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She said, ‘I’m so afraid.’ And I said, ‘why?,’ and she said, ‘Because I’m so profoundly happy. Happiness like this is frightening.’ I asked her why and she said, ‘They only let you be this happy if they’re preparing to take something from you.’
Khaled Hosseini
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Well <part 1>. The conclusion from that quote may quite be “trust nobody” and act on that. That would be a bad conclusion.
Well <part 2>. We seem to be having a ‘trust crisis’ in the world these days. That is bad.
It is bad because the consequence of a trust crisis is that we trust nobody and in trusting nobody we then begin to make individual choices, actions and decisions based on that thinking.
That, my friends, constitutes a crisis.
Let me be clear on this issue.
A trust nobody attitude is for the weak.
A trust nobody attitude is not a sign of confidence in one self but rather a sign of lack of confidence.
A trust nobody attitude is a cowardly attitude.
Let me be clear on why.
The ripple effect of not trusting anybody bleeds into every aspect of Life and in doing so it bleeds in terms of action and inaction <or the slowing down of action>.
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“But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.”
Graham Greene
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Let me be clear on a key distinction. There is a huge difference between trust nobody and question everything <and everyone>.
For example, I believe it was Pope Francis who said, talking about the world of business and its business leaders, “a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power.” when referring to business and business leaders.
This is not about trust nobody, but rather we should question everything <or be open to questioning>. He is simply suggesting not being naïve.
But. This does not mean ‘do not trust anybody.’
Look. We should question everything and anything worth questioning.
But that certainly doesn’t translate into trusting no one.
That said.
There is truly a relationship between questioning everything and trust because without trust not only do you begin thinking and acting more individually, you also begin to invest an inordinate amount of energy going down that endless rabbit hole called ‘questioning everything.’ This rabbit hole which seemingly offers logic and ‘reasons’ everywhere you look.
There appeared to be no logical reason. Oh. Logic is nothing more than a panacea to the ordinary people. More accurately … it is the tool by which the rulers, leaders, maintain the status quo. Every cause produces one or more effects. Every effect is the result of one or more causes. When you think of it that way … where is the logic? It is wherever you decide to find it.
In this ‘no trust/question everything’ rabbit hole we then use logic in some odd ways which inevitably serves as a crutch to the not trusting and we actually use logic to focus on one sliver of a conspiracy thought <sometimes a fact without context> to build non-trust.
Regardless.
I sensed this crisis beginning to peak in the early 2010’s and research began bearing out my sense.
Americans don’t trust each other anymore. We’re not talking about the loss of faith in big institutions such as the government, the church or Wall Street, which fluctuates with events. For four decades, a gut-level ingredient of democracy—trust in the other fellow—has been quietly draining away. These days, only one-third of Americans say most people can be trusted. Half felt that way in 1972, when the General Social Survey first asked the question.
Forty years later, a record high of nearly two-thirds say “you can’t be too careful” in dealing with people.
In addition.
A study found that Americans are suspicious of each other in everyday encounters. Less than one-third expressed a lot of trust in clerks who swipe their credit cards, drivers on the road, or people they meet when traveling.
Research also shows that the trust issue varies by culture and even geography, but I am not going to go into that kind of detail. Suffice it to say there is an interesting adverse trust creation between having a denser network of interactions which leads to more distrust of outsiders and, conversely, those who have a weaker network of interactions which leads to a higher level of trust toward ‘outsiders.’
Wow.
In other words, the closer knit your personal life is, i.e., the more insular you are with friends & family, the more distrustful you are. Conversely, if you actually have fewer close friends and family you are more likely to be trustful.
Ponder that a moment.
Anyway. Does it matter that Americans <or any group of citizens> are suspicious of one another?
Yes.
In fact, behavioral research tells us why it matters:
“The more trust people have, the more willing they are to make sacrifices to hold up their end to solve problems.”
Well. This is called ‘social trust’ and social trust produces good things.
It produces a society where it’s easier to compromise or make a deal.
It produces a society where people are willing to work with those who are different from them for the common good.
It actually produces <or promotes> economic growth.
Distrust, on the other hand, seems to encourage corruption. Conversely, it also encourages an absurd amount of energy trying to protect against corruption <or those who we decide we will not trust>. In other words, this trust issue gets us both coming and going. We invest more individual energy trying to get “what is ours” in a zero-sum world and invest more collective energy trying to build systems to make the untrustworthy less successful at corrupting the system.
