Kaa’s Lament: A World Without Trust
How do we rebuild the conditions for trust?
Hello Everyone!
What does it mean to trust someone or something? When we think about words and concepts we innately have a sense of what exactly they mean, yet when pressed to articulate it we struggle.
I encounter this often with the students I teach. Last week I asked one of them the meaning of the word “firmly.” They looked at me and said: “I don’t know how to explain it but I know what it is!” To which my response was, “If you can’t explain it how do I know you know what it is?”
The Danger in Trust
I think the same can be said for the concepts of trust and confidence. We know what it is to trust someone, but when pressed to explain the difference between trust and belief, or trust and confidence, or even if asked to list the ingredients of trust, I suspect we would all struggle. I promised in my last issue to dive into each the five reflections on the world today, the first of of which was a loss of trust and confidence. But we must first start with a common definition - and Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy is often a good place to start:
Trust is important, but it is also dangerous. It is important because it allows us to depend on others—for love, for advice, for help with our plumbing, or what have you—especially when we know that no outside force compels them to give us these things. But trust also involves the risk that people we trust will not pull through for us, for if there were some guarantee they would pull through, then we would have no need to trust them. Trust is therefore dangerous.
Studies by the OECD, the World Economic Form, the United Nation’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, have all explored declining trust in national governments, scientists and policy makers, the judiciary and the private sector. This is not a new phenomenon, it pre-dates COVID-19:
Yet the definition above is revealing. It points to an aspect of trust we rarely interrogate in our day to day lives, the emotional risk vulnerability that trust demands. Martha Nussbaum explains that:
Trust … is different from mere reliance. One may rely on an alarm clock, and to that extent be disappointed if it fails to do its job, but one does not feel deeply vulnerable, or profoundly invaded by the failure. Similarly, one may rely on a dishonest colleague to continue lying and cheating, but this is reason, precisely, not to trust that person; instead, one will try to protect oneself from damage. Trust, by contrast, involves opening oneself to the possibility of betrayal, hence to a very deep form of harm. It means relaxing the self-protective strategies with which we usually go through life, attaching great importance to actions by the other over which one has little control. It means, then, living with a certain degree of helplessness.
What does this mean for the decline in trust in society? I would suggest that we need to relook at the conditions by which we build and maintain trust in our personal, social and communal lives.
The Ingredients of Trust
The ability to build trust is a function of time. There is an element of truth in the cliche, “it takes years to build trust but a second to destroy it.” The value of trust lies in the time one has invested to build it. Trust is also nurtured in an atmosphere of comfort and safety, where vulnerability is protected not exploited. A third ingredient for trust is an element of transparency and predictability. We have trust in people and things because there is an element of reliability, we know how they work, the operations that underline their activity, and we have confidence that this will produce the expected outcome.
Yet the conditions necessary for the building of trust in our individual and collective lives have been pushed to the breaking point. We live in a world in which people are literally (keep reading) moving faster and in which time has grown shorter. It is a world in which vulnerabilities are not embraced but exploited, and the costs of this exploitation are higher. Technological transformation, particularly in the realm of AI has also resulted in a grey haze of opacity regarding systems and their inner workings. Can any one explain, precisely and in layman’s terms without resorting to vague references to LLM’s and deep learning how or why CHAT-GPT gives you the responses it does to your prompts? (See here for an initial read).
No Time for Lingering
For those of you who like evidence and hard data, here is some food for thought. An NBER paper entitled Shifting Patterns of Social Interaction: Exploring the Social Life of Urban Spaces Through AI examines walking speed, propensity to linger, (yes you read that correctly) group sizes and group formation over a 30-year period in four urban public spaces located in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. The paper finds that the average walking speed increased by 15%, that time spent lingering in spaces has halved, and that the frequency in group encounters has declined, indicating fewer interactions in public spaces.
As a notorious slow walker, I am glad to see that someone has studied walking speeds and the propensity to linger, but it appears that the value, and art (yes lingering is an art) has declined with time. And while superficial on a first glance, the study is revealing in its data behind the indescribable feeling that we live in a world in which people move faster, in which the time and opportunity for spontaneous social interaction is restricted.
Shrinking Collective Attention
We also live in an information and communication environment that has contributed to shrinking collective attention spans. Where according to Martha Nussbaum, social media “encourage[s] brief blurts of opinion rather than the working out of a complex argument. The tone is often shrill as if people are shouting to be heard. People don’t listen. Everything is me me me.” The time for analysis and with it understanding has evaporated, and with this our basis for trust is slowly eroded.
A study by Nature Magazine on the dynamics of collective attention span notes that, “shorter attention cycles are mainly driven by increasing information flows, represented as content production and consumption rates…. producing and consuming more content results in shortening of attention spans for individual topics and higher turnover rates between popular cultural items. In other words, the ever-present competition for recency and the abundance of information leads to the squeezing of more topics in the same time intervals as the result of limitations of the available collective attention.”
All this is to say in that we are seeing the collapse of conditions in which trust is built and cultivated. We need to re-build the personal, emotional, communal and societal conditions in which trust can grow. The answer may not be to keep insisting on the veracity or authority of science, or haughtily looking down on those who disagree with fact, but rather seek to understand them as humans, to understand the conditions that have lead them to that place of mis-trust. We need time for each other, we require more authentic communication and interaction, we need a greater education around the systems that we interact with on a day to day basis, and we must resist the urge to exploit, leverage or capitalize every vulnerability.
In her essay entitled, “The Discontents of Truth in and Trust in 21st Century America” in Daedalus Magazine, Sheila Jasanoff writes:
Simply insisting on the authority of science without attending to the politics of reason and persuasion has proved not to restore trust in either knowledge or power… Modest beginnings can be made, however, with more inclusive processes for framing policy questions, greater attentiveness to dissenting voices and minority views, and humility in admitting where regulatory restrictions are based more on prudence and concern for others than on “sound science.” Ultimately, the solution to a world whose “solemn plausibilities . . . have lost their reverence and effect” is not to walk away from the politics of truth, but to understand, improve, and knowingly embrace it.
Lessons from The Jungle Book
I must confess one of the prompts for this mini-essay was the Jungle Book. I was on Youtube and I stumbled upon the video of Kaa’s song, “Trust In Me.” The lyrics are:
Trust in me, just in me
Shut your eyes and trust in me
You can sleep safe and sound
Knowing I am around
Slip into silent slumber
Sail on a silver mist
Slowly and surely your senses
Will cease to resist
Let’s hope we are not a world of Mowglis walking senselessly to our deaths. And I have confidence, in the story, Bagheera and Baloo did eventually come to the rescue…
Thank you for reading
ps: It would mean a great deal if you could share this with one or two people in your network who you think would find this interesting.
FK.
I cover and explore the topic of Trust in my podcast here:
https://soberchristiangentlemanpodcast.substack.com/p/s1-ep-7-scgp-rebroadcast