The commentator David Brooks sees an epidemic of mistrust as an existential threat: “Levels of trust in this country—in our institutions, in our politics, and in one another—are in precipitous decline. And when social trust collapses, nations fail.”
If trust appears to be languishing in the political realm, though, it appears to be thriving in another important institution of modern society—capitalism. The modern sharing economy is premised on leaps of faith in perfect strangers: we rely on crowdsourced restaurant reviews on Yelp, climb into a stranger’s car through Uber, stay at someone else’s house via Airbnb, and look for love on Bumble, Hinge, and sundry other dating apps. A financial-trust index set up by the economists Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales during the Great Recession has shown consistent growth in the past decade. The supply of money has more than doubled since the recession, and yet we’ve seen few paroxysms of goldbuggery or other disorders of mistrust. Interest rates, which rise when investors lose trust in repayment, remain close to zero. What’s really going on?
People don’t see the phenomenal trust embedded in the modern economy for the same reason that David Foster Wallace’s fishes could not fathom water: everything is predicated on its existence. Adam Smith concluded that trust was a fundamental feature of humanity. (“Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog,” he wrote in “The Wealth of Nations.”)
In the same way, monks, I have taught the Dhamma [dharma] compared to a raft, for the purpose of crossing over, not for the purpose of holding onto. Understanding the Dhamma as taught compared to a raft, you should let go even of Dhammas, to say nothing of non-Dhammas." [Thanissaro Bhikkhu translation]
Well there's a dark cloud rising from the desert floor
I packed my bags and I'm heading straight into the storm
Gonna be a twister to blow everything down
That ain't got the faith to stand its ground
Blow away the dreams that tear you apart
Blow away the dreams that break your heart
Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted
~ Bruce Springsteen, 'Promised Land'