If Trust Builds a Society, the Absence of Trust Destroys It
The Covid Policy That Really Mattered Wasn’t a Policy
That our political and social problems are maddeningly difficult to solve doesn’t make them any less necessary to at least try and ease. Whatever basket of pandemic policies the Biden administration tries — be they the vaccine mandates the Supreme Court just gutted, or new testing infrastructure, or variant-specific boosters — will not work if the social context in which those policies play out continues to deteriorate. And it is deteriorating: 88 percent of Americans say the pandemic has left us more divided, which is higher than in any of the other 16 countries Pew surveyed.
We erred this time by believing ourselves not just more capable, but also more united, than ultimately proved true. Now that we know the truth about ourselves, and the havoc our divisions will wreak on any pandemic response, the problem we need to solve becomes clearer.
What does good pandemic policy look like for a low-trust, high-dysfunction society?
Ezra Klein makes an interesting case in this article. He’s right about a lot of things. Our pandemic response resulted in more disease and more deaths from COVID than most countries in the world and there is a strong case to be made that it had more to do with our mutual distrust of the media, the government, and one another than any other single factor.
This is fucked up, gang.
Trust is a tricky thing. For the most part, we engage in a transactional model of giving and receiving trust. Do things I consider trustworthy and I give you my trust. Do something that breaks that trust and it is taken away until you do enough things to reestablish that trust. Until you break it again. In this way, we say, we earn the trust of others.
Like hope, trust is fragile and amazingly powerful. With it, relationships can grow, employers can instill loyalty, societies can progress in genuinely positive ways. Without it, we all become ineffective solo efforts without enough juice to move past the navel gaze or the frozen burrito wrapper that has been sitting on the coffee table since June.
It is also a reciprocal relationship within ourselves: if we are trustworthy, we are more trusting. If we are not trustworthy, we distrust more.
Tyler was my assistant for five years back in Chicago. I trusted Tyler despite a few red flags in his character because that’s how I roll. I believe trust is given rather than earned and have little faith in the tit-for-tat method of common trust transaction.Trust or do not trust, there is no try. Tyler, apparently, did not trust me. To be fair to him, I was pretty hard on him. He was an awful combination of incredibly ambitious and passively lazy. He loved the recognition but wasn’t willing to do the work. Consequently, I was on his ass a lot.
Those red flags became apparent when I found out he actively campaigned for the position and aggressively threw two of his colleagues under the bus to get it. When I found out about it, we had a serious conversation and I let him know that that sort of thing was not tolerated. Over time I realized I trusted Tyler but didn’t completely respect him much and the stage was set.
We were friends as well Director and direct report. We co-hosted a podcast together. We worked together on The Moth in Chicago. Hell, I officiated his wedding. Honestly, I have so many fond memories that reconciling them with the endgame is difficult.
At the tail end of those five years, I found out that he was actively campaigning for my job much in the same way he had knifed his colleagues previously. My trust in him — professionally and personally — shattered over night and, like a present I had given that had been tossed in the trash, it was not to be given again. Because he was essentially an untrustworthy person, I was blindsided and never caught up.
In hindsight, though, I can’t say I’d do anything differently had I to do it over again. The breaking of trust is always rough but, if you’re a grown-up, you find a way to forgive and still not forget.
The childish reaction is to state that Tyler was never really my friend but that’s, well, childish. Tyler was my friend until he wasn’t. That’s the way of things. Sometimes trust is broken and ends a relationship. Sometimes the relationship has more value and the adults in the room recognize that they need to do that thing the Zoomers reject as something toxically masculine but I view as absolutely necessary: they get over it.
Do I trust Klein in his assertion that the United States would’ve been more effective at mitigating the effects of the pandemic if we’d been, you know, more united? If we trusted one another? If we trusted our institutions?
I have a theory that, while there were instances of the government twisting the truth here and there (Trail of Tears, Reconstruction, Pearl Harbor), the moment the country was asked to swallow the hollow load of the Warren Commission, the cracks in our collective ability to trust the white dudes in suits, hats, and ties in the hallways of Washington power began in earnest. The Magic Bullet Theory is just fucking silly and to straight-face it to explain the assassination of a beloved president was just too much to ask.
