Elsewhere

Numbers are used as justification when there is no personal relationship.

Think about that for a moment.

If I trust that you’re going to give me correct change, I don’t even count it when you give it to me. Why bother? I trust you. And I trust you because I know you–we have a relationship. I trust that, even if you miscounted and I find out later, you would quickly correct the mistake, with little harm done.

When some stranger gives me change, I count it. We have no relationship; both his competency and his ethics are suspect. Guilty until proven innocent, you might say, but really, most of us have been burned enough times to accept this reality of everyday life. There’s a fine line between openness and naivete.

This concept scales indefinitely. We monitor the finances of corporations because we don’t trust them. We quantify our achievements so that we can prove to some stranger in the human resources department why we deserve a raise. We don’t need to prove that to our boss; she already knows us. But she needs to prove it to them.

With each degree of separation, trust drops dramatically. I trust you, and I might trust your friend, but I might double check them anyway; and their friend, I wouldn’t trust much more than a complete stranger.

Think about how much time and energy is spent on numbers–justifying, proving, defending to people we don’t know. Entire industries, professions, and disciplines within professions are dedicated to it. How much efficiency could be gained if there was a trusted personal relationship instead?

I don’t have any answers or moral message here. I know that life usually gets more complicated than that. Just something to think about.