Are the people trustworthy? Is the facilitator? Is the process?

Back in April at the most recent Art of Hosting we convened, someone asked me “does the Art of Hosting make good faith assumptions about people?” I’ve been thinking about that question ever since, and not satisfied by my answer which, came from a more defensive posture. I think the short answer is, yes, in my practice I make good faith assumptions about people. But let’s expand that. I found a blog post of mine from twenty years ago that lays this down: The essence of his argument is this: in Judeo-Christian societies, humans are said to be born with sin, and are therefore inherently untrustworthy; to be precise, humans are unable to rely on their own judgements to make good decisions and decisions for the good. And so the way to deal with a population of largely untrustworthy neer-do-wells is to create an eleborate system of controls in society to ensure that behaviour is managed and the chaos doesn’t get too overwhelming. In contrast, Watts says, many societies, including…