Substituting you for me

A pilot friend of mine was describing to a dilettante friend of ours the process of obtaining a pilot's license. He talked about what it means to "fly blind," or fly relying solely on the instruments, not being able to see anything out the windows of the cockpit, or at least not looking. Obviously you wouldn't want to fly blindly if you had the option to also see outside, but the point is that sometimes you don't have that option, or sometimes what you are seeing with your naked eye can be deceptive.

While he was describing the sort of psychological self-mastery it takes to ignore everything that you think you know about your situation and instead put all of your trust in fallible tinker toys of gauges (which you may not even understand how they operate), I couldn't help but think of the way I struggle to ignore meaningless but strong impulses or emotional hallucinations.

I have talked before about relying on a prosthetic moral compass to compensate for my lack of conscience. I have also talked about my understanding of the utility of trust. By that I mean, substituting someone else's judgment for my own -- particularly principled people I know who have managed to achieve a stable sort of success and happiness.

A small example of an exercise of trust involves a relative of mine. He is a lover of technology, a proud first adopter. I have never really been a gearhead of any sort, so I always have him choose my set-ups. He is not my advisor for buying/adopting tech type stuff, he actually makes decisions for me. I was talking with a work colleague the other day about it. I told him I admired his laptop, to which he replied I should just buy my own. I explained to him that my technologically more sophisticated relative hadn't told me I should/could, and that he makes all my tech decisions for me. When my colleague suggested that I just do it anyway, I realized he misunderstood the nature of me "trusting" someone else to make decisions for me. If I just bought whatever I wanted when I wanted, then he would no longer be making decisions for me, he would be making suggestions to which I could either follow or not follow, or at best he would be making demands that I could veto. That would defeat the whole point of me putting him in charge of that aspect of my life.

To the extent I believe that there is value in things like "faith" or "trust," it is that you ignore your own ideas about what you think you know and rely on something, not because it is infallible, but because it is a different sort of fallible than you. That's why I don't understand people who say they have faith in something, a religion perhaps, but only when it's convenient or it happens to coincide with how they would have chosen anyway. Maybe this is a downside to my personality, the ability and willingness to just follow blindly. I don't think it is always a good thing, and it certainly has its downsides (as does deciding yourself). But to the extent it is useful at all, I believe it is only in this way.