See the Series Introduction for Just Tao It, Part I: HERE
See the Just Tao It Series Introduction Tao/It on-ramp, PART II: HERE
See Just Tao It, Chapter 1: HERE
From my interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 49 (Unpublished):
With open mind,
the wise find
all people
worthy of care.
Those who live nobly,
are treated well.
Those lost from themselves,
are treated well also.
Trust rises
where trust is given.
To those who live trustfully,
trust is offered freely.
To those unable to trust,
the wise remain trustworthy still.
In this way,
wisdom keeps
childlike simplicity.
Unhardened by fear.
Unbroken by doubt.
—
One thing that used to set me off was hearing senior executives refer to the relational capacities that build trust in leadership as “soft skills.”
As though trust were secondary work. Optional work. Something added after the serious business of strategy, execution, and results was already underway.
That way of thinking does not survive serious contact with human systems for very long.
Trust is not window dressing.
It is structural.
Without trust, organizations calcify. Teams fragment. Families fracture. Democracies weaken. Even brilliant strategies eventually fail when the people responsible for carrying them forward no longer trust one another enough to speak honestly, collaborate openly, or respond truthfully to reality as it is.
We are living through a period where this is becoming increasingly visible. Distrust is accelerating across institutions, governments, media systems, organizations, and everyday human relationships. Political discourse rewards outrage more easily than understanding. Social platforms amplify emotional activation faster than discernment. Information itself has become weaponized. Truth and falsehood now travel together so rapidly that many people no longer know what deserves confidence.
And once distrust deepens far enough, shared reality itself becomes difficult to hold.
You can see this in real time. The same event gets interpreted through completely opposing lenses, and neither side trusts the other’s sources, motives, or perceptions. The relational field becomes so saturated with distrust that even clear evidence gets filtered through suspicion.
Jack Gibb understood something decades ago that many organizations still fail to recognize: trust is not merely a pleasant emotional condition between people. It is the condition that makes openness, learning, coordination, and interdependence possible in the first place.
Remove trust, and even highly talented people begin operating as isolated individuals protecting themselves from one another.
Without trust, people manage appearances. They conceal uncertainty. They withhold information. They become territorial. Over time, systems organized around self-protection lose the ability to respond honestly to reality.
You can feel this happening inside organizations long before anyone names it directly. Meetings become performances instead of conversations. Accountability becomes political. Feedback becomes dangerous. Leaders begin receiving filtered information designed more to preserve safety than reveal truth.
Once that happens, decline may already be underway.
What continues to fascinate me is how many different thinkers eventually arrive at similar conclusions from completely different directions.
Stephen Covey approached trust through Character AND Competence. Both are necessary. Character without competence eventually disappoints people. Competence without character eventually damages relationships.
Charles Feltman describes trust through Care AND Reliability. People need to believe not only that you care about their well-being, but also that your behavior can be depended upon consistently over time.
Other leadership models point toward similar tensions: Support AND Challenge. Relationship AND Accountability. Integrity AND Performance.
Different language. Same terrain.
Trust weakens whenever one side consistently outruns the other.
Good intentions without competence eventually disappoint. Competence without integrity eventually harms. Care without accountability creates drift. Accountability without care creates fear.
Human systems suffer when these tensions stop being leveraged wisely.
Trust rises
where trust is given.
That line feels almost dangerous now because we live in a culture where distrust often appears more intelligent than openness. Cynicism can masquerade as wisdom. Detachment can masquerade as sophistication. Suspicion can create the appearance of strength.
But hardened people rarely build healthy systems.
They may control systems. They may dominate systems. But environments shaped primarily by fear and distrust rarely sustain truthfulness, learning, creativity, accountability, or meaningful human development for very long.
One of the strongest definitions of trust I have encountered comes from Charles Feltman, who describes trust as choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions.
That matters because trust always involves vulnerability.
Not the abandonment of discernment, but the willingness to place something meaningful into relationship without complete control over the outcome.
Which means trust inevitably involves courage, uncertainty, and risk.
