Modern civilization continues down the fasttrack of technology dependence, AI media generation, and advanced mass communication, persuasion and manipulation techniques, which has me thinking a lot about trust and what that means in our current culture, institutional environments as well as for our future.
Who do you trust? What kinds of statements or content raises immediate red flags? How do you know if you are, or have been brainwashed?
I brainstormed some terms in an attempt to identify characteristics, objectives and values of a high trust versus a low trust culture.
| High Trust | Low Trust |
|---|---|
| Sharing | Regulation |
| Freedom | Oversight |
| Creativity | Conformity |
| Exploration | Inhibition |
| Try | Observe |
| Understanding | Appearance |
| Experience | Credentialism |
| Vulnerability | Security |
What I realized in thinking through this list is that these values don’t represent one desirable or optimal way of being versus another competing, undesirable and suboptimal way of being. Rather they are complimentary values that are each important in appropriate measures depending on a given circumstance.
Sharing is an important value of a high-trust culture. This may sound superficially obvious, but let’s just entertain the idea for a moment. Sharing isn’t just about “being nice”. Even when we teach this fundamental value to children, it is primarily about establishing and building trust.
“I trust you to play with my toy and not break it.”
“I trust you to give my toy back to me when you are done playing with it.”
“I trust you are going to let me play with your toys when I come visit.”
Sharing is a fundamental value for a reason. It represents the most basic form of relationship establishment. If, say as children, you don’t trust me enough to let me play with your toys when I come visit, I’m going to be miserable and I will make it known to my mother and anyone else who’s in charge of arranging this visit that I am not happy in that environment. Either your mom is going to make you share, or my mom is going to decide it’s not worth it for us to spend time at your house.
But there are also established rules around sharing. First of all, the acknowledgement of principle ownership. The toy belongs to you, but you are allowing me to play with it provided I accept certain conditions. These conditions can vary based on the toy (e.g. don’t throw, don’t chew on, don’t break apart) and thus they represent regulatory guidance for the sharing interaction.
Sharing without regulation is detrimental to the principle sharer, while overregulation, e.g. don’t play with the toys at all, denies the opportunity for trust and friendship to evolve.
Building on the topic of sharing are the concepts of freedom and oversight. Continuing under this frame, freedom is the idea that you are allowed to do anything that isn’t prohibited by the regulations. It’s no fun for me to let you play with my toy and then spend all my time watching you as you play with it, carefully making sure you never violate any of the rules. This amounts to extreme oversight. You don’t get to experience the freedom or explore the imaginative possibilities of playing with the toy under this type of surveillance because your play is clouded by the fear of accidentally getting caught breaking one of the rules. Alternatively, with no oversight at all, you might as well not even have the rule, the toy ends up being ruined and who knows what other collateral damage might be caused.
Generally speaking, most people agree that creativity and creative expression are fundamentally positive concepts that encourage exploration and inspire growth. The counterbalance to that is the concept of conformity, which is often presented in less admirable and more negative terms. But I would argue that, like with freedom and oversight, conformity serves a necessary and useful purpose in reigning in completely unbridled creativity.
Left alone to explode in any and every direction, creative exploration can and will lead to some dark and undesirable places. Not every behavior or product should be excused, justified or accepted simply as a matter of creative expression. Yes, conformity marks the lines in which one is supposed to color, but it also serves as a standard bearing weight for what is and is not palatable or acceptable in art, expression and culture.
Creativity allows for testing of the subjective limits of conformity, but without those limits, the concept of creativity itself ceases to hold any meaning. Creativity is not primarily about identifying frames to break, but rather about examining all of the possibilities that can exist within the frame.
Similar to conformity, inhibition exists as a useful barrier to harmful and destructive unchained exploration. Exploration, when controlled and measured, is a wonderful thing that society should encourage and benefit from. But without inhibition it tends toward recklessness.