At its lowest, most banal level, it diverts energy to counting change every time it is given to us and at the highest level it leads to the drawing up 100+ page legal contracts and building gated communities.
Regardless. Here is where ‘trust nobody’ gets really concerning. Some studies suggest it’s too late for most Americans alive today to become more trusting.
Research says the basis for a person’s lifetime trust levels is set by his or her mid-twenties and unlikely to change, other than in some unifying crisis … such as a world war.
The hope? <for those of us alive and do not want a world war>
People actually get a little more trusting as they age <note: this factoid surprised me … I would have thought otherwise without research>.
That said. Beginning with the baby boomers, each generation has started off adulthood less trusting than those who came before them. And while ethical behavior, such as lying and cheating, are difficult to document over the decades it’s worth noting that the early, most trusting years of studies coincided with the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War.
Trust dropped off in the more stable 1980s.
Which leads me to who should we blame?
Many social scientists blame 24-hour news coverage of distant violence – not in one’s actual neighborhood – for skewing people’s perceptions of crime <because crime has actually diminished over the same period of time>.
I would just say that all the media, all of them, in some way cannot be trusted not because they are biased <because they should offer a point of view> but rather because they are all now in the show business.
And then there is us – the people,
We blame our president for everything <but it is not possible for all our problems to be his fault>.
We hate and blame our politicians <but we created them and give them their positions>.
We hate Rush Limbaugh, Bill Maher, Hannity, Rachel Maddow <but we created and watch them>.
We hate the churches <and mosques> and yet believe our religions to the point of being helpless sheep.
Ah. Which brings me to religion and trust.
Organized religion does bring some underpinnings of shared sensemaking which does enable some levels of collective trust so it is true there can be a correlation between dwindling ties to religion and trust. That said. It seems to me that we have lost what religion is all about and in doing so have lost trust in religion. We have twisted it into something so dangerously inflexible it becomes a tool to, well, judge others, shame others <and sometimes ourselves>, to separate people rather than gather, be righteously pretentious and, maybe the worse, to control. It has become a tool in an “us versus them” narrative. Well. It seems to me that we now use religion for the exact opposite reason it exists.
Aw shit. You know what I say to finding someone or something to blame?
Nuts to all that.
We need to take responsibility for our part in why trust is in crisis.
“You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you do not trust enough.” – Frank Crane
The fate of trust is in our own hands.
We will live a life of torment if we do not trust enough.
In the end.
Trust nobody?
That is the plight of fools and cowards.
You will slowly suffocate with every breath you take.
To trust is to live.
Ponder.
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process, the presidency itself, democracy, America’s position in the world, and our constitutional rights & freedoms, I tend to believe one of the most egregious actions he did was by doing all of that lying and destroying any semblance of the overall standard of respectful discourse a civilized society typically has.
have listed above which we should now put our big boy & girl pants on .. and solve.
The strength of a country is defined in how it deals with its worst moments. Trump represents the worst, represented the worst and in his wake he left us with the worst. I say that because, well, he is coming back. Twitter is a megaphone for all his shit.
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choice. Maybe its better said to suggest it is the space between sensemaking and choice making (apologies to Daniel Schmachtenberger because I believe this mangles his much deeper thinking on these topics). It is where what you end up creating is shaped by, well, what one views as right or wrong. The reason I see its importance residing between value creation and progress/velocity is because if an organization crafts a concept with high value, absent of ethical creation, and it moves on to the next phase and gains its likely velocity the concept shifts into high gear only amplifying its lowest aspect – lack of ethical value. In other words, velocity amplifies value whether it is created ethically or not.
Ethics are not absolutes. Your ethics, or values, may not be mine <so maybe we should seek empathy toward other’s feelings and beliefs>. Yet. We must demand our algorithms have some absolutes in order to kill off the bad or evil we know exists. Maybe technology should be seeking what someone called “approximately moral.” This can be done in the actual outputting software (inputs to people), but it is possibly even more important in the ‘constraints’ software – the spies spying on the algorithm spies.
