Trust
Among the most basic factors in what we may call the “practice of daily life” is one that is most easily forgotten or commonly neglected: trust. I mean, to begin with, trust in what we habitually regard as reliable without giving it a moment’s thought, as something we rarely doubt, let alone conceptualize. We seem to have little idea of the degree to which trust determines our every move, gesture and act. Trust, as James Bowman observes of honor in Honor: A History, is “reflexive” and at its core “inseparable from the human condition.”
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 liveable.
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.
Everybody is interested in the topical, few in the fundamental. Trust as an inward faculty is routinely disregarded. In the public domain, where it is most apparent, it is often fallible and prone to disappointment. Yet without it, to cite Acts 17:28 in a secular context, the world in which we live and move and have our being would simply stop. Trust is indeed everything.
