The Trustful Approach: an Introduction

The trustful approach is a philosophical exercise that teaches you peace of mind and confidence in the face of political disagreement and social discord.

How can we live with the shocking behaviour of some of our fellow citizens? Everyday, people show commitment to beliefs and deeds that we think are wrong. When they are morally wrong, we feel utterly bewildered by their conduct: how can we make sense of it? “What are they even thinking? How dare they?” From our point of view, the minds of the people who engage in those wrongdoings feel strange, incomprehensible, and hostile. While thinking about how far they have fallen, we feel powerless. It seems impossible to get through to them. And over time, all of this wears us down.

We need tools to address how stressful this experience is. Like many negative experiences, it can come to dominate our lives, if we’re not careful. This can make us the worst versions of ourselves, leading us to betray our own values, including the values we accuse others of disrespecting.

I would like to propose a philosophical exercise designed specifically to deal with this feeling of moral shock. My idea is that if you practice this exercise regularly, you will be more resilient in the face of those challenges. They will feel less bad, and be less disorienting. You will be able to meet those instances of bewilderment, without losing all of your peace of mind, energy, and focus. At the same time, I recognize that those unpleasant experiences are important to our sense of morality, and so I have taken care to design the exercise in such a way that it doesn’t entail compromising on our values or letting go of legitimate indignation.

The exercise in question is called the “trustful approach”. In a sense, it is about trusting yourself and trusting your opponent more. But the devil is in the details. It is not about compromising on one’s values. The exercise is essentially about becoming aware of the rumination we engage in when we try to understand what someone was thinking when they did or said something wrong. There are certain things that are important to notice about this state of mind. Noticing them brings a lot of clarity to the situation and frees your mind from unnecessary suffering.

So here’s how you practice the trustful approach: the most important thing is to notice when you are in a state of moral shock, and to try to contemplate that emotion with as much curiosity as possible. Contemplating this feeling leads you to observe this desire that you have of knowing what goes on in the mind of the offender who said or did something wrong. This moral shock feels like a frustration of that desire. Crucially, you can pay attention to the various interpretations that come to mind as to what the offender was likely thinking. How you interpret what they meant to do or say. You are paying attention to the process of trying to fulfil that desire, of trying to find closure through hypotheses. In particular, you can be mindful of the way you form such hypotheses, how you linger on them for moral support, and how you discard them, as you eventually become dissatisfied with them. Over time, you will learn to realize how strangely inept those interpretations can be, since often their only virtue is to promise that they will finally put your mind at ease – by uncovering the secret motive of the offender – and they routinely fail to live up to that promise. But in order to realize this, you need to become adept at noticing two key aspects of the experience of moral shock.

Indeed, upon paying attention, you need to perform a double clarification of your experience. Paying attention to these feelings leads you to uncover two ambiguities that you can dispel.

The first clarification answers the question “Am I shocked or am I surprised?”. Though shock should be understood as a form of surprise, it is not necessarily reducible to the kind of surprise we experience when something goes against our expectations. Firstly, the shocking behaviour might have been fully expected, and we still feel strongly about it. Secondly, if all we cared about was predicting the future, we would respond to the offence by simply revising our expectations as to how the offender is likely to behave in the future, and then move on. However, what matters when we are shocked is not that a predictive expectation failed, but that a moral expectation was breached. Moral standards dictate how one should behave, not how one is likely to behave, so it is no wonder that we do not easily move on. No matter how much information we gather or guess about the offender, moral shock can always renew our curiosity: we can always ask “But how could this be?!” and truly mean it as a question. This allows rumination. Moral standards are there to convince people to do better, and are able to create new expectations. “I still expect you to do better.” Thus, the desire to know what they are thinking is marked by a fundamental ambiguity: are you trying to read their mind or are you trying to shape their mind? Are you truly wondering what they think or are you arguing with them inside your head, expecting them to change? It is good to become aware of the fact that your curiosity towards the mind of the offender is underpinned by a desire to repair the norm that was disrespected, bringing with it the hope of getting them to admit what they did wrong and the despair of thinking you might not be able to. Neither this hope nor this despair are appropriate during rumination, as rumination is not a proper way to reach people and change them.

