By Selwyn Duke
A certain very erudite and ever entertaining social critic
remarked recently that he always thought the worst of people. He went on to say
— perhaps, at most, half jokingly — that he was always right about them, too. He
then revealed that he actually had been very trusting as a boy, that he
believed everyone and often got taken advantage of. He certainly doesn’t get
taken advantage of much now, I’m sure. But what he doesn’t know is that in one
significant way he hasn’t changed at all.
The man’s admission of his boyhood as a doormat didn’t
surprise me, for gullibility and cynicism are two sides of the same coin. They
are both a function of naiveté, which can be defined as ignorance about
reality. The gullible person proceeds as if everyone is good and trustworthy,
whereas the cynic proceeds as if everyone is essentially bad and untrustworthy.
But reality is quite different: there are, practically speaking, “good” people
and “bad” people, the well-meaning and the self-serving. And possessing
discernment enables one to distinguish between the two groups. Yet the gullible
person trusts people even when he shouldn’t and the cynic fails to trust them
even when he should.
