"A husband and wife are on a trip to Bali. While enjoying the romantic atmosphere of Kuta Beach, they reminisce about the first time they met.Wife: 'Do you love me just because my father left me a fortune?'Husband: 'Not at all, darling. I would love you no matter who left you the money.'""One could tell the story of human civilization as a story of how we learned to trust one another,' Maple continued and kept her eyes on rock carvings of elephants at Borobudur temple.Elephants possess memories that enable them to recognize other elephants, and even humans, for a lifetime. The elephant rock carvings on this temple reveal that elephants use their vivid memories of past experiences, such as hunger, to help them survive future hardships. The carvings remind us to respect and remember our relationships, elephants are a perfect icon for loyalty and trust."We learned first to share the spoils of a group hunt instead of hunting and eating. Working together, we could build pyramids. But working together means relying on others, and this creates opportunities for shirking—for some members of the group to take advantage of others. We needed to find ways to create trust. Over time, we developed governments and rules to help manage these dilemmas of cooperation, but those rules also need trust to function.Every game has rules, and so does every society. The institutions that govern us are the beliefs and norms, the invisible rules, that constrain how we act. We follow the institutions because of our expectations of what will happen if we follow and what will happen to us if we don’t. Those expectations create norms of behavior and rules. Those norms or rules are a large part of what we call culture, says Benjamin Ho.The institutions are central to trust because most human institutions rely on trust to function. Societies develop institutions to solve the problems they face, from the problems of collective action to the allocation of scarce resources. More specifically, modern institutions like markets, courts, and democracies, all rely on trust at many levels.The second reason why institutions are central to trust is the fact that so many of our human institutions are designed around facilitating trust. The story of human civilization has been about building bigger and greater things by learning to cooperate on ever-larger scales.Trust is a belief in the trustworthiness of the person we interact with. Our beliefs are based on the information we receive, and many human institutions are about spreading and curating the flow of information. Trustworthiness is a character trait of someone who acts in a manner that justifies the trust placed in them. Trustworthiness could vary for different people in different situations, and while they reflect some internal moral compass, those internal values often originate from some outside institutional influence.There two senses in which trust has long been associated with government, says Russel Hardin. One tradition is stated well in the ancient Greek 'Anonymous Iamblichi': 'The first result of lawfulness is trust, which greatly benefits all people and is among the greatest goods. The result of trust is that property has common benefits, so that even just a little property suffices since it is circulated, whereas without this even a great amount does not suffice. In essence, law enables people to trust and therefore to exchange, to their great benefit.Governments come in many forms and play many roles. An alternative notion of the purpose of government, goes back to at least Thomas Hobbes, is the government as centralizer of power. In the modern economy, governments make the rules, collect taxes, and provide social services. Crucial to its ability to function in this capacity, the government has to be able to make rules and expect that they will be followed. Most of the time, we don’t give much thought to why we follow the rules. The traditional view is that we follow the rules because if we don’t, there will be consequences. If we don’t pay our taxes, there will be a fine. If we don’t pay the fine, our property will be seized. If we don’t give up our property, we face jail time. If we refuse jail time, we face the risk of violence.Hobbes argued that citizens put up with this system because the order created by government is better than the nasty world that would exist without government. People follow through on transactions, contribute taxes, and eschew violence because of the implicit threat of punishment; they put up with being threatened because it is better than living in society ungoverned. This is a rigid view of government based on strict rules, and it does not acknowledge the role of trust and human relationships.According to Hardin, trust in government is not a major consideration in the working of a modem society, but the trust among themselves that a good government enables its citi zens to have is very important in their lives. A claim that one trusts government is not closely analogous to a claim that one trusts another person. The seeming goodness and importance of ordinary interpersonal trust does not clearly transfer to any nonanalogous notion of trust in government.Adam Smith noted that even in an individualistic, free-market economy, the magic comes from how the market coordinates