Who Can You Trust?

By Kirby Farrell | September 25, 2014

“Only one-third of Americans say most people can be trusted,” according to a 2013 poll. “Half felt that way in 1972.”  These days, “a record high of nearly two-thirds say ‘you can’t be too careful’ in dealing with people.” An AP-GfK poll conducted a year ago “found that Americans are suspicious of each other in everyday encounters. Less than one-third expressed a lot of trust in clerks who swipe their credit cards, drivers on the road or people they meet when traveling.”

News outlets love this sort of poll. It’s a filler thrill: a sip of adrenaline that can draw readers to notice ads that pay for the news. It says something, but what?  In a way this item is part of the problem: chances are, you don’t really trust the advertisers and journalists, but you sift the evidence and decide to read on. Or not.

Trust is at least two problems. One is that society needs enough trust to cohere. The other is that people need trust and mistrust—and to sort them out wisely. Too much trust makes you somebody’s slave or entrée. Too much suspicion saps morale, stalemates things, makes lawyers rich, and sabotages investment in the future. Think of all the Americans whose mistrust of politics tells them voting is a waste of time.

For society, the deep threat is civil war, as in battle cries about “big government” and sly “militia” threats of revolution. When police shoot unarmed black males, the bullets express white society’s mistrust of all blacks as a separate camp—an army—of parasites and criminals.

Economic war is here already, since most incomes have been stagnant for three decades, and the veiled guerrilla war against the poor is chronic. During the opening salvos of “lean and mean” business ideology, the New York Times featured a dispatch titled “Casualties on the Battlefield of Business.” In the new climate of insecurity, powerless employees were suffering. Meanwhile business has routed labor unions and won the weakest labor laws of any advanced country—the US is the only one with no guaranteed paid days off. When bankers crash the economy and get bonuses instead of prosecution, you know who’s winning.

“Fear is motivating people to not be away from the workplace, even though concerns about layoffs have mitigated since the recession, said Rusty Rueff, a career and workplace expert at employment site Glassdoor. American workers only used half of their eligible vacation time during the past 12 months, a Glassdoor survey found. The top reason for not taking vacation time was the concern that no other employee could do the job, followed by a fear of getting behind. Seventeen percent of respondents said they were afraid of losing their job.” Keep marching or die.

Since people spend half their waking lives at work (if they can find a fulltime job), mistrust on the job is painful. When Market Basket’s board ousted its worker-friendly CEO, you can see why employees rallied for his reinstatement—though the supermarket chain fired some to silence them. The workers used social media to organize, giving themselves an informal union and a voice.

This “union” is significant partly because theories about the decline of trust often focus on our increasing isolation: what Robert Putnam called “bowling alone.” More television time and more isolation produces what media researcher George Gerbner called “mean world syndrome.” His studies showed that the more TV you watch, the more likely you are to exaggerate the dangers in your neighborhood. The “mean world” of media violence is a marketing strategy. In effect, entertainment is stimulating mistrust as a pick-me-up, turning flight into fight and giving you a mood massage. The drawback is that massages don’t give you confidence on the job or on your street.

The poor of course do live in a meaner world and have to be more suspicious than the rich, who enjoy a gated community and a generous bank balance. TV’s mean world can be a tonic for the rich, since it proves how virtuously successful they are. It’s a tonic. For people dating, mean world vibes can be poisonous. In such a world even fantasies of bondage contracts in Fifty Shades of Grey look reassuring.

“In God we trust,” says the dollar bill. Assuming you trust dollar bills.

Psychologist Erik Erikson saw “basic trust” as the foundation ofpersonality. Mistrust, he concluded, can lead to kids beset by frustration, suspicion, withdrawal and a lack of confidence.

Since parents foster trust in infants, you might wonder how they’re doing. Among 35 developed countries, only Romanian kids face more poverty than American kids. “The U.S. economy is one of the most unequal in the developed world. This would explain why the United States, on child poverty, is ranked between Bulgaria and Romania, [34th of 35], though Americans are on average six times richer than Bulgarians and Romanians.” (1)

Despite the poverty and hunger, hot-button politicians want to force more women to bear unwanted children, at a time when “Roughly one live birth in seven was unwanted at conception.”(3) Not a prescription for trust. Maybe schools can even out kids’ chances.

Nah.

In the US, says Robert Reich, “The wealthiest highest-spending districts are now providing about twice as much funding per student as are the lowest-spending districts, according to a federal advisory commission report. What are called a “public schools” in many of America’s wealthy communities aren’t really “public” at all. In effect, they’re private schools, whose tuition is hidden away in the purchase price of upscale homes there, and in the corresponding property taxes.”

And get this. “Rather than pay extra taxes that would go to poorer districts, many parents in upscale communities have quietly shifted their financial support to tax-deductible ‘parent’s foundations’ designed to enhance their own schools.” (4) The rich, you see, are cleverer than you and me. They can afford to be clever.

Politicians should have to consider whether a particular policy fosters wisedecisions about trust and mistrust. They’d BS about it no doubt, but at least trust would be a public issue. Think of the official insanity in Utah, where an elementary school teacher who was carrying a concealed firearm at school accidentally shot herself in the leg when the weapon discharged in a faculty bathroom shortly before classes started Thursday morning, officials said. The teacher at Westbrook Elementary School, in the Salt Lake City suburb of Taylorsville, was severely injured when the bullet entered and exited her leg.

The school gun is legal and encouraged in Utah. The official babble rationalized the leg wound. How many of the kids, you wonder, drew the right lesson: the toilets are dangerous on the ship of fools.