Mistrust is Good

An excerprt from article by Dhirendra Kumar of Valueresearchonline.com, a financial expert.

There's a saying (or perhaps it's a line from a poem) that good fences make good neighbours. This means that when the fence between your neighbours' land and yours will be high and strong then you will get along better with your neighbours. There won't be any grounds for suspecting one's neighbour when things go wrong. What this proverb is saying that if one builds in the assumption of a certain amount f mistrust, then things actually run better and there's effectively more trust in an interaction. The important thing here is that the mistrust is institutionalised. No one has to take a decision as to whether a particular neighbour is trustworthy or not. No one has to bear the humiliation of being the only one to be fenced out. In this sense, a universal, all-encompassing mistrust is a good basis on which to build honest and confident interactions.

I think it makes sense.