the division of labor: a factory of pin makers, each specializing in one part of the production, can produce vastly more pins than an equal number of traditional pin makers working alone. Those rules became formalized by governments, which expanded their scope into all parts of our daily lives. Governments, particularly democratic governments, rely on the rule of law, and the functioning of the rule of law relies on trust as well. Each institutional development allowed our circle of trust to grow, but each also made whom and how we trust more impersonal—a characteristic of the modern market economy.Trust is taken for granted, even though it is essential. The role that trust plays in the modern economy is not often acknowledged in either economics courses or popular culture. In most modern democracies, it has been decided that we can’t trust the people in power to control the supply of money. A better version of that statement is that everyone, including the people in power, is better off if elected officials do not have direct control of the money supply.U.S. law has required all U.S. currency to contain the words 'In God We Trust' since 1956, although the phrase has been used regularly on U.S. coins and bills since 1864. The aim of facilitating trust—not in God, perhaps, but in money itself—drives many decisions about U.S. currency design, according to Ho.Rulers could benefit from having the ability to produce money when needed (especially to wage war), and citizens also could benefit from the more liquid money supply. However, rulers were constrained by distrust. People knew that the temptation to print too much money was too great. Rulers faced a similar problem when it came to borrowing money. Governments issue bonds to borrow money from citizens. This practice is especially common in times of war. Issuing bonds may seem different from printing money, but in practice they are very similar.According to Ronald Inglehart, relatively high levels of subjective well-being and interpersonal trust are conducive to the stability of democratic institutions. Low levels of subjective well-being and interpersonal trust may play an important role in the collapse of authoritarian regimes. Economic development is conducive to democracy not only because it mobilizes the mass publics, but also because it encourages supportive cultural orientations. Economic development is also conducive to cultural changes that help stabilize democracy. Mass political culture is crucial to the long-term stability of democracy: Political culture stabilizes democracy by providing a climate of trust and an enduring base of mass support.Democratic institutions depend on trust that the opposition will accept the rules of the democratic process. You must view your political opponents as a loyal opposition who will not imprison or execute you if you surrender political power to them, but can be relied on to govern within the laws and to surrender power if your side wins the next election.When people are dissatisfied with politics, added Inglehart, they may change the parties in office. When the people of a given society become dissatisfied with their lives, they may reject the regime – or even the political community.Many sociologists have maintained that trust is the glue of social life. For politics, economics, and personal well-being, social trust is a valuable resource. According to Trudy Govier, trust and distrust in politics or government can mean many things. Most discussions of such distrust focus on issues of integrity—honesty, reliability, promise-keeping, principled action, and lack of hypocrisy. These are fiduciary responsibilities; people in public office must be faithful to the duties and responsibilities of their office. But expectations of competence are also essential for trust, in politics as elsewhere.Competence is not a purely intellectual or technical matter that can be separated from ethical aspects of character. And for integrity to be meaningful, one needs competence: one needs to be aware of how one is acting and what particular contexts demand. Moral integrity and trustworthiness presuppose this personal competence. Overall good judgment about priorities and personal qualities is tremendously important.People sometimes distrust government action because they believe the requisite officials and civil servants are incompetent—too inefficient, or insufficiently knowledgeable to implement a task they have set for themselves. There are different people and institutions within politics and government, and we may distinguish among these on grounds of trust. At the national level, we might think of trusting the leader, the Cabinet, the governing party, the elected members from the governing party, the whole body of elected representatives, or our favourite political party or locally elected representative. Alternatively, we might concern ourselves with civil servants and governmental institutions as distinct from elected representatives. To speak of trusting or distrusting politicians is to focus on elected representatives and those who seek election. But to speak of trusting government can mean either politicians or civil servants and institutions.In reflecting on trust and politics, we naturally come to the matter of leadership. In Western