A Matter of Trust

A brief commentary on the landscape of Now

Where should we place our trust?¹

In all manner of research, we are guided to ask basic, fundamental questions: Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How. Our attention, however, can be (often artificially) aimed, like induced gravitation, toward the question of Who.

The Messenger (or one’s perception of the Messenger) may be elevated above all else. The other questions sometimes never get asked before belief takes over.

This is observable everywhere in a culture that over-values fame, notoriety, and popularity. The modern culture-making machine places great emphasis on this, clearly evidenced by the worship of celebrities, notoriety, and the award-winning this, that, or the other. These are the things that are amplified and proliferate.

The most ubiquitous outlook is all-too-often the most commonly believed.

This is, of course, one of the foundational tools of mass-media manipulation, now vastly intensified by electronic media of all kinds.

Perhaps the most worrying product of this emphasis is that the desired outcome is not unlike the grade school student government ‘elections’ that inhabit some part of our memories. Slogans, empty words, and popularity contests, not at all unlike advertising. It seems obvious now that these ‘elections’ were never about any sort of true governance. It was most commonly, in effect, window dressing: a way to prime young minds to accept outcomes based on group preference; or less charitably put, the tyranny of popularity.

Whether acknowledged or not, everything from fashion and diet, to national spending and public policy, revolve around this dynamic. This power should not be underestimated, after all, wars have been waged built on it, genocide perpetrated rooted in it. The fruits can be decidedly malign.

In the context of Now, despite the lessons of the COVID era, people continue to want to identify with a preferred message and their preferred messengers. It’s a deeply held thing, almost instinctive.

It is a framing that manipulates the human mythic desire for heroes and villains. Like a performative ‘professional’ mock wrestling match, the culture pits personalities or organizations and their messages, one against the other. The public’s role is to select their champion and choose a side—a team—rather than think for themselves. The amplified portrayals are most often, black and white: there is no gray.

The dogmatic cognitive frame, remains:

Anointed ‘experts’, ‘thought-leaders’, well-known ‘revolutionaries’, best-selling authors, celebrities, and ‘viral’ social media are the fountains of credence; but you, yourself, are unreliable, biased, and untrained.

The slogans are everywhere, even as sub-text. Trust the system. Trust the science. Trust the experts. Trust your team.

Simultaneously, we are immersed in misleading narratives, skewed motivations, ambition, failures in judgement, errors in assessment, inside dealing, nepotism, corruption, and deception— clearly observable to anyone paying close attention.

Dogma thrives when we don’t think for ourselves.

That is, after all, the goal of the constructed information storm everyone is attempting to navigate. Some refer to it as propaganda, information warfare, or a long-lived multi-layered psychological operation; the labels matter less than what the observable aims are: to confuse, confound, and seed doubt. Distilled to its essence, the strategy being employed uses a potent weapon: the undermining of trust, especially trust in your own judgement, unique abilities and capacities.

The reality is that within the torrent, there is both good and ill. There is truthfulness and good intent, just as there are deceptions, misleads, and nefarious intent. Nothing is pristine.

Like drawing from a tainted well, it is up to each individual to decide to drink, or not.

Each of us must judge for ourselves.

But in that reckoning, we must strive to remember that we each have the capacity to reason, reflect deeply, and see with some degree of clarity, however limited. We can certainly deceive ourselves (if we choose to) but this is not striving to see with clarity. In our search, we may not perceive the totality, but we can take the threads we hold and weave them into a fabric of reasoned understanding, no matter how incomplete. That power is in each of us, and we ought not relinquish it, ever.

It is a skillset to constantly hone.

Question everything.

Question everyone.

Question yourself.

Set aside the question of Who and ask: What? Why? How?

Reason thoughtfully.

Be open-minded.

Be unafraid.

Eschew popularity.

Take nothing for granted.

Listen to your morality, your conscience, your experience.

Consider with your entire being and believe in your capacity to discern.

Dogma thrives when we don’t think for ourselves.

Dogma thrives when we distrust ourselves.

Set aside the frame you’ve been given and trust in yourself.

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P.S. Keep Feynman’s first principle close!

P.P.S. The lyrics of Billy Joel are ever-resounding…

It took a lot for you to not lose your faith in this world

But I can't offer you proof

But you're gonna face a moment of truth

It's hard when you're always afraid

You just recover when another belief is betrayed

So break my heart if you must

It's a matter of trust

-

#intertwine

#questioneverything

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Related:

1. Trust is an interesting word. It implies not only reliance on the soundness or veracity of something or someone, but also notions of comfort and soothing disappointment. Indeed, this is found in the Old Norse root traust ‘help, confidence, protection, support’ and the Dutch troost as well as the German trost, both meaning ‘comfort, consolation’.

Trust and truth are closely related. They both stem from the Proto-Germanic treuwaz, meaning ‘having or characterized by good faith’ and evolved to take on more specific notions of kinship, loyalty, and ‘belief’. These connections are evident in the Old English treow ‘faith, belief’ and treowe ‘faithful, trusty’. The oldest sense of truth actually connotes ‘faith, faithfulness; fidelity, kin, friends; loyalty; veracity, quality of being true; pledge, covenant’.

Interestingly, these connections imply that the perhaps less objective notions of belief, faith, loyalty, and reliability are tied up in the oldest and deeper meaning of what constitutes truth.