The Turtle and the Scorpion

So there’s this story. Maybe you’ve heard it.

A scorpion wants to cross a river, but being a land-dwelling, venomous little bastard, he can’t swim. He sees a turtle at the bank and goes, “Hello mate, do us a favour, yeah? Let me hop on your back and you can ferry me across.”

The turtle goes, “You must be having a laugh. You’ll sting me halfway over and I’ll die.”

But the scorpion, who’s got the silky tongue of a toxic ex, goes, “Ah noways, c’mon—think about it. If I sting you, I drown too. Doesn’t make any sense, does it?”

Against its better judgement, the turtle agrees.

Midway across, sure enough, the scorpion stings him.

The turtle, in disbelief: “What the fuck are you doing?”

And the scorpion shrugs. “I’m a scorpion. What did you expect?”

Now in some versions, the turtle’s fine—protected by its shell. In others, it’s a frog and things end… less optimistically. But the point isn’t survival. The point is that trust, once broken, tends to stay broken. And sometimes the fault isn’t that you trusted, it’s who you trusted.

Still, we do it anyway. Again and again. We trust lovers, strangers, systems. We trust the bridge will hold when we take the first step, even if it looks like it was made from string and myth. Because is there ever an alternative?

We don’t know that things will work out. We never have. We never will. But we put our trust in another person, or in a relationship, or a shared future—or even in ourselves—anyway. Not because we’re sure. But because we have faith. Not a spiritual kind for a cosmic deity acting in mysterious ways, but because faith is what happens when we reach the end of knowledge and certainty.

Philosopher Onora O’Neill thinks that trust only makes sense when you don’t have guarantees. When life won’t give you a warranty. When you're standing on the edge of a decision, and no one’s going to come along and tell you what to do. Trust is the currency we use to transact in the unknown. Not a cheap optimism, but a kind of existential commitment: “I’m going to act as if this will work out.” A defiant wager in favour of possibility.

It’s not reason. It’s risk. The word “trust” comes from the Old Norse treysta—to make strong, to make safe. So when you trust someone, you’re not just handing them your vulnerabilities. You’re also fortifying the world between you. In Confucian philosophy, one of the core virtues is xin—“trustworthiness” or “reliability.” The character itself is poetic: on the left, ren (person); on the right, yan (word). Together, it’s someone who stands by their word. A person you can count on.

We might think of it as a way to bind us together, “I bind myself to you, and you to me.” The binding isn’t a cage but a scaffolding. Trust happens in the extending of trust, not before it. It’s not something you have, it’s something you do, repeatedly. Like building a bridge that only holds because you're walking across it. Like a jazz musician learning to improvise in real time. You’re composing the relationship as you go.

But if you’re still sitting there trying to do the math — calculating whether this person is “worth the risk”—you’re not trusting. You’re analysing. Kierkegaard would call this mistrust. Because mistrust is always trying to second-guess the future. It waits for proof before taking action. But trust moves first. It acts without proof. And this movement is what makes relationships possible in the first place.

Kierkegaard says that love “builds up.” So does trust. It’s generative. It adds something new to the world. Suspicion, on the other hand, builds nothing. It’s inert. Defensive. Stuck in a loop of second-guessing. That doesn’t mean you trust everyone. Or that love demands you throw open the gates to every grinning narcissist or charming sociopath who strolls by. Sometimes, as in the fable, the scorpion tells you who they are. And you have to listen.

The point isn’t to simply trust more, but to trust better.

The funny thing is that the more we try to guarantee trust with official systems—contracts, policies, compliance checklists—the more we end up draining the real stuff out of it. In smaller, face-to-face worlds, you kept your word because if you didn’t, you’d have to look people in the eye tomorrow—and they’d remember. Your reputation was the contract. Break it, and you weren’t just in legal trouble, you were in social exile. Now we outsource all that to paperwork. A signature and a few paragraphs of legalese replace actual human accountability. You don’t have to know the other person, or care about them, or even like them—you just have to meet the bare minimum spelled out in the fine print. The paper becomes the shield: “See? I did my part.” But that’s not trust. That’s risk-management cosplay. And it quietly trains us to think, “What’s the least I can do to still be in the right?” instead of, “How do I honour the trust this person gave me?”

Each time we build a new system to force trust, we’re building a world where we practise it less. We replace the bridge between people with a stack of rules—and then wonder why no one knows how to cross anymore.

Onora O’Neill says something quietly radical: that our problem today isn’t a lack of trust. It’s a surplus of untrustworthy people and systems. And so, the goal isn't blind faith—it’s discernment. As she puts it: “I aim positively to try not to trust the untrustworthy.” So instead of trying to be more trusting, we should be trying to be more trustworthy. Because we can't control who stings us. But we can control who we become.

Because things will go wrong. There will be misunderstandings, dropped balls and broken promises. What matters is the pattern over time. We can fail each other and still be worthy of trust—if the overall arc bends toward care and commitment. Trust is always built in time. It’s not a static quality—it’s a repertoire. Something we rehearse and refine and fuck up and return to, again and again.

You trust because life requires movement, and movement requires faith in something. In someone. In ourselves. Our capacity to navigate the unknown. To become a person worth trusting—even when others aren’t.

The turtle wasn’t wrong to trust. The turtle was lucky to have a shell. But we don’t always have that kind of protection. Sometimes we get stung. Still, you get back in the river—not because a contract says you can, but because the bridge between people is only built by walking across it.