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 3rd century, when the many (sometimes conflicting) stories about the life, death, teachings, and resurrection of Jesus were parsed and hardened into factual truth statements that eventually became mandatory beliefs in order to call oneself a Christian.
Blind faith is belief without evidence. Blind faith, inf fact, often resists contradictory evidence and only is receptive to confirming evidence. (Psychologists call this “confirmation bias.”) New information that does not fit our pre-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.
Without trust, the kind that led the signers of the Declaration of Independence to pledge to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, our nation will revert to a state of nature in which (the words of Hobbes) life is nasty, British, and short for most of us. So being cautiously trusting is a risky but necessary first step.
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 most important, 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, in corporations, and in the shallowness of motivations of many of our fellow citizens 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 are no quick and easy fixes. But there are steps that we can take to restore our capacity to trust and to be the kind of person others would trust as they judge is us our words and actions. We can encourage and support those institutions that we trust and call to account those that fail to be honest, respectful, compassionate, just, and fair.
We can begin with our own inventory of whom and what we trust—people, news media, friends, family, organizations. None of them are perfect, but we can call them to ccount when they fail and affirm our faith when they serve us and the larger community well. t s incumbent on each of us to question, to get information from more than a single source, th protest wrongdoing and participate in civic processes that can slowly but eventually restore our trust in one another and our institutions.
We can seek out individuals and organizations that affirm our shared values and promote them together. There is both safety in numbers and reassurance in mutual support. Together, we can learn, act, protest, vote, and engage in other ways in creating a society resting more firmly on a foundation of mutual trust and obligation.
In whom and what do you place your trust? How can you being the work of restoration for yourself and the larger community?
PurpleSage41 