I have always been insecure about my education and knowledge. I knew I hadn’t been taught the things I wished I knew.


Trust

Read Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes and he painstakingly wrote down how society was to be structured. It wasn’t structured like that yet, but he was putting out a LOOOONNNGGG treatise on how it could be done.

When Leviathan was written, the commonwealth it described did not exist. What did exist was a set of expectations and habits of how a society should work. Since those expectations were reasonably fulfilled, this amounted to trust.

Trust is what makes human interactions work. I loan you my broom to sweep your sidewalk, I am taking a risk. But if you prove my trust by returning it, then I might be able to borrow your shovel when I have to dig in my garden. Since we trust each other, I am saved the cost of buying a shovel and you are saved the cost of buying a broom.

What a happy little neighborhood. Since we have built this trust through exchange, we might even leave both tools in an unlocked place where each person has access. It’s more convenient.

Until some jerk from outside the neighborhood comes in and steals both items.

Oh no! Now we are both poorer, and we are suspicious of all strangers. Not only are we suspicious, we are hostile.

Which is a real shame, because if we had maintained the trust, we could have expanded our collective set of tools and made everyone’s life easier. The next guy might have had a spray nozzle for the hose, which I could have used on my garden and gotten even more tomato crop. I would have shared with my neighbors and we all would be increasingly healthier and shinier.

Here in the 21st century I’ve been living that dream. Here in America, a culture that fostered that kind of trust, we are healthier and shinier. Go stand next to any North Korean and see the difference. Americans are taller than the malnourished and oppressed citizens of that sad country.

It is a risk to trust, for sure. That broom of mine is vulnerable. I could get all worked up over it. I need walk around safely and not trip over debris! Me and my family could trip and get seriously hurt. I have to protect my family and that means protecting my broom.

Trust is risky. I’m not in control.

And even more, that risk leaves me trapped in indecision. Remember those expectations and habits that made up the culture? When those habits and practices are abandoned, then the trust is broken.

I KNOW it would help us both to share our tools. But I’ve been burned. I’ve watched others get burned. How do I make that leap and release my tight grip on what I have struggled to own?

It’s natural to cling to my own. The aberration is the trust.

When a novel corona virus showed up on earth, trust sustained an injury. Sharing space, sharing air, trusting one another took on a new level of risk. The whole world rocked the other way.

I feel it in many areas that were common practices before. Here’s one example. Like many, I lost my job in 2020. I found another one, lost in and found another one.

And I felt the difference from before. Yes, I got a lot of interviews. I had gotten a lot of interviews pre=covid. But there was a hesitancy. More and more interviews were required. I felt a hesitancy to take the risk of making a decision. Even the people in charge of making decisions—executives—couldn’t find the wherewithal to execute.

It has taken a long time to build up the water table of trust in our culture. It was more than 400 years ago that Hobbes wrote his Leviathan showing how a commonwealth could do it. The 10 commandments are thousands of years old.

Trust is thankfully a renewable resource. But it takes intention to renew it. It means taking risks and suffering loss.

In the end, the vision is that we all are better off. I will have to trust that vision is the true one. I believe it can be if we do it together.