“Being paranoid simply means you are in possession of all the facts.” One of my favorite quotes ever, and it comes from one of the greatest works of fiction, Transmetropolitian. See, I am paranoid, technically. I often worry about what people are really planning, what can happen to me and to those I care about. My mind is often filled with what if scenarios and what plans as to what to do if something does happen. That’s why I carry a weapon with me, everywhere I go. That’s why I look my door, even when I am inside, and always lock my car doors. I figure, I can trust people, but only in so much as they will act in what they see as their best interests. It’s a rare person that I truly trust, that I truly feel safe around. Maybe its because I just how fragile the human body is (any one can kill any one else, if they go about it properly), maybe its because I have been burned in the past. In any case, I would feel bad about this, but there has never been a truly good and decent person, through and through, in the history of the world. That’s right, every one, saints and sinners alike, are evil and good in their own ways.

Ghadi hated black people, and was likely a pedophile. Mother Teresa was a sadist, who acquired, by some estimates, over 50 million dollars in donations, but spent almost none of it on the people she was supposedly devoted to aiding. On the other hand, Hitler was animal rights nut, to an extent (he was a vegetarian and hated hunting), and Ted Bundy by all accounts genuinely loved and cared for his girlfriend, who he never once hurt. People are not inherently good, nor are they inherently evil. People are animals; we will do what we need to do to survive, to benefit ourselves and those we care about, and we will do so in whatever way gives us the most reward for the least over all effort. Its all subjective, of course, so sometimes a person will do the “right” thing because doing so benefits them more than doing the wrong thing in their opinion, but different person may see it in a different perspective. This is why psychology and sociology are soft science: no one, no matter how skilled they are, can accurately predict what every one would do in a given situation. All psychologists can do is make guesses, based on statistics. For instance, on average, men are more concerned about physical infidelity than emotional, and for women it’s the opposite. However, that is not the case for everyone; just most people. Some people care at all, some people care about both, and so on.

So, knowing that people, especially the ones we don’t know well, are unpredictable, why should any one trust any one? Sure, trust your dear friends, trust your family (assuming you can stand them), but no one else should be trusted, at least not to appreciable extent. No one can know what any random person on the street will do. Now I am not saying to treat every one as your potential murder, but I have always run under one assumption: only the dead are totally reliable. Every one else, in some ways shape or form, can fail you. They may not, and in some cases, will go out of their way to avoid hurting you. But ultimately, we are all only human.