On the Deconstruction of Trust

The word Trust has been used as a form of coercion by parents and partners, bosses and best friends for a long time. In this essay, I will propose a mechanism by which we can rehabilitate trust to be a prosocial tool in our community building belt instead of a weapon of antisocial manipulation. With some precision about what trust is and what it is not, we will be able to equip ourselves with the tools we need to gain more autonomy in our own lives.

As humans, we are limited to a finite knowledge of the world and are subject to two fundamental realities. We must interact with other humans, and we don’t know what others are going to do. In our attempt to soothe our own anxieties about the unpredictable nature of the humans we must interact with we have developed strategies. One is antisocial and the other is prosocial. Control, turning those humans into objects or obstacles to be used for our own projects, distances ourselves from our facticity and robs others of their freedom. Trust is the mechanism that maintains the ambiguity of the self and the other.

Trust is a feeling that I have which informs the actions I take. Specifically, the actions that open me up to harm for if there is no risk of harm then there is no need for the inductive reasoning that comes with the feeling of trust. I feel trust in elevators because I have experience with elevators and will step onto one without hesitation. I have experienced hundreds of rides that went fine, and that history gives me grounds to expect this one will too. If the elevator jams, I’m late for my meeting and I feel betrayed. I recalibrate with this new bit of empirical data, and go on trusting elevators, in general, a little more carefully. Trust in people works the same way. It is inductive, one-sided, and entirely mine to place. My actions are based on empirical evidence and intuition, and if it fails, the failure produces an emotion in me, betrayal, but that emotion is not harm. It is a report on my own prediction.

This means betrayal is something I feel, not a harm done to me. The distinction matters more than it first appears to be. If I place my trust in someone, meaning I feel trust and my actions open myself up to harm, and they act in a way I did not expect, I am responsible for the fact that I placed my trust there, and I am responsible for the feeling that results. The other person is an independent will, not a mechanism I am entitled to control, and no amount of my trusting them changes that. I do not get to convert my own disappointed prediction into their debt. What I am entitled to is something else entirely, and separating the two is the whole task of this essay.

I've established the first half of the argument, the feelings, and now we must tease out the second half, the harm. Harm is what crosses the boundary between two people. Trust and betrayal stay on my side of the boundary; they are mine to feel. Harm is different, because harm does not require that I trusted anyone in the first place. If a friend borrows my car and wrecks it, the wreck is not made worse or better by whether I trusted him with the keys. He caused real damage to my property, regardless of my internal state going in. This is the first tier, material or bodily harm, and it is close to a legalistic standard. It can be named, argued, and settled without either party needing to reference how they feel about the other. The person who caused it owes reconciliation. This is real harm. That much is not really in dispute by anyone.

The second tier of harm is where most of the real texture of human relationships lives, and it is not harm in the first sense at all. I’ll borrow a term from Michel Onfray and call this tier playful contracts. Two people agree, sometimes in so many words and sometimes simply by doing something the same way for a long time, to a set of rules that make their relationship work. Monogamy is a playful contract. So is the unspoken agreement that the third Friday is for poker night, or that a business partner runs decisions past you before signing anything. These social rules are real for the individuals that agree to play by them. Like the rules to baseball, they are shared facts about what two or more people built together. But they are not laws. Nobody goes to jail for changing the rules of baseball, and nobody should be held to a playful contract as though it were a legal one either. Either person is free to say the game has stopped working for them and ask to renegotiate it.

What nobody is free to do, in tier two, is convert the social or emotional pain of a broken or renegotiated contract into a tier one legalistic harm the other person must compensate them for. If my friend no longer wants to come to game night, we are both allowed to feel exactly what we feel about that, and neither of us gets to make the other responsible for the feeling itself. What we do owe each other is honesty about the state of the game, and a real conversation at the table about whether new rules can be found or whether the game is simply over. The wrong move, the coercive move, is to skip that conversation and instead hold up the emotion of betrayal as though it were equivalent to the wrecked car, as though feeling bad were the same kind of claim as having something taken from you. It is not. Emotions are entirely valid and entirely real, and they are still not currency. They are not something the other person is obligated to fix, prevent, or make up for. This allows for a test to be made, was their actual harm done, or are there broken rules and hurt feelings?

The third tier of harm is no harm at all and is where control masquerades as a kind of counterfeit trust. Here, no game was ever agreed to. There was no negotiation, explicit or built through years of repeated behavior, that the other person ever had the chance to accept or decline. There is only a desire or hope, on one side, dressed up in the language of trust so that refusal looks like harm instead of what it is, someone declining a demand they never agreed to. A parent telling an adult child "I trusted you'd stay close to family" is not naming a broken contract. There was a hope the parent held privately and when their child doesn’t live up to their expectation, or doesn’t bend to their control, they feel an emotion. That loss of control is sometimes packaged as a tier two broken contract or even worse, passed off as real harm like those in tier one. The same move shows up between friends, in workplaces, in whole institutions that tell citizens or employees that they are “trusted” to comply as a substitute for ever putting real terms on the table. What separates this tier from the second is simple. Was there ever a moment where the other person could have said no? If yes, there was a game, and both people are bound to its honest renegotiation, not its enforcement. If no, there was never anything but one person's want, and calling it harm does not make it one.

This essay seeks to rehabilitate trust. It is not born of a cynicism about trust nor a suspicion of feeling. It is precision about what belongs to whom. Trust is mine to feel and guide my actions. Betrayal is also my bitter wine to feel and use to recalibrate where I place my trust. Harm is the one thing that actually moves between people, and it is the only thing I am entitled to bring to the table without dressing it up as anything else. If we are to build a community and cultivate our garden of relationships, we must be equipped to stand on our own two feet. We are responsible for our own feelings, our own actions, and for the harm we cause. Trust is the tool we use to navigate relationships successfully and separating it from coercion is the first step in gaining our freedom while recognizing our facticity.