Maybe mistrust is the wrong word: after all, the question is not really whether we trust but what we put our trust in: individuals and relationships or a vast impersonal apparatus that regulates and coordinates.
But, then again, we do not so much trust in the latter as rely on it—an unhealthy reliance, an over-dependence. The suspicion of governments and corporations that has become so glaring since the late ‘60s, which shows itself in the most wild conspiracy theories and in the most sober cynicism about the motives of our leaders, is in part an expression of our feeling that we are letting these institutions do too much for us. We are letting them—asking them to—do what communities of human beings ought to do for and among themselves: uphold and adjudicate norms of behavior, decide who is responsible to whom for what, tell us what is safe and what is not, look after the poor and the sick and the destitute—even tell us what is real and what is not.
But for all our mistrust of our institutions, for all our awareness that they are bad substitutes for a social fabric and culture, we are afraid to do without them, afraid to rely on individuals, on relationships, on judgment—afraid to go on trust.
We do not know who will betray us or when. We misjudge people. We sour relationships. And the worst of it is, when things do go sour, there is injury on both sides, so that we are judged and reviled by the very person who we think has done us wrong.
Whereas the state is consistent: we know it will be infuriating, stupid, robotic, but we know that it will act according to its rules; it will do to each of us what it does to everyone in our position; it will not be resentful or vindictive, only impossible, byzantine, unjust but systematically unjust. We will not wonder if we have acted badly; there will be no misunderstanding to straighten out; it is not a person. Its cruelty is mindless.
I can be angry at the government or at a business, but I cannot argue with it. I will speak to various agents and customer service representatives, and they will be helpful or unhelpful, understanding, rude, competent, stupid. But I know that they are not the institution they represent. My anger or gratitude towards the agent is only for the agent. And the more I observe this, the more I think that perhaps it is meaningless to be angry at the institution itself. What is the institution? I almost want to say that I am angry at fate, which has trapped me in this hall of mirrors, this endless labyrinth of phone-calls and websites and mysterious charges and denials of service and threats and promises. I am angry at the world that has produced this institution, angry at my impotence in the face of it and my dependence upon it—but not at it. It is not there to be angry at. It does not exist in that sense.
Reliance differs from trust in that it entails no risk, or none that I must worry about: if the institutions I rely on fail, then I will come to harm, but so will everyone around me; there will be no losers and no winners, only a general chaos; and anyhow the collapse of institutions is something I cannot really quite imagine, even if I know it’s possible. But if I trust another human being, I may be betrayed, humiliated, made a sucker and a fool, either in small ways that they will never acknowledge or in large ones that they flee from; and on the other hand, I may become someone else’s villain, probably without even meaning to, through misunderstanding, carelessness, cowardice. In fact, if I trust another human being, some of these things are more or less bound to happen.
Trust implicates me: my character, my dignity, my judgment. Reliance does not.
But if, knowing all this and longing to become human, I wish to choose trust over reliance, I discover that there is no longer any way to do this. We have lost the social fabric, the systems of personal obligation on which that form of life depends.
They are lost because we unmade them. They existed once because we made them. The guiding principle behind these crumbs is that it is in our power to make them again; and if we have not begun to remake them, it is because we lack the courage, or lack the desire, or lack the imagination.
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