Solomon and Flores provide rich and thought provoking examples of how authentic trust is crafted and how it works. They also describe how the spiral of distrust can devolve into ever increasing doubt and suspicion, causing us to seek out more evidence for our distrust (case building), further dividing us, and causing alienation until eventually we resort to trust's alternatives -- threats, repressive control, and acts of retribution.
The first third of Building
Trust in Business an Life deals with trust relationships between individual people
and concludes with the question of institutions and groups of people. If
trusting people requires relationship and predictability, how does one have a
relationship with government or a corporation?
Clearly we do trust institutions. As noted earlier, we keep our money in banks and we do our commerce with pieces of paper or plastic. "On one familiar reading, corporations are thought to have only one kind of interest, their own bottom-line financial interest, but even where this cynical reading is correct, it nevertheless suggests that corporations have interests and strategies, and this leads us to his consider them in human terms. What defines a corporation is not its profit margin but its sense of commitments and responsibility" certainly you can't look a corporation in the eye as you can a person, but corporations employ people to perform the roles of corporate governance so that the corporation actually can make decisions and commitments as if they were a person. Indeed the degree to which corporations are persons under law is hotly debated ever since they were granted certain rights of free speech by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision.
Trust, trustworthiness, conditional trust, competence as it relates to trust, misunderstandings of trust -- all of these are discussed in detail by Solomon and Flores. The important take away point here is that authentic trust, the trust a mature thinker exercises is not a just and emotion, or a mood, or a static condition. It is a living process that can be either nurtured or damaged or even killed. Like love, trust grows and wanes with experience. It is a facet of relationship. But unlike love, we can trust someone we loathe and fear.
In the last half of the book trust is discussed as an emotion that follows from beliefs. "We are responsible for our beliefs, although we do not choose a belief as we might choose to entertain a thought. Even if we simply absorbed our beliefs as we were growing up (consider, for example, racist beliefs). We are responsible for examining them, criticizing them, and cultivating alternative beliefs when it becomes evident that our old beliefs are somehow wrong. Authentic trust consists, to at least some extent, in deciding what to believe, and, more importantly, resolving to create the circumstances in which these beliefs will be justified"
This connection of trust and belief affects our thinking and
speaking about issues, but Is rarely consciously examined as we interpret facts
and formulate our opinions. Beliefs are
structures of knowing. We come to them in many ways as the authors note. But
they all are acquired from our exposure to culture and life experience. Most human learning starts with a pre-rational
belief or theory about reality which we test and update as we go.
I suppose it's possible to arrive at a belief by some deductive analytical process, but it's pretty rare. The learning cycle refines our intuitive beliefs with a series of steps: observation, reflection, concept, action, observation, reflection, updated concept, action, observation, reflection, ... " the cycle repeats as long as necessary to arrive at a belief that has utility.
Beliefs - The Human Operating System
Beliefs are the human operating system. We choose what to believe. Much mischief proceeds from unexamined beliefs. We operate on a large set of beliefs about reality, and these beliefs allow us to interact with the real world without needing to ponder and analyze each choice. Decisions large and small are seldom illuminated by complete information, so beliefs let us function in the cognitive dark much as one navigates the bedroom floor at night. Trusting that no piece of furniture has moved, and no misplaced shoe lies in the path we can move cautiously in the darkness to reach the bathroom door without a light.
It's easy to scale this example up. Observe the traffic on a six lane expressway. The act of driving manifests great trust and an abiding belief that the roads and bridges are sound and our fellow drivers will be prudent and predictable. Yet we know of numerous examples where those beliefs were wrong and that trust was betrayed. Are we unrelated to the other drivers we share the road with? Hardly. Driving a crowded highway is like dancing, we observe the movements of others and coordinate our moves accordingly.
When we encounter a traffic accident, is our trust betrayed?
Yes. Irrevocably? No. Do we update our beliefs? Maybe.
Failures of Trust and Belief
Beliefs and trust can lose their healthy dynamism and become
dysfunctional. We see this most clearly in others. Albert Einstein, a thinker of great
reputation, said, "Insanity [is] doing the same thing over and over again and
expecting different results."
People get
rigid in their beliefs, and even when utility is absent they keep on trusting and choosing to believe without reflection. A few years ago there was a religious cult
whose leader predicted the end of the world on a certain date he had computed
from scriptural clues. Believers disposed of their possessions, put their
affairs in order and prepared to be transported away from this veil of tears.
But the promised rapture didn't happen. No problem, the leader checked his
math, made corrections and they awaited the revised date only to be
disappointed again.
What surprises us is that interviews with the members of the cult revealed that they chose to persist in their belief in their prophet notwithstanding their own quite dramatic experience that belief was not justified.
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