industrial democracies, says Govier, the elected leader has been selected as leader of a political party that seeks an electoral mandate to govern. A political leader must lead in a variety of contexts, the most obvious and most important being the political party, the government, and the public itself. The political leader may be the leader of a party, the head of government, and, in a different and less formal sense, the leader of the people. He or she has several distinct leadership roles, and different contexts call for different leadership skills. Approachability, public speaking skills, and charisma are especially important in relating to the public, while facilitation, negotiation, and mediation skills are central in managing the caucus within the political party. Original ideas, understanding of issues, knowledge, and attention to detail are important in the actual running of government. Few individuals have all the qualities necessary for the many con- texts in which a modern leader functions. Different people have dif- ferent styles of leadership, which suit different situations. There is no one thing called leadership and no one way of doing it right. But no matter who and no matter how, effective leadership always requires a considerable degree of trust. Generally speaking, the greater the trust, the more effective the leader.A person will not be the chosen leader of a political party unless most party members have confidence in him or her. The need for trust is still more obvious when we consider some of the specific functions of a party leader. With the public, the party leader is a kind of key communicator for the party. To be elected and run a government, a leader needs some degree of public trust. There are different styles and models of leadership, but all leadership styles presuppose trust in the leader.Democratic societies are trusting societies. Trust matters. People who trust others have an expansive view of their community and this helps connect them to people who are different from themselves. It also leads people to seek common ground when they disagree on solutions to public issues, says Eric M. Uslaner. Trust is not an all-purpose solution to society’s problems. It won’t get people involved in civic groups or in political life. But it does have other, perhaps even more important consequences. Because trust links us to people who are different from ourselves, it makes cooperation and com- promise easier.A civil society is a cooperative society. Trust may not be the only route to cooperation. But trust can make it easier to solve recurring collective action problems, since goodwill eliminates much hard bargaining at the outset of each negotiation, and should make it more likely that some compromise will be reached. People who trust others should also be the most likely to endorse the prevailing moral code in their communities. Cooperation and compromise can only flourish when people respect each other, despite their differences. So a trusting community is a tolerant community, where discrimination is anathema, says Uslaner.If there is a conflict in public trust in state administrators, concrete actions should be taken to resolve it. Trust is central to human existence. Like all social animals, human beings have an instinctive need to cooperate and rely on each other in order to satisfy their most basic emotional, psychological, and material needs. Without trust, we are not only less happy as individuals but also less productive in groups. Research has linked the virtues and benefits of trust to economic prosperity, societal stability, and even human survival, says Robert F. Hurley. The powerful effect of trust is that it enables cooperative behavior without costly and cumbersome monitoring and contracting. Trust is a form of social capital that enhances performance between individuals, within and among groups, and in larger collectives (for example, organizations, institutions, and nations).Distrust can be healthy and advisable, but when present in the extreme and in the wrong situations, it corrodes the cooperative instinct. It turns collaborative exchange into a slow and anxious mess of protective maneuvers.Without trust, people are more anxious and less happy; leaders without trust have slower and more cautious followers; organizations without trust struggle to be productive; governments without trust lose essential civic cooperation; and societies without trust deteriorate, says Hurley. If we cannot generate adequate and reasonable perceptions of trust, through agents acting in a trustworthy manner, our lives will be more problematic and less prosperous.We'll continue our discussion in the next sessions, bi 'idhnillah."
Citations & References:
- Benjamin Ho, Why Trust Matters: An Economist's Guide to the Ties that Bind Us, 2021, Columbia University Press
- Valerie Braithwaite & Margaret Levi (Eds.), Trust and Governance, 1998, Russell Sage Foundation
- Mark E. Warren (Ed.), Democracy and Trust, 1999, Cambridge University Press
- Trudy Govier, Social Trust and Human Communities, 1997, McGill-Queen's University Press
- Eric M. Uslaner, The Moral Foundations of Trust, 2002, Cambridge University Press
- Robert F. Hurley, The Decision to Trust: How Leaders Create High-Trust Organizations, 2012, Jossey-Bass
