To be suspicious is to feel reluctant to accept an offered version of reality as true. Suspicion is an emotional perspective that wears a mask of rationality, It’s a mood, a perspective, even though it uses the language of critical thinking.
To call suspicion a perspective is to say that being suspicious is a way of looking at things. The word perspective comes from the Latin word specere, which is also the root word for spectacles, spectator, and spectrum. Specere means to look at something. So, spectacles are tools for looking with better focus, a spectator is a person occupied with looking at something, and a spectrum is an organization of colors according to how our eyes react when we look at them.
Suspicion is also derived from specere, though it might not look that way at first. Look again at the idea of suspecting something isn’t what it seems, however, and the connection becomes more clear. To suspect something is to look upwards at something, to sub spect it, meaning to look at it from a different angle in order to examine it carefully for something that isn’t what it appears to be at first glance.
To feel suspicious is a social gamble, because to show suspicion is to violate the expectation (another specere word) of trust. To trust is to accept something as so enduringly true that there’s no need to look twice at it. To be suspicious is to insist that it is necessary to take a second look. Suspicion therefore is often interpreted as an insult, an insinuation that something or somebody is not worthy of trust.
Often, to choose between suspicion and trust is to choose between being right and being loved. As Elvis sang,
We’re caught in a trap.
I can’t walk out,
because I love you too much, baby.
Why can’t you see
what you’re doing to me
when you don’t believe a word I say?
We can’t go on together
with suspicious minds,
and we can’t build our dreams
on suspicious minds.
On the other hand, we all know stories of people who have trusted others for years, only to find out in the end that the trust was rotten to the core, built around the refusal to look at what a suspicious mind would have easily identified as a lie. They’ve lived their lives foolishly chasing dreams that they should have known could never be real.
