Trust, friendship, truth and honesty

The above are, near universally, considered very important, and perhaps even necessary, in any relationship (relationship being interactions between people rather than describing a specific romantic attachment); and yet they can very easily conflict with each other within a relationship (rather than within an individual). The most obvious example would be between honesty and truth, one person can express information gained from another source with perfect honesty and belief, which is never the less known to be untrue. Similarly being honest and admitting a past transgression can break a trust, despite the intuitively complimentary natures of honesty and trust, the can in fact break each other. 

Now sadly my abilities as a linguist, poet or even basic wordsmith are rather limited (refer to my lovely absence of full stopes for further confirmation) however with the horribly deficient tools at my disposal I will attempt to explore at least some of the above concepts. Trust, is that simply an expectation of honesty which is reflective of given morals? I trust that 1+1=2, similarly I trust that my friends will not spread heinous rumours about me, seems quite simple, and yet... certainly we all see flaws in our friends, some people are gossips, some people have tendencies to perhaps embellish somewhat on the truth, yet we can so often still naively believe that they will act against their nature in the context of your friendship with them, even knowing they do not with others (note, that thought isn’t going anywhere, I just kinda wrote it down anyway).

To redefine the prior concepts, how does this relationship seem?

Trust = true if, honesty = truth

Then if true

Friendship = trust if truth = morally acceptable behaviour

I think that works doesn’t it? If we can trust someone to do the right thing, we are their friend? That is obviously a surface evaluation of a complex problem, with different levels involved in all variables which could potentially change the values, but from the above it can seemingly be concluded that friendship is a simple and easily solved equation, and chances are that most people are in fact worthy of friendship from any given individual based on the general overlap of morals in society. The conclusion I must then come to, is that as individuals we misinterpret information to change the variables when creating imbalances in this equation, the easiest mistakes to make are obviously in the honesty = truth segment, if you trust more than one person, and those people have different sources of information on a given topic, they will both honestly give you opinions they see as true but which may be inconsistent..... I’m sure we see where this is going. Friendships are fragile, ultimately I believe we can reduce this equation further. If you care about someone, then it basically just doesn’t matter, we will get emotionally biased, ignore the facts, and make snap judgements.

So where does this leave the concepts of truth honesty friendship and trust? We might say we need them all, but at the end of the day any and all of them are only going to be applied when we emotionally want them to be, we will ignore the facts when it suits us, and ultimately we are all more fallible than we might like to think.