IVIV: Trust

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Can I just skip back a page or two to this passage on p. 70:
 
"Doc watched her getting in line. What kind of DDA game was
she running on him now? He wished he could believe her more,
but the business was unforgiving, and life in psychedelic-sixties 
L.A. offered more cautionary arguments than you could wave
a joint at against too much trust, and the seventies were
looking no more promising."
 
It seems to me that the notion of 'trust' emerges as a crucial 
theme in IV. On the one hand, we have characters in the novel
saying things like "I figure a guy can't ever be too paranoid"
(149), but on the other hand we have characters like Doc, who
consciously decides to try his hand at some trust, despite
all the cautionary arguments against it.
 
On p. 342, Crocker Fenway lectures Doc (who is nervous that 
he'll get wasted when he hands back the heroin Bigfoot put
in his trunk):
 
"Luckily for you, that's a sanction they prefer to exercise
only against their own. Given the sorts of business they engage
in, without absolute trust in one's associates all may too
swiftly revert to anarchy. Outsiders like yourself tend to
get the benefit of the doubt, and you in turn may trust their
word without any hesitation."
 
Crocker is of course one of the bad guys of IV, but what he
says here isn't entirely a crock of shit. In fact, his assertion
that without trust all may too swiftly revert to anarchy is
very similar to one of the central themes in Melville's
The Confidence-Man. That novel also seems to tell us that
without a minimum of trust, it'll all fall apart. Expect
to be cheated, but don't not trust. Otherwise things may
degenerate all too easily into all-encompassing suspicion
and paranoia.
 
At any rate, Doc takes Crocker's lesson to heart, and when
Denis asks him why on earth he believes Crocker's promise
that the crooks won't hurt anybody, he says:
 
"What, I should only trust good people? man, good people
get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody
evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense. I mean
I wouldn't give odds either way." (349)
 
I trust y'all have an opinion on this.
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