Trust and Respect: The Fail Factors of Life

While life can be complicated, your success or failure often boils down to these two things

Photo by Bhautik Patel on Unsplash

When the computer game “Civilization” came out, long ago, it was praised for its historical correctness. It allows you to sort of redo history – given all the same factors as the real history, the one we had in real life, you can through the game try to do it differently.

Several factors are included. For instance, you need to build a nation, starting with one group of settlers, and you must develop technologies and sciences, plus establish more settlements, to grow your nation in both size and civilization level.

In order to win the game, you need to become some kind of dominant. There are different ways of winning, but one is the interesting one to me: you can build a special settler that will go through space and put down people on a different planet, to begin with a fresh start, since most of what happened on Earth really wasn’t that good, and Earth was more or less ruined by the progressions of the human species.

Fast forward to a much later version of the game: Beyond Earth.

In this game, you’ve actually reached the destination. After many years of travelling through space, you and some other settlers land on that remote planet, capable of supporting human life, although already occupied with aliens of different kinds.

The mechanisms are mostly the same: you need to establish one city at first, then add more, and you need to develop technologies and sciences, this time related to the special conditions of this planet and its existing life forms.

The game will give you advice along the way. It’s a strategy game with a graphical user interface, and you have time to think. Nothing happens suddenly, requiring a quick trigger finger – it is my kind of game, where you have time to think, and whatever you do will benefit from careful thoughts.

One piece of advice you’ll get is to shoot the aliens when they get close to your cities. There’s an easy mechanism for doing that. And at first, probably the first many times you play the game, you’ll want to do that. After all, the aliens do seem threatening and dangerous, so better defend yourself.

But if you don’t shoot, they’ll not harm you. You learn that by trying. You’ll find out that you can let your figures of different kinds, that you control in the game, move around between the different aliens without getting harmed by them at all. Or, that is, a couple of small exceptions exist: if you send out settlers to start a new city, the aliens have a tendency to accidentaly bump into them, which they’ll not survive. And the aliens also tend to step on the farms and power generators and other stuff you have built around your cities, so that they’ll need repair.

But apart from these minor annoyances, you can actually live in peace with the aliens, if you just take care not to make them angry.

Because, they have a collective conscience of some kind – if one gets angry, they all do, all over the planet. And then they will all start attacking all of your little figures, who then might die from it. And even if they don’t die, their lives and tasks in the game will become significantly more complicated, being attacked all the time.

You can easily make the aliens angry, in a subtle way: the little figures have an ability to move a few steps at a time in each round of the game. But their sight might be shorter than their ability to move, so if you ask them to move, say, three steps away from where they are, and they can see only two steps ahead, there could be an alien standing there, at the third step, getting seriously offended by being accidentally bumped into – and then we have the war started.

If you are very careful and never bump into any of the aliens, they will become plentyful and very annoying, and they will often be in the way of what you want to do. Plus, your workers in and around the cities are afraid of them and try to stay away from them, so it is difficult to reach any good level of progression for your emerging civilization.

In other words, you will, eventually, be at war with the aliens.

Other players in the game can be real people, like you, or they can be supplied by the computer as AI players. Such AI players act upon rules of behavior, and these rules are totally narcissist. There is no empathy anywhere in an AI player – they always do what is best for themselves. But it can be difficult to understand that, when seeing their seemingly considerate behavior. You’ll learn, if you play this game a lot, that several factor decide how they treat you – and if they, for instance, start a war against you. Those factors are, among others, trust and respect.

If you nurse them by making agreements with them that fit their personalities, or if you make them respect you (in that traditional way of making them afraid of you), they will act accordingly. They have different personalities, but luckily, you can get intelligence reports to tell you more about these, so that you can behave in a clever EQ way, and treat each of them as they need to be treated, to make you achieve what you want.

All about narcissism, including your behavior, that has to adapt to the whole scenario, if you want to win the game.

Of course, you can also just play the game without wanting to win. Just to be there and have fun, as long as it lasts. But it will not last that long, since the ways of winning include some kind of dominance. There are different ways of winning, also in this version of the game, and their being dominant is a bit subtle for some of them, but you need to be ahead to win, scientifically, technologically, visionarily, or by exercising raw power and attack the others, conquoring their cities.

If you don’t try to win, you’ll definitely loose, because the others, including the AI players, will try to win, and their victory requires you to loose.

The game always leads to wars between the colonies. And war with the aliens. And all kinds of trouble that you’ll have to deal with on your own, while everybody around just runs away from it – to save their own skin, or just because they have their own business to do.

So, it’s a lot like life. Very real, in this simplified computer game way.

If you trust others, in the game or in life, you’ll find that their personal agenda may make them untrustworthy. You don’t know that, ahead of their betrayal or their attack on you – because, at first they behave nicely, and you get to know their way of being, get used to a way of being yourself, that fits. And then, suddenly, something makes them change their minds, and like the aliens, also people can suddenly become your enemies.

Think of the things you buy, such as subscriptions of various services. It is based on trust: you expect something particular to be delivered for the money you then pay, and everybody will talk nicely to you, treating you as a friend. As soon as you are a bit late with a payment or in some other way “bump into them”, they’ll often freak out and start attacking you, with fees, incasso, and other dramatic actions.

If they respect you, because you have good consumer laws to back you up, or if you are a member of the apartment renters organization, or whatever could make them be a bit wary of the consequences it could have to attack you, they might continue to treat you nicely, even if you happen to bump into them accidentally.

When thinking about my life as it was, I feel that this is how all my failures have been defined: by trusting people, only to be attacked by them the day they feel that there is some crack in their trust in me, or their respect for me.

Individuals, companies (but mostly represented by individual bosses), and many other little figures in life’s big computer game, all have their own, narcissist agendas and personalities, and they are mostly able to, and open to, changing their treatment of you in a moment, from acting like friends and allied, to attacking you.

Some of us, like me, are not making a strategy in life, like we would in a computer game – we simply approach others with trust and a natural respect; not the fear-kind, but a respect for their values as human beings and their rights to exist and to have a life that is dignant and as good as possible.

We trust and respect. And that makes us vulnerable.

In the computer game, a figure will get weaker from being attacked, and even though it can recover, it takes some time. During that time, others find it almost irresistable to attack them even more – surrounding them and attacking them, until the weak one dies.

Society squeezes the weak ones out, to have only strong individuals left – such ones that the other society members can respect, and that they can show trust but with a strategy to turn around and attack at any time.

And, in contrast to the game, some of us in real life do not have “intelligence reports” that can tell about their mood towards us. Some of us don’t sense, or not very well, that they are losing respect for us.

So, hence my conclusion on life and why I failed, the many times I did, in business, job relations, personal relations, and every other situation – I trust too much, and I respect others, without having an exit strategy – without planning to attack them the day I may loose trust in them, because I don’t expect that to ever happen.

When being there, in the middle of a group of aliens, or groups of other settlers from other colonies, I trust that they behave well, and I respect their rights to be there, just as I expect them to trust and respect me and my rights. I trust that something will be done to settle any mistrust that may appear, to clear out any misunderstandings, so that we again can trust and respect each others. I trust that there will be no sudden attacks. And I trust that people want solutions on whatever problems they see, not just an immediate gratification from what they may see as retaliation for having bumped into them.

But there it is: they always appear. The sudden attacks, based on the uncommunicated loss of trust in and respect for me.

And I wonder if this is what defines a loser: the unconditional trust in and respect for others. I think it is.