Malcolm Ocean's roamblog

July 10th, 2025

edited 2025-07-10 · open in Roam
      • kid so mad that his hair's being pulled, by his own hand, which is clenching harder because he's so mad...  geopolitics feels like this sometimes (at a scale above countries or individual leaders)
    • > there is also what we might call “one-place trust,” where one trusts other people in general rather than trusting a specific individual or group of individuals...one must first have *trust* in order to trust y to do z or to trust y more generally

      Jones (2004) calls it “basal security,” while Herman (1992/1997) refers to “basic trust” but also to a sense of “safety in the world.” Améry (1999) describes an enduring loss of “trust in the world” that he experienced after torture and subsequent incarceration in Auschwitz

      “losing trust” involves losing a habitual confidence that more usually permeates all experience, thought, and activity

      we experience a fundamental assault on our right to live, on our personal sense of worth, and further, on our sense that the world (including people) basically supports human life.

      Janoff-Bulman (1992, pp. 5–6)...identifies three such beliefs as central to one-place trust: “the world is benevolent;” “the world is meaningful;” and “the self is worthy.”
    • 3 beliefs central to one-place trust / basic trust
      • “the world is benevolent”
      • “the world is meaningful”
      • “the self is worthy”
    • source: (SC's tweets have been deleted!)
      • > Hot take: anyone pressuring you to lose this "basal security" or "sense of trust", or anyone saying it is morally obligatory to lack it, is a bad person who is literally traumatizing you.
      • JD (2019) disagrees with this, but his take is basically that people shouldn't have naive versions of this trust, and that sometimes the trust needs to be broken to get the non-naive versions