We have to learn how to trust again
Society cannot function without trust. Credit: Getty Images/PhotoAlto/Jerome Gorin
I was driving on Little East Neck Road in Babylon Town the other day.
It's like so many Long Island roads, like so many roads everywhere. One lane each way, a double yellow line down the middle. I was on my way home from work in the early evening and had just crossed Straight Path heading south on a straight section of road when a car coming the other way, possibly also heading home from work, nearly sideswiped me. Or so it seemed. The other driver drifted over the yellow lines though perhaps not as much as it appeared at the moment.
And on we both went, leaving behind a rather mundane and unremarkable moment.
Until I began to play what-if.
What if the other driver had strayed further? What if I had been closer to the yellow lines, or on them, and not paying attention? What if we had been going a little faster?
And when you do that, when you think about the dozens of cars you pass that way every day, and a hundred other unremarkable things that happen on a daily basis in which you must implicitly rely on someone else, you realize how important is the commodity of trust.
Simply put, society cannot function without trust.
We trust the other car to stay in its lane. We trust that the food we buy at the grocery store or restaurant is safe to eat. We trust that our children are in good hands and safe at school.
And we do this — and this part is critical — despite a certain amount of recurring, verifiable evidence that occasionally this trust is misplaced. Cars sometimes stray. Food sometimes makes us sick. Children sometimes are harmed at school.
The important thing is that despite these occasional betrayals, our reflex generally is still to trust. Trust but verify, in some circumstances, and implement some rules and regulations, but essentially we choose to trust in most facets of our lives.
Except politics.
In politics, the reflex for too many people seems to be mistrust. And often, it's mistrust despite a lack of recurring, verifiable evidence.
The ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles would have recognized us. "Trust dies but mistrust blossoms," he wrote.
More than 2,400 years later, we have Elon Musk advising us to "trust nothing, not even nothing."
His cynicism might be bleak, but it is a mirror to a culture in which many people's twitchy trust muscle is tribal. If someone is in the tribe, the muscle flexes. If they're not, the muscle recoils. For these people, it doesn't matter whether there is any verifiable evidence one way or another. And the reflex is hardened by leaders who tell us explicitly not to trust the other side, whether that's an individual or an institution. And by peers on social media who parrot those dictates. And by ever-emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, some of whose uses makes it darn near impossible to trust that anything you read or see is what it's supposed to be.
We're suffering from a trust deficit, and we're in trouble.
I'm not sure how we solve this. It won't be quick or easy. We're going to have to play a long game. But somehow we have to find our way back to trusting when trust is warranted.
My 19-month-old granddaughter likes when I take her out to the backyard to pick raspberries. She leads me to the thicket and looks expectantly, waiting for me to pick one from the bushes and give it to her to eat. And she'll eat whatever I give her because she trusts me. Even if the berry is mottled, or has a hole from a bug, or is way too soft because it's way too ripe — she'll eat it.
I'm not saying we all have to learn to trust like that. But when the berries are good and there are no thorns, it's the way we have to go.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
