Sometimes I feel a certain anxiety, as though the people around me – just general people, not friends or acquaintances – that people don’t trust me. And maybe they don’t for a plethora of superficial reasons, false preconceptions, or their own fears and insecurities. But what I’m wondering is if the ability to trust others is based upon a person’s estimates of their own integrity. What I mean is that, if a person considers themselves somewhat morally “flexible”, capable of doing unscrupulous things, do they then project that capacity onto others? If you feel that you are not trustworthy yourself, then do you assume the same about others?
Or is it the inverse? That because you are paranoid, insecure, or at least just cautious about the actions or intentions of others, that you assume that feel the same way about you? I am – quite obviously – a cynic, and so perhaps because I don’t trust or anticipate people to have unsavory qualities, I feel like those sentiments are reflected right back at me. Whichever way it goes, I think this kind of thing is at the heart of the barriers to communication and interaction that are so powerful in this city. Certainly there are plenty of people that are genuinely untrustworthy, genuinely immoral, genuinely fucked up – but one would hope that it’s not the majority, or even a large number. Yet it seems as though most people in this city are fearful of mostly everyone else, any macho posturing notwithstanding. What’s strange is that while this area suffers under a lot of crime, it is not unique in that respect, and yet this paranoia-cynicism-insecurity complex is very much a regional (even local) phenomenon. Such bad energy in this place.