Thursday, October 12, 2017

Second Degree


Building trust is hard. The idea of six degrees of separation is that all people everywhere are six 'friend of friend' steps away from each other. This is hard to believe when we seem so different to each other. 'The Righteous Mind' looks at why good people disagree on things where it is hard to believe someone could disagree with us... and still be good. With our close friends, we are comfortable cutting them some slack. When they have a crazy view, we don't write them off because of a shared history. With strangers we are more brutal. The only people who change other people's views are friends. Either friends, or people we have sufficient respect for to value their opinion. Trusting someone increases our vulnerability. To trust someone six degrees away is hard, but we could work at trusting those people who we trust trust. We could start by making more introductions. By making six into five.

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