Trust

Choosing to trust is a decision that is much ridiculed today. It is in many cases easy to see with the benefit of hindsight that it was foolish to trust someone, but doing so in advance is of course much harder. In general we are moving in the direction of trusting less and less; exposure to betrayal is simply too high a price to pay. The consequences of this ripply out across society with tremendous impact.

There are many ways to trust, but often what we trust is a person. In many cases that person is hidden from us, represented through the state or a firm.¹ Perhaps in an even greater number of cases (although the internet is making this less and less the case) we are actually trusting people directly when we believe we are trusting those abstract entities — in such simple things as the grocery store employee not being sick when handling our food or the clerk in delivering our paperwork.

I have recently found myself repeatedly enmeshed in discussions about identity and trust, often (but not exclusively) in technical forms. In this case obtaining trust is the method of making sure that the individual is who they say they are. This can be done in numerous ways like passwords,² access to physical items (like keys, SIM cards, or an airgapped machine), and through a combination of the above (access to a cryptographic private key). But trust really operates on a deeper level. The point of authentication is to make sure the person carrying out an action is the one you trust, but it does not build that trust to begin with.

Technological development has led to a general decline in trust. Think of the telephone; it has generally meant a detachment from the immediate present, making us more inclined to “check up” on the activities of others. The portable (or cell) phone exacerbated this feeling and made it possible to reach another person practically at all times. It is a feeling that people of my generation now has had as our entire lived experience.

Today’s children do not have the same freedoms that previous generations did. Growing up I was still free to roam around the neighbourhood and visiting friends without anybody knowing our exact coördinates or activities. I got my first phone originally because my parents wanted some way for me to call them for help when i first started walking to and from school alone. This is quite a reasonable use of it, and it does not impose on my freedom if I am the only one initiating a communication.³

But the existence of a phone has more consequences, a child with a smartphone becomes digitized and able to operated on through the connective web. Them being able to call you inevitably means you being able to call them, and that makes you aware of this constant ability to “check up” on what they are doing. Apple’s Find my iphone became simply Find once it became clear that people were using it (or similar services) to track loved ones — to constantly “check up” on how they are doing instead of simply trusting their own agency.

Many people’s anxiety and loneliness stems from a fundamental lack of trust — in others, in themselves, and in other’s trust in them. Not being able to securely expect that the people surrounding you will be there when you most need it means a world where one has to manage entirety alone; a bellum omnium contra omnes. Managing to survive (and thrive!) in such an environment is naturally a challenge, and one that we humans are not made to deal with as tribal creatures.

It is then not strange that we, as non-trusting individuals, choose to reinforce this tradition by building structures that remove the need for trust. I have chosen to reject this. This is surprisingly difficult, it is not natural to trust someone who does not trust you in return. It leaves you vulnerable to betrayal, and thus is really only something that is possible to do if you are secure in your position and confident in yourself. But choosing to unilaterally trust is a requirement for building a generally trusting society.

In numerous developed countries, and at least in the Nordic ones, self-checkout machines are becoming increasingly common. I have no doubt that the reason for this is rooted in the ever-increasing extension of the division of labour (particularly through the employment of capital), but it has had tremendous ramifications for trust. It is now possible to maintain one’s existence in one of humanity’s most dense concentration — namely the city — without coming into contact with another person. You can work remotely, or as a lone delivery driver picking up enigmatic packages and delivering them to doorsteps, and then get all your basic needs delivered or machine-scanned yourself. But equally it has made the employees that are left behind increasingly paranoid and strained.

It is my understanding that there has occurred significant increase in theft following the implementation of these machines. This has led to workers confronting people who look young (to maintain haphazard age restrictions on self-service) or for people who bring bags into the store (who do so in order to carry home the food or items they buy). The age restrictions are particularly troublesome; alcohol, tobacco, and cinemas have age restrictions in order to help protect children for their own sake, but denying them the simple freedom of being able to skip a long line is a small erosion of democracy.

Still, age restrictions on self-service machines does not spell the end of liberal democracy. It is however a sign of how our current state no longer trusts its own citizens. If we can not trust people to buy all the things they take off the shelf in the grocery store how can we trust them to pick the right future of our nation and state in elections?

Similarly the expansion of closed-circuit television (CCTV) and other forms of mass video surveillance is also a form of a negative spiral, where a decreased level of trust leads to more cameras, that in turn leads to a further erosion. Fear over crime can only be solved in the long term by a reduction in fear (for crime can never be entirely eliminated) but this can not be attained if the level of trust in society remains low.

There are few democratic nations in the world today that have a civil and collected political environment — strict polarisation has become the norm. Political extremism and division is not the fault of any one political system. It can not be fixed merely in The United States, France, Austria, or Japan. It is a flaw with the overarching system that all of these nations share.

Party membership has seen a long decline across the world, and yet people are in many ways more intensely politically engaged⁴ than ever before. I find it hard not to interpret this as anything other than an dissatisfaction with the system of participation. It is not a mere mechanical system, but also one that is social in nature — it is a question of feelings and of relations between individuals and groups.

Solving this is thus not a technical question; it can fundamentally not be solved through the use of statistics or models. Instead we must tackle it head on, in the grit of intellectual hand-to-hand combat. It must be dealt with personally and intimately. Jesus said “Love your neighbour as yourself”,⁵ and it is thus. Love should be given out unilaterally and unconditionally, with nothing expected in return. The chief requirement for this is trust, and as long as you put your trust in others you will be continuously surprised by how much your investment will pay off.

This lays the basis for a radical new democracy. Radical in the etymological sense of the word — stemming from Latin’s radicalis meaning “root”. Democracy has always been personal, just as all politics is personal in that it is acted on through people. Our abstractions and “political systems” always have their foundation in that personal level, of a politics that is done between four eyes. A truly democratic political system always derives its power from the people, and can always be changed by the people if it does not serve their purpose.

Sweden is quite a high-trust society — it is a fact commonly quoted by politicians and academics alike. But even then this trust is not something that we can take for granted. It must be nurtured and safeguarded. Were we to give, for example, the police (an institution in which there is quite high social trust) unwarranted powers it would inevitably lead to more serious mistakes; “power corrupts”. By then that trust in that institution will be gone, and the societal benefits that come with it as well. For similar reasons it is problematic when politicians like Ebba Busch are disingenuous in debates — not because of the contents of their statements but because it erodes trust in the democratic process and creates feelings like “well, politicians always lie” when it does not have to be that way.

Trusting others does not need to be foolish — you do not need to be a doormat — but the general baseline in our society can and should be raised. In general it means giving people the benefit of the doubt, of not asking needlessly inquisitive questions and giving people the space and agency they need to accomplish tasks and/or maintain themselves.

I have (unfortunately for environmental reasons) been spending a lot of time at airports recently. The airport functions as a good example of a trusting public space. People are free to browse and pick food in little open stores without being constantly watched through cameras or corner mirrors, and in a world otherwise filled with hostile architecture are free to sleep on the ample seating available. As long as you have been “vetted” to enter the sacred space of the airport you are automatically assumed to be good, to follow the rules, and to be trustworthy. This is even more true for the Lounge, whose reputation and storytelling is based on only the most respectable having access to this inner chamber.

This does not have to remain a exclusive privilege of those fortunate enough to frequently visit the oases of trust on the outskirts of major cities. It can be a fundamental value to build our societies through. And it starts with you. ❦