A social disaster: the loss of trust

As a nation, as a society, we are being tested at every stage of the process we are living through. Fires, floods, earthquakes, but more importantly, and more dangerous than these, the social disasters that come along with them or follow in their wake. The way we look at one another, our attitudes, our behavior, our approaches, or our estrangement from one another.

The physical wounds caused by natural disasters heal; the dead, of course, cannot be brought back, but our world is mortal anyway. Yet when the loss of trust that follows these disasters dissolves the mortar of society, what we experience shows all the signs of social corrosion.

Demolishing corroded buildings and rebuilding them, burdensome as it may be, is something that can be undertaken. But what is to be done about a corroded social structure?

The most important cause of this corrosion is people's loss of trust in one another. Remedying it means re-establishing the resources that will restore trust.

Trust, like sincerity, is one of the indispensable elements of every definition of friendship. A friend is, before anything else, someone you trust completely, someone you believe will be by your side in hard times, someone with whom you can comfortably share every secret, confident that he will not put it on the market, someone to whom you can entrust your life, your property, your loved ones without ever imagining that he would betray you.

Of course, trust is not always a matter limited to friends or friendship. In fact, even our minimal social life is always a situation that requires trust.

We trust that the tire of the car we get into will not burst, that the driver, a stranger to us, is a skilled and licensed person, that the car, even at full speed, is equipped to meet the conditions of the road, and even that the drivers of oncoming cars know the traffic rules and will not suddenly swerve in front of our car. We also trust that the cable of the elevator we get into will not snap and thus smash us to the ground.

In fact, we do not know any of these things for certain, and quite possibly the driver we get in with may be unlicensed, or, though licensed, may be sleepless or dazed that day, or the car's brakes may have failed. Without knowing that none of these is the case, without even thinking of it, we act on the assumption that everything is in order, and we carry on our daily lives without feeling any need to question, out of such anxiety, any of the options set before us. Without this unquestioned sense of trust, we could not even carry on our ordinary lives.

Of course, in the course of our social life we trust, in one way or another, many people we meet and do not know, but this is of course a trust within certain limits of relationship. In matters that require a little more sharing, in situations where the distance closes a little more, we expect a little more reliability from the people we admit into our more inner spheres; we choose people, and there is in fact nothing wrong with that. But developments and discourses that are especially of a kind to destroy trust in people do not merely put people on guard against one another in a society; they also make life unbearable.

The coefficient of people's trust in one another has always been regarded as one of the indicators of a society's strength. Recently, especially among American social scientists, there is talk of a social disaster that has been suffered in the form of the loss of the sentiment of "trust." It has also been said that becoming a society composed of people who do not trust one another means the drying up of a resource to which the strength of the United States is indebted.

These social scientists have treated the concept of trust as an input of "social capital," and have pointed to this relationship of trust as one of a society's greatest sources of power. They have even dwelt on the resources or channels that would repair the lost relationship of trust and develop it again.

These channels, these trust-generating sources, are people's voluntary associations, and activities that create close acquaintanceships and social networks, such as the family, the community, the association, the foundation. The decline of these activities dries up trust in society, and therefore friendship, and society becomes a society of individuals, lonely, utterly alone, with no trust whatsoever in one another.

No initiative energy that could benefit humanity or generate hope comes out of such a society. When the idea spreads that everyone with whom one enters into a relationship with may deceive you at any moment, that the person speaking to you is most likely lying, that everyone does their work badly and deceitfully, then everyone who holds this idea has acquired an excuse for himself to repeat the same deceit, lies and tricks.

This is a style of struggle in which the files everyone keeps on everyone else are opened when the time comes, and which in the end goes no further than a contest at the level of "the pot calls the kettle black."

Once mutual accusations begin, there is no longer any point in deciding who is right and who is wrong, who is dirtier and who is less dirty. From the moment allegations of corruption begin to be used not out of a genuine concern for cleanliness but as a crude instrument of politics, without anyone questioning their basis, everyone's conscience begins to be soiled.

The ear that hears these rumors, the eye that sees them, the heart that feels them, the mind that thinks about them are all soiled. An accusation seen as a simple way of getting the better of a rival, after a while, returns like a boomerang and strikes not only the one who threw it but the whole society along with him.

Evil, unfortunately, has an expansive, contagious quality. That is why there is a difference between evil that remains within the limits of the individual and evil committed openly (in the public sphere). An evil that can be tolerated in the individual sphere becomes normalized when committed openly, awakens the sleeping fitna, and after a while becomes something that a significant number of people regard as normal and do shamelessly and openly.

This course of events causes a corrosion that is hard to repair. It is not only your enemies who live in the corroded structure; you are in there too, and when it collapses, everyone is left under it.