A child is naturally curious, so when a parent takes him to the park he wants to run wild and explore everything in the environment. He will sprint across the open field, scramble up the rocks and climb the trees without a care in the world or a hint of inhibition. It’s the parent’s responsibility, for the safety of their child, to instill that sense, because mother knows their are venomous snakes in the grass, rabid marmots living in the rocks and a multitude of catastrophes awaiting in the trees.
Yet, it is unreasonable and unhealthy for mom to disallow any running, scrambling, jumping or climbing. Her job is not to prohibit these explorative activities for fear of harm, but to acknowledge and educate her child about the potential harms as a means of allowing more enduring and valuable exploration long term.
In a high trust environment, one is encouraged to try a lot of new things and not worry so much about success or failure. The theory being that eventually you will stumble upon the successful thing and ride that to a successful future. Conversely, a lower trust environment values observation over rushing into action. The idea here is that with careful observation and rigorous note-taking one will learn what works and what doesn’t before embarking on a task or objective, thus reducing the odds and avoiding the embarrassment of resulting failure and harm.
Once again, I don’t believe one approach or the other represents a complete or optimal strategy. The problem with the first approach, of trial and error until you find something that hits, is that it presupposes the subject will be able to instantly and effectively identify when a trial is successful. This despite the fact that nothing in the approach by itself would necessarily lend toward reaching that conclusion.
What is the purpose of serially trying new things if you do not pause to observe and analyze the effectiveness of said trials? You are likely to miss out on success, if for a moment it doesn’t look or feel like success, because you’ll have already moved onto the next thing.
On the other hand, obsessing over analytics and observation can be paralyzing to the point you become discouraged from taking any risks or action at all and, as a result, are left standing in quick sand as the more experimentally inclined breeze by you with innovative and field-tested approaches.
To establish trust and convey value, you need to understand what makes an effort successful and be able to support that finding with observational data and analysis. In simplified terms, you need to have tried, failed, tried again, succeeded and have some concrete idea why you failed as well as why you succeeded.
There is no doubt that tackling a task or working through a problem, at any level of complexity, leads to a deeper understanding of that task or problem and all that’s involved in completing or solving for it. It’s also universally accepted that this depth of understanding is quite valuable.
In order for that value to be leveraged it has to be recognizable. There are many ways individuals demonstrate and society recognizes these achievements: grades, diplomas, resumes, certificates, awards, positions, promotions, etc.
Trust is earned by understanding and rewarded by appearance. You could argue that appearance is a value of a high trust environment rather than a low trust one. For example, if you tell me you are a licensed pilot, and I take your word for it, that is certainly indicative of a high trust relationship. But in reality, I would look for several additional cues to validate this trust, even if only subconsciously. I would expect a certain level of professional appearance and communication skill at the very least. If I was hiring you to be a pilot, this evaluation of your appearance would be even more in depth to include your experience, education, criminal history, and more.
Nearly all of these attributes of appearance, however, can be feigned, whereas true understanding, derived from experience cannot be.
Let’s say, for example, we have two men who claim to be highly credentialed, licensed pilots. The first looks and dresses like a bum, has crooked, brown-stained teeth and speaks vulgarly, but is honest to a fault. The other is clean cut, well-dressed and well-spoken, with a perfect smile. And he’s a pathological liar.
In the low trust society, the first guy will never get hired to fly a plane, despite having the knowledge and experience to do so. He will be disqualified simply because he does not look the part and nobody will bother to examine any further. The second guy will get hired (or else nobody will) with disastrous results all but guaranteed.
This example simply illustrates why it’s important on an individual level to ensure your appearance represents your understanding and experience, and also why relying on credentialism alone can be dangerous. As a decision maker, you must be discerning of both genuinely earned expertise and the truest representative signals thereof. That means you must take responsibility for knowing the right questions to ask and signals to look for when assessing where, and with whom, to put your trust.