Add to that the Watergate Scandal and the dice were tossed. Americans, who were always skeptical of politicians, started crossing over the Rubicon to complete and utter mistrust. I recall hearing stories about my grandfather — WWII veteran, blue collar oil rigger — railing against fluoride in the water as a government conspiracy to control the masses and I imagine that if he’d had a Facebook page at the time, he might have gone way down that rabbit hole and become a full-fledged crackpot.
Propaganda has likewise been omnipresent in this country but there was a time, long gone and evaporated like the smoke in the office of Ben Bradley, when most Americans at least trusted some of the news media of old to tell them the truth in the world. Today we have a lot of spin and with the presence of videos and tweets an almost pathological need to out the hypocrisy involved in the creation of Connect the Dots Narratives rather than simply reporting the news.
My mother’s neighbor has a “Let’s Go, Brandon” bumper sticker on his van and hates my mother because she flew a Black Lives Matter flag during and just after the riots of Summer 2020. I feel the sting of moral indignation when I see someone refusing to wear a face mask or wearing it improperly and I have to stop myself from minding his business rather than my own. I deleted all of my personal social media accounts because, in my widening distrust of those whose ideas run counter to my own, I found myself hating people whom I had never met and would unlikely ever be in the same physical space.
I want to trust my neighbors. I want to trust the news media. I want to trust the government.
But I don’t. And neither do you. Not really.
Whom do we trust?
Hell if I know. Maybe, in the pursuit of some sort of answer, whom do I trust?
I know who I don’t trust.
I don’t trust anything on FOX News. I also no longer trust NPR. Both are so loaded with promoting a specific and narrow worldview that I can’t simply watch and listen and not bend over backward to find what I believe is true versus the narrative that is being spun.
I don’t trust almost any politician whom I’ve heard of because the trustworthy ones are too busy working on solving problems to be seen much.
I don’t trust advertising of any kind.
I don’t trust Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Auto, Big Agriculture. I trust Zuckerberg as far as I could pick him up and toss him, like the robot kid in AI, across the room.
I trust my wife. I trust my family. I trust most of my friends.
Reagan famously said “Trust but verify.” It’s a solid sound byte and decent advice. The difficulty is that with so many seeking trust, there isn’t enough time in any one day to both verify those threads of info and enjoy the streaming goodness of HBOMax. So we stop trusting one another and watch Peacemaker and The Gilded Age.
I’m an optimist at heart. I also believe without finding a way to trust a few more people today and a few more tomorrow, to openly seek out those we feel we can trust, we’re fucked as a nation. We have to trust some of us. We have very little choice but to trust some of the news and a few politicians or what the fuck else are we gonna do? We sure screwed up the pandemic response and millions paid the price in COVID deaths and at least a few years of completely fucked educational failure.
I also believe that trust is a choice rather than a challenge. Trust is given rather than earned.
So whom do I give my trust?
The aforementioned wife, family, and friends (most of them). Also, I give my trust to those in the media asking questions and using data to verify the answers. I give my trust to reporters who present facts, not narratives. I give my trust to those politicians who actually accomplish some modicum of governance for the people who elected them. I give my trust to those voices out there who are curious, aren’t angry, aren’t lecturing me, and do their level best to judge less and understand more.
I choose to trust Fauci but I understand if you don’t. I choose to trust my Apple device even if I’m leery of trusting the mega-corporation. I choose to trust the kid making my chicken sandwich despite all evidence that he may have pulled a Project Mayhem on me.
Like with Tyler, I might be wrong with some of these choices. Like with Tyler, I’m pretty certain I’ll survive if I am.
The Big Lesson is to give trust freely. Try to forgive when it’s broken and give it again if necessary. It isn’t a finite resource any more than hope. Scars happen because the wound healed and scar tissue is thicker and we could all use some thicker skin these days.