Marshall McLuhan’s words” “we shape our technology and our technology shapes us.”
down to people. People doing the right things. Creating the right things in the right way. It was, once again, Mary Parker Follett who can guide us toward the right future using her own words as she described ‘Right’:
not through consistency, but coherence, a somewhat tenuous inner connection wherein nothing can collapse except within more of itself. What this means is finding ‘selective consistency’ (the structural value embedded within) and tying it to agility (the ability to be malleable to accommodate individual buyer preferences). This is where a Human Algorithm offers a unique opportunity. We often don’t think of a behavioral data hub or AI design as part of experiential value consistency, but we should. Often the core is not a shared strategy, but a shared engine. And, yes, through that distinctive engine you can create a distinctive “shareable” brand asset. It was Mark Ritson who suggested 
the ability to not only tie their brand portfolio together strategically, but also enabled an enhanced value structure to all brands. What we mean by enhanced value is a historically coherent data transaction accumulation created a solid foundation to apply learning from one product/service transaction journey to another – lateral, or adjacent, thinking in algorithm form. It stops stratifying behavior – siloed bounded behavior – and enables incremental iterative progress from one brand to another.
Gravity. Every shopping journey has gravity. What we mean by that is left to its own devices a shopper will end up on the ground. A great shopping experience is one in which the AI sees and senses the shopper gravity in order to (a) fly or (b) simply keep things from crashing, i.e., end up in a place where preferences & expectations are not optimal. Here is the tricky part. This center of gravity is good important because, in its conserving energy, it keeps all the expended energy from flying off into chaos, albeit it can also be bad important in that it sacrifices progress in doing. Gravity keeps the shopping experience grounded, but the danger resides in that the experience only has the feeling of speed and achievements and all the while it’s just one huge hamster wheel, i.e., the shopper is spinning their wheels getting nowhere to their desired outcome.
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Businesses, at their hearts of hearts, contrary to what Peter Drucker said, are stratifying 
between the Will of an Institution and the Institutional Will what binds them together is ideas, or, the ideas that ground that particular institution’s idea of ‘the business of doing business’. That said. The Will of an Institution is driven by the idea of how it believes it makes its money. I purposefully use ‘believe’ because the wealth/profit outcome is typically a consequence of a set of beliefs or ideas, on how that wealth/profit is created. What that means is set aside ‘Purpose’ and even culture and get down to the brass tacks of how it makes its money and this includes desired behavior of people to make that money.
This suggests that organizations, traditions, corporations, nations, and all other powers, while ideally should serve humans and humanity by providing various social structures, will stratify their dynamics to the pursuit of survival and the Will OF the institution – not humans & humanity.
To be clear. This is class exploitation with no real objective existence other than the institutional wants, what a business desires, not what people need. This puts the Will of the Institution on a slippery slope of societal relativism. Societal needs is not the priority or a function of a business, but rather the world is defined by the producer’s decision with regard to people’s livelihood and the business’s profits. I say this so starkly to say society’s economic destiny is played out in relation to the institutional pressure, or business pressure, applied to household economies <not the reverse>.
The issue is we are not absent of a system and to the degree the system is stratified into, well, pick your group <subordinate/ordinate, economics, political, etc.> is the degree in which reciprocal exchange is prevented. This suggests that the power of the individual has limits within a system. In other words, an individual’s desire for reciprocal exchange may lack the necessary strength to reshape the system or the society. As a consequence, the stratified system increases the likelihood of conformity in behavior desired by the institutional system, not the natural inclinations of the individual <as well as human dissatisfaction driven by unsatisfactory exchange between parties>. And by declining the exchange of reciprocity the entire concept of societal reciprocity gets the oxygen sucked out of it and suffocates. Yes. Circling back to my earlier corruption point, responsibility at least partially rests upon the people within the institution who unknowingly permit corrupt, or corrupting, institutions to perpetuate. The path to changing it almost always begins with awareness and informed understanding, but almost ends with a wicked path where one has to run a brutal gauntlet of Institutional Will in order to change the system.
