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 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.
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.