It’s been said many times that trust requires vulnerability, and that is certainly true. To be completely trusting of someone, a spouse, for example, demands it. Even me, pouring out these thoughts and sharing them, is an example of vulnerability in action. I’m trusting you to read and consider these ideas with no assurances they won’t be taken in whole or in part to be used against me in some manner.
Security, when taken to the same extreme, is the polar opposite of vulnerability. One can avoid the potential pitfalls and damage a relationship can cause by shutting himself in and never interacting with anyone. He will be completely secure from ever being exposed, but that obviously comes at a steep personal cost, foregoing all the advantages and pleasures of interpersonal interaction.
Similarly, I could self-censor (maybe some people think I should) and keep these ideas to myself. I would certainly be protected from anyone getting the wrong idea about who I am or what my intentions are in sharing my thoughts, beliefs and observations. But I would also be denying anyone who sees something useful or thought-provoking in what I’ve written from experiencing that shared understanding, whatever value that might provide and direction that may take for each of us.
Trust is built in between the total vulnerability of an intimate partnership and the lockdown security of an isolated hermit. To create a functionally trusting culture, we need to strike a balance between unrestrained openness and impenetrable safeguards. Vulnerability as a concept exists because it can be taken advantage of and abused. To demand or impose it violates the principle, erodes trust and has the inverse effect of generating a stronger desire for more privacy and security. Conversely, imposing strict privacy and censorial measures generates a sense of oppression that motivates a natural desire within to break free. Put simply, if you tell me I cannot express something inside of me, I will desire only to express it, and if you tell me I must say or believe something, I will refuse. In no way can trust been achieved through such decrees.
We often hear about how polarized our culture has become and how we live in a post-trust environment. Too often the path to restoring trust and creating a peaceful future is presented, either explicitly or implicitly, in terms of a necessary attack on and defeat of one set of values over another. This cannot succeed, because, as I have hopefully illustrated to some degree, these values are interdependent on each other. We cannot destroy the conformists if we hope to preserve the creatives. We cannot earn trust by censoring away our vulnerabilities or dismissing hard won expertise in favor of boutique purchased credentials.
In the introduction I posed a few questions which I will attempt to answer now.
Who do you trust? Trust those who are honest and vulnerable, who aren’t pitching perfectly clean solutions by asking you to dismiss or ignore the valid and reasonable values that, only on the surface, appear to run counter to their own. Also, allow them to earn it. If someone posts a tweet or article you find interesting, you don’t have to subscribe right then and there to be a faithful disciple of their teachings. Alternatively, don’t write-off someone because they said something you didn’t like or made you feel uncomfortable once or twice. Maybe you didn’t understand their point of view or maybe they were just off that day. Over time you will learn and be able to better evaluate whether or not an individual or outlet is consistent, honest and trustworthy.
What kinds of statements or content should raise immediate red flags? Any pitch that is too far weighted to one extreme or the other should serve as a signal that you are being sold a piece of propaganda. Learn to see if the alternative perspective is presented faithfully, or if it’s not, that the bias of the presenter is at least self-acknowledged in an honest way. If a content producer (e.g. writer, reporter) claims to be of one political persuasion but routinely presents only the opposite view of what s/he claims to hold as a bias, that person is manipulative and less trustworthy than a person who only consistently presents content that aligns with their acknowledged bias.
How do you know if you are, or have been brainwashed? Consider your own strongly held beliefs about what you know to be definitively true. Use the chart I shared to help you determine where those beliefs land on a spectrum. Does the emotional reason or value behind that belief skew to the extreme end of the value system? Are you able to articulate, in depth and in your own words, why you believe a certain idea or concept to be true? If you don’t have a good answer for those questions, the odds are your strongly held belief was assigned to you rather than developed through personal experience and understanding. In other words, you have the appearance of a belief, without the foundational support. This is a clear sign of brainwashing. Don’t feel bad or try to justify it - it literally happens to everyone. We should consider ourselves fortunate to be able learn and grow from such experiences, making us sharper and more discerning, thereby increasing our own ability to trust and be trusted.
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