Most institutions do not like informal networks despite the fact informal networks are most likely to be just the things making the Institution itself successful. While I could list a variety of reasons business institutions do not like them let me settle on this. The fact that social+functional groups (informal networks) drawn from a vast variety of a population, i.e., diverse, have repeatedly demonstrated their ability to acquire every conceivable aspect of the world cultural inventory. In other words, they accumulate the diversity into a formidable sub-culture – one that could easily challenge the ‘desired culture’ as stated by the Will of the Institution. Well. That is if the Institution were to permit it to be so. While, in principle, culture can change and evolve independent of simple ‘survival feedback’ the reality is within an Institution, and its Will, the evolution can be created (purposefully) by institutional feedback. Reflecting on that feedback thought probably accounts for many of the control-ish attributes we see in institutions today and a general reductionist attitude toward, well, everything. The point of Institutional Will is, and will almost always be, driving response alternatives to the smallest possible number of things compatible with the Will of the Institution <which they will suggest is ‘meeting desired culture’ objectives>. Yes. Institutional desires actually are a constraint on natural behavioral scale. In other words, the institution seeks to constrain a range of possible behavioral responses thereby suffocating the emergent aspects, by crushing the divergent aspects in the equation, so everything is ‘finely’ convergent.
up. What I mean by that is ‘unifying’ is when people, and small groups of people, emerge in a common purpose with similar goals. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out this concept is terrifying to most senior leadership wherein the power resides in the people, not the ‘leader’ or even the system. Which leads me to, on the other hand, unity is a socially constructed process in which social systems coalesce around some common abiding truths. What this means to an Institution is that these ‘truths’ are not constructed by some leader (or politician), but rather represent an agreement, maybe a collaboration, on an idea or ideas <of which values, if ideas or principles behaviors, can be included>. It’s not consensus or even an agreement, but it is an acceptance. I sometimes call this a coalition of the interested. Why interested? Well. Vision, Purpose, BHAG or any of the traditional leadership tricks are actually worthless unless people are interested in them. The only way to circumvent existing construct, and systems, is to actually have people interested in something enough that the existing system becomes irrelevant and they create a new system to support what they are interested in. as a corollary, the only way to activate an existing construct, to its fullest potential, is to actually have people interested in something enough that the existing system IS relevant to them. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out 90+% of the time Institutional Will has little interest in what the employees are interested in, but rather what the Will of the Institution is interested in.
Which leads me to people.
Which leads me to where we can go from here.
systems that destroy the earth and crush the meaning out of people and its subsequent poverty of social values & value, hope will arise. As we withdraw our consent to these powers, practicing noncooperation while finding or creating meaning-generating alternatives, what has seemed impossible becomes possible because we are willing to pay the price to make it so. But we need to play, or, as someone said, “only when we ourselves enter the game and bind our own life inextricably to the game’s outcome does hope arrive.”
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Throw the entire book at her, everything in it, send her to jail. For a long time.
She should never be allowed to run a business again. I am not suggesting she can’t work, just not permitted to run a business. Maybe forever is too long, but say she can’t for 20 years. Why? She lost her business leadership card. Period. And you know what? I’d treat all these business shitbags the same way. Be a shit and lose your business card so maybe you have to “reskill” or whatever bullshit we suggest the ‘common worker’ has to do when they lose their job.
I keep seeing research in the United States that says something like 50% of people under the age of 30 do not believe in capitalism.
Yes. Capitalism has certainly vastly improved our lives and our means to live. But it has also fed this insatiability.
I have been thinking about capitalism for a while nudging my mind toward discussing morals and character <society & culture>. In doing so I found it interesting to think about Schumpeter when addressing the youth capitalism challenge.
Second is our propensity to consume <and its self perpetuation>.
certainly stagnated, family disposable income has grown, life standards have improved, health has improved and overall quality of life has improved <and showed a continuous growth>. Unfortunately, at the same time, while families busily lived their lives they also had access to the finest inventory of toys capitalism could provide. Each generation was doing better than the one before, life was good and standard of living acquired a layer of ‘non essentials’ as part of how the people lived a successful & happy life.
Suffice it to say technology, because it leaves nothing untouched, generates a range of problems beyond the technology sphere with some ramifications/consequences for the future.
ignore parts we don’t want. So, while the potential exists for making a collective belief possible, it just doesn’t happen. Common sensemaking is going to be difficult but at some point we need to tackle ‘halfisms versus wholisms’ so that while not everyone will ever see ‘the whole’ the fragments do not drive the narratives.
connectivity to reality (and us) so that we can maximize its benefits 24/7/365. I also believe given what I wrote we should be tripling down on technology to help us solve/resolve some of reality’s most relentless ‘wicked’ problems and issues.
I admit. I am 