Trust
is instinctive in every moment of human existence.
It is a faculty that we unconsciously exercise or
apply to just about everything, irrespective of the
unpredictable: that the approaching driver will stay
in his lane, that the elevator will not stall between
floors, that the manhole cover we walk over will remain
solidly in place, that the balcony we sit under while
having coffee in a sidewalk café will not collapse
upon us (as happened to a couple in Montreal with
grisly results) and will not give way under our feet
(as happened to my university’s Faculty Club
manager, who plunged to his death a few minutes after
we exchanged the time of day), that the food we buy
will not poison us, that the vaccine we take is not
lethal, that our banker will not defraud us, that
our doctor knows what she is talking about, that the
ferry we board will not sink, that the microwave will
not suddenly burst into flames (as happened to my
mother-in-law), that the person we pass while jogging
will not attack us — ad infinitum. We may be
wary or nervous at times; nonetheless, trust goes
so deep that it is the psychic motor powering all
human action, even the most trivial.
In effect,
trust is what philosopher David Hume in An Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding called “the
apperception of customary conjunction.” If this
were not so, the most mundane routines would be put
on hold, as in the case of Russian novelist Ivan Goncharov’s
Oblomov, who never gets out of bed. We would not dare
to cross the street. Every instant would be filled
with paranoia. Trust is the cornerstone of sanity.
In short,
trust is the existential plug-in that enables us to
get on with our domestic lives at every instant of
the day. It is, so to speak, the Rule of Law on which
everyday existence is intimately predicated, whose
valence is so ethereal it is almost literally metaphysical
or inwardly kinesthetic. The stock remark “Have
a good day,” though utterly banal, is founded
on trust. The Israeli version of the common phrase,
“Have a magic day,” is more to the point.
Trust is the magic that makes life livable.
Of course,
trust is not perfect and, as noted, is seldom conscious,
which does not diminish its essential nature. When
we up the ante from the private and unreflected minutiae
of common anticipation — precisely that which
goes unnoticed — and consider the larger political,
economic, institutional, and conceptual realms of
life, the element of trust becomes more visible.
Trust,
after all, is the foundation of marriage, which is
plainly why secrets and betrayals are so destructive.
It is why radical feminism is a social evil, having
demolished the assumption of mutuality between the
sexes. Friendship is grounded in trust far more than
it depends on reciprocal advantages. It is why fiduciary
organizations and estate planning tools are called
Trusts, if often euphemistically.
Cult-thriller
writer Harlan Coben, whose Netflix series has garnered
a sizeable viewership, reiterates his major theme
in every book and every episode: you can never know
another person. This is evidently a cliché
but no less true, a fact that is always liable to
damage not only personal relationships but the social
glue that holds a community together. Canada’s
Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien’s recent
observation that “there is currently a trust
deficit in the digital economy” regrettably
applies across the board. This is why trust ideally
remains the sacred bond that allows not only for individual
security and confidence in daily affairs but provides
— again ideally — for the contractual
and informational health of the cultural arena.
The private
sphere, as the Commissioner notes, is definitely under
assault. Anything we say in public or do in personal
encounters, however innocent, may be used against
us. The public danger is when trust begins to grow
untenable or deficient on a scale of agential magnitude.
When one can no longer trust the integrity of the
political echelon, the medical profession, the judiciary,
the press, the digital platforms, and the academy,
which is very much the case today, the nation itself
becomes unstable and the future increasingly problematic.
All its organs are sick. As Tucker Carlson observed
in this most controversial moment, “You can’t
trust [a] government that abuses power. For the first
time in generations, Americans have reason to believe
that our intelligence and law enforcement agencies
gravely misuse the powers we have given them.”
Notwithstanding,
the crux of the matter is that without trust on every
level of our lives — whether the blithe confidence
that our mechanical appliances will continue to work
(we recall philosopher Martin Heidegger’s remark
in "The
Question Concerning Technology"
that the “failure of equipment” leaves
us in a state of existential bewilderment), that “until
death do us part” actually means something,
that our friends and partners will not deceive us,
that people will abide by the rules of social conduct
and decorum, that the professional class will adhere
to the norms of communal expectation, indeed, that
we ourselves will struggle against our own demons,
thus permitting us to trust ourselves, however fitfully
— the world we regularly count on would disintegrate
into mere anarchy.
Dante’s
famous conclusion regarding celestial ordinance in
The Divine Comedy, “the Love that moves
the Sun and the other stars,” is, from the human
perspective, the Trust that moves us from one day
to another, the conviction that things, usages, and
even subliminal expectations will remain intact, “things
as they were, things as they are/Things as they will
be, by and by,” as poet Wallace Stevens writes.
It is the invisible grout that keeps the masonry of
our world together. It is the latent conviction that
a planet-obliterating asteroid will not strike today.
The irony
is that what should be obvious, even at the molecular
level, is scarcely recognized, enabling us to unthinkingly
break the continuum that sustains our every breath.
Those who do so as a matter of course, who lie for
a living and have no compunction violating the moral
nexus of trust, are the enemies of life or, to use
a religious axiom, the servants of the devil. They
conspire against the quick of life itself. It is at
this point we may begin to understand the extent to
which the phenomenon of trust is inherent in the very
marrow of our existence. As in the indigenous fable,
trust is the turtle on which our world rests.
To recapitulate,
trust is a fundamental principle of human life, the
psychological source of accustomed behavior. It is
what enables us to get up in the morning without suffering
a crisis of paralysis. Trust is the belief in normality
despite the irruption of the precarious, whether in
nature or in the sphere of practical affairs, in the
absence of which even the slightest action would be
impossible. When the sense of trust is impaired at
the micro level, a species of madness is the result.
Our condition is phobic. When it is violated at the
macro level, civil order is disrupted. Our condition
is dystopian. The façade of surface continuity,
or the mythos of permanence, is consoling, but also
treacherous. From the rational standpoint, we know
the world is inherently labile and uncertain, in other
words, untrustworthy, which is why, on the visceral
level, trust is, paradoxically, the power that keeps
us going.
