How about it, blogworld?

Breakingranks has posted an honest, genuine, real, human issue here; what advice can we offer?

I'll post something in a day, but would love to hear from others first.

I am very curious about what contexts you have found yourself time and time again having trusted people, yet getting burned. It seems like a vital point. And what context? Is it business? personal?

This is not a trivial point. It's about losing faith in people, and that's a pretty sad thing. And lonely.

I guess it boils down to this: Can you let a past bad experience ruin the potential for a good experience in the future?

Do we stop falling in love because a lover left us with a younger version of ourselves? Sometimes we do !

I feel like if there is an answer it would be something somewhat superhuman, like, "turn the other cheek," which is ok if you can bring back people from the dead at the bat of an eyelash, but for the rest of us mortals it is not a matter of course to be so divinely generous.

And yet, to live in fear and cynical mistrust is not a great place to be. This means that the past rules the future and there is no where to go. 

So it becomes a personal choice. We can sacrifice our ability to trust people for the rest of our lives, or we can sacrifice the feelng of getting burned, and make a consious effort not to paint the future with the past.

( I still feel that this is somewhat superhuman though.  )

Just answering the "context for getting burned" question - most of these bad experiences have been in the work/corporate context. I don't think I have any record at all of friend/intimacy betrayal. I'm the sort of person who focuses on maintaining a few good relationships instead of many superficial ones.

I thought about this long and hard yesterday, taking into consideration that I am a freelancer, A freelance programmer, which is not necessarily where most people are coming from.

When I think of how much work I do, I think I would hate it  if I did a terrible job. If I scammed the client, under-delivered, produced something useless (not meeting my client`s needs.)

How could I take pride in my work, if it didn`t do what it set out to accomplish.

The bottom line for me is that so much of my life, my living being, goes into this "work" stuff, and not without a sense of irony and a healthy dose of cynicism about where the world is at.

What gets me through it all, is that I must be a part of this sometimes-really-gross world out there to live, and there`s little I can do by myself to make it less gross.

What I can do is work on not being gross myself, so I can sleep well. basically.

Great dialogue, thanks to Mark and Will for taking this in fascinating directions.

I want to specifically respond to the issue that breakingranks raised—basically, how do you trust in business when people behave in abusive, untrustworthy ways?

One response is of course rules, procedures, systems, prohibitions, reviews, sanctions, and they do have their place.  But as breakingranks notes, the ability of nefarious people to circumvent rules will always outpace the rules put in place to prevent them.  Rules have their limits.

At a corporate level, values are another, higher, level of recourse.  Values-driven firms are becoming recognized more and more as effective at generating consistent results in an organization, rather than the "bleeding-heart" image that phrase used to conjure up.

But that's not what breakingranks was talking about either; I think the issue he raised was a personal one.  How does one react personally to abusive, untrustworthy people?

I don't have a silver bullet, but I've got four small rocks to throw.

1. Where and to the extent possible, don't deal with such people.  Vote with your feet.  You won't be the only one.

2. Constructively confront.  If someone throws their weight at you in an effort to get you to shade the truth, ask them directly and sincerely, "Let me be clear about something; you're not asking me to tell a lie, are you?"  Most likely he'll say "no, of course not, I'm just asking you to...." in which case you have established a boundary.  (If he says "yes, I am," that's when you quit.  Seriously.)

3. Make sure you don't pre-judge.  Don't presume that someone you haven't dealt with is untrustworthy, because once you lead with that presumption, you have "gone over" to the Dark Side.  Be careful about what you put at stake in new situations, but leave the new person room to behave in a trustworthy manner.

4. Make sure your own behaviors are trustworthy.   Most people don't like screwing over a trustworthy person, particularly one who is plainspoken and willing to constructively confront (see 2 above).   They'd rather pick on people who are unsure of their principles and act afraid of being screwed.  They get what they fear.  You don't have to.