The second clarification answers the question “Who believes what?” Because rumination based on moral shock thrives on the ambiguity between trying to read the mind of others and trying to shape the mind of others, it becomes difficult to remember to whom the values and beliefs that you ponder actually belong. The process of realizing that you are fundamentally trying to regain confidence about the validity of the norm that the offender disrespected should culminate in the realization that these values and beliefs you are considering are yours, and not that of the offender. Instead of realizing that, we tend to come up with “incredulous interpretations” of the deeds and words of the people who offend us. Interpretations marked by utter disbelief that they could be motivated by different values or beliefs. For instance, we might hastily hypothesize “They knew it was wrong but they did it to hurt me” or “They knew it was wrong but they did it to attract attention”, which is incoherent since this premise “they knew it was wrong” consists essentially in attributing to them the values and beliefs that we have, and that they manifestly lacked in the moment of doing something wrong. In other words, we refuse to let go of the idea that the cause of their behaviour can be understood using our beliefs; we refuse to believe they could think differently. This influences how we interpret the justifications offered by the offender. We interpret them in an incredulous way, refusing to consider that they might be a sincere expression of what motivated the offender, while at the same time hoping they can serve as an accidental confession that we are right. The fact of the matter is that people are usually more than happy to communicate their true motives, as far as they understand them, since they are very proud of those motives. Those motives are based on their values and beliefs, how could they not be proud of it? On the contrary, the incredulous approach allows us to ruminate on our own, because it allows us to fantasize that in committing the offence, the offender paradoxically recognized the importance of the norm that they disrespected, which makes it so taking seriously their point of view and how it differs from ours completely superfluous. In this situation, rumination feels like a great use of one’s time. But it is unhelpful, as it promises us that we can relate to the offender, while creating the conditions that make it impossible to relate to them, thus increasing the feeling of despair, the suspicion that the offender can’t be reached and reasoned with.

In summary: The trustful approach is practiced by mindfully paying attention to the feeling of moral shock. This feeling features a frustrated desire to know what is happening in the mind of the offender. This desire has to be examined and clarified in two ways. Firstly, “Am I shocked or am I surprised?” Shock is not always the kind of surprise that has to do with a failure of predictive expectations. It is about moral standards. Therefore, shocked curiosity can only be satisfied by knowing what to do with the situation. Can I change this person or is now not the right moment? Secondly, “Who believes what?”, when knowing the mind of the offender is caught up in trying to change the mind of the offender, it becomes difficult to keep straight who believes what. We easily forget that the offender has different beliefs. This creates a lot of needless confusion. In the end, I learn to trust my values and beliefs more, and to not be insecure about them in a way that leads me to produce incredulous interpretations of the justifications people give of their actions.

This entire exercise brings peace of mind by stopping the cognitive machinery that gets activated in order to call out the offender and change their behaviour, even when there is no plausible path to achieve such a thing. Thus we can save our energy until we find the appropriate forum to mobilize those efforts. Since the exercise prevents us from generating inept hypotheses and distrustful theories that we cling to for relief, it means that once we have found this forum, we are in a better position to change the minds of other people, and/or to have our own mind changed in the attempt, because we are primarily attentive to the way they are thinking, and not to the way we wish they would think.

P.S: Though I do practice this exercise myself, and it does me a lot of good, all of this is still very experimental, and I am always trying to refine the design and the pedagogy of the exercise. This is why I need people to test it out. 

If you want to give feedback on this article and how it introduces the Trustful Approach, you can do so by filling out this Short Google Form that asks a handful of specific questions. It does not require that you have tried the exercise yet, only that you have read about it.

If you have practiced the Trustful Approach and would like to give me feedback about it, here is a more open-ended form to do so.

In any case, if you are interested in any way, (for instance, if you are willing to give it a try but are still unsure how to go about it and would like some guidance), please contact me at this email address: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr . I am very open to any feedback or any dialogue about this.

Pierrick Simon

01/05/2024

my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr

(do not hesitate to reach out)

Bluesky: @pierricksimon.bsky.social

Twitter: @PhiloTranquille