In Whom Can I Trust?

Trust is one of those tricky words with multiple meanings.  Among its synonyms are faith and belief, but they are quite different.   The Latin word credo (I believe) finds its way into English as creed, credible (or incredible), credentials.  The Greek word pistis, or Latin equivalent fides, has a more subtle meaning of confidence or trust. Clearly they overlap, but the meaning that I find of greatest social value is the idea of trust.  Do we trust our own judgment? Do we trust people in whom we confide? Do we trust the police, the justice system, our elected officials? Do we trust corporations to produce products that are safe and beneficial? Do we trust banks with our money?  Surveys about trust suggest that most of the institutions of American society do not evoke trust.  That decline is aided by social media, but it is not new.

Faith is the connector between belief and trust.  Think about the huge difference between “I believe in you (faith, trust) and I believe you (I think that what you are saying is factually true).  That confusion has dominated Western Christianity since the 3^rd century, when the many (sometimes conflicting) stories about the life, death, teachings, and resurrection of Jesus were parsed and hardened into truth statements that eventually became mandatory beliefs in order to call oneself a Christian.

Blind faith is belief without evidence. Blind faith, inf fact, resists contradictory evidence and only is receptive to confirming evidence. (Psychologists call this “confirmation bias.”) New information that does not fit into our established beliefs is rejected almost every time.) Likewise blind trust in the good intentions of people and institutions weakens rather than strengthening the ties that bind us together in community at all levels from the household to the community to the nation.

Beliefs are durable, trust is not.  Trust is easy to shatter and difficult to repair. Our beliefs are a part of our identity. Our shared beliefs create mutually reinforcing communities of believers. And yet…trust is the foundation of a functioning democratic society.  We need to trust the good intentions, the competence, and the honesty of our public officials and the institutions—courts, law enforcement, public agencies, election administrators.  It would also be a good thing if we felt we could trust private agencies, banks and other corporations, service providers, and the media. However, each of them has let us down time and again.

Our faith in government and elected officials has eroded over time, with a rapid fall in recent years. How do we restore trust in one another, in government, in the news media in an age of AI and social media? There aer n quick and easy fixes.  But it s incumbent on each of us to question, to get information from more than a single source, th protest wrong doing and participate in civic processes that can slowly but eventually restore our trust in one another and our institutions.