I think modern culture struggles deeply with this. Many people want certainty without vulnerability. Influence without mutuality. Safety without openness. Control without dependence on others.
But human relationships do not work that way for very long.
Neither do organizations.
Neither do democracies.
To those unable to trust,
the wise remain trustworthy still.
That line does not strike me as permission for manipulation or the absence of boundaries. It feels more like a refusal to let distrust harden into permanent dehumanization.
There is a profound difference between remaining trustworthy and becoming endlessly trusting.
Trustworthiness means refusing to let another person’s fear, betrayal, manipulation, or distrust determine the quality of your own character.
Endless trust without discernment abandons necessary boundaries and ignores patterns requiring wise response.
The Tao never mistakes openness for blindness.
Discernment AND Trust sit at the center of this chapter.
Discernment to the neglect of Trust creates isolation, suspicion, and the inability to build anything meaningful with others.
Trust to the neglect of Discernment creates vulnerability to manipulation, exploitation, and the erosion of necessary boundaries.
We need both: the ability to see clearly and remain open at the same time.
The Tao seems deeply interested in that tension throughout this chapter. Remaining open without becoming defenseless. Remaining discerning without becoming hardened.
Artificial intelligence complicates this tension profoundly. AI can now generate the appearance of trustworthiness at scale. It can simulate empathy, expertise, confidence, and relationship with extraordinary sophistication.
But simulation is not presence.
Algorithms can optimize for engagement, but they cannot be trusted in the way human beings can be trusted because they do not participate in consequence, accountability, suffering, growth, or moral responsibility.
Which means remaining genuinely trustworthy may become one of the more radical human acts of the coming era. It requires people capable of telling the truth, holding boundaries, sustaining discernment, and remaining human simultaneously.
Barry Johnson often referenced something he learned from Jack Gibb:
seeing is loving.
I have thought about that line for many years now, and especially in the last decade.
When human beings stop truly seeing one another, they often begin relating instead to abstractions, identities, enemies, projections, stereotypes, or fears. Once that happens, trust deteriorates rapidly because people are no longer encountering one another directly. They are reacting to representations shaped by anxiety, ideology, tribalism, and manipulation.
This is where Discernment AND Trust becomes profoundly practical.
Discernment requires seeing clearly, including recognizing patterns, risks, harms, and histories that shape wise response.
Trust requires continuing to see the person beneath the category, projection, or fear.
Both matter.
Without discernment, human beings become vulnerable to manipulation and systems that exploit openness.
Without trust, people become incapable of the collaboration, vulnerability, and mutuality necessary for meaningful human life.
In this way,
wisdom keeps
childlike simplicity.
Unhardened by fear.
Unbroken by doubt.
That may be one of the hardest invitations in the entire Tao Te Ching.
Not becoming hardened after betrayal, disappointment, manipulation, or institutional failure may require enormous courage. Especially in a world increasingly organized around outrage, suspicion, and fear.
The Tao keeps returning to another possibility. Remaining open enough to see clearly. Steady enough to discern wisely. Human enough to keep caring.
That is not weakness.
I am increasingly convinced it may be one of the deepest forms of strength human beings possess. Chapter 49 seems to understand something many modern systems forget: distrust cannot heal inside systems organized entirely around suspicion.
That does not mean abandoning discernment. It means refusing to let fear become the organizing force behind everything.
With open mind,
the wise find
all people
worthy of care.
Seeing people as worthy of care does not require abandoning discernment about harm, manipulation, or trustworthiness.
But the moment human beings lose the capacity to see one another as worthy of care, something essential begins disappearing.
And once that disappears, trust itself becomes almost impossible to restore.
Here’s a Polarity Map for Discernment AND Trust:
INVITATIONS:
Take a custom Polarity Assessment based on this Chapter’s Polarity HERE.
To use an “AI-trained Chat w/Cliff for Step 1, Seeing” CLICK HERE.
Ready for the Polarity Advantage? Go deeper into Polarity Thinking, see our online self-directed Credentialing and Introduction to Polarity Practice or in-person training with Barry Johnson and me at Kayser Ridge by CLICKING HERE.
