Trust & Trustworthiness

trust | Middle English: from Old Norse traust, from traustr ‘strong’; the verb from Old Norse treysta, assimilated to the noun. (Copied from Google)

What is trust? What does someone have to do to be trustworthy?

How may one answer these questions? An analytic definition of trust risks limiting trust to a far narrower range than our lived experience testifies. However, our experience of trust & trustworthiness certainly seems insufficient to answer the question you ask at the beginning, middle, and, perhaps, the end of a relationship, "Do I trust you?"

The Old Norse meaning may provide us with a helpful framework for thinking about trust. In relationships, trust is a necessary ingredient for healthy boundaries & vulnerability. But why? Let's swap, "I trust my friend with my secrets," for, "My friend is strong enough to carry my secrets." These are not equivalent sentences. The former concerns the choice & disposition of the truster and the latter emphasizes the worthiness of the trustee. Yet it is this very distinction that points to the meaning of trust as a kind of strength: trust requires reciprocity.

Now, I am not a proponent for a crude form of etymology; simply because 'strength' is what Google says 'trust' meant in an earlier form does not mean that it is a direct equivalent today, or else we would not have the word strength. Strength would be redundant for trust. But distant relatives are still important, after all. Perhaps we might think of trust as a reciprocal trust between persons in virtue of a particular kind of relationship. I trust both my wife & my surgeon, though in radically different ways, and this is good and right to do so. I trust my surgeon with a scalpel and my wife with part of my soul, and not the other way around.

We are still miles to go from answering the question, "What makes someone trustworthy?" Indeed, that mileage is beyond the scope of this work. I will offer this anecdote for the remaining space we do have here: consider how I began this essay. I Googled the phrase "trust etymology" and found the answer I pasted above. I, in this way, trusted the keystrokes I placed into a search engine for a particular answer. My practical wisdom judged that Google was trustworthy to provide an accurate answer to this particular question. If I were asked the reasons why I trusted Google for this answer, I could offer a few answers which reduce down to, "Google is known for providing accurate information for common-knowledge." This would be a curious answer if I remembered that Google began to simply show what has been written, not what is a confirmed answer. In the end, I found Google trustworthy because I assumed that with all its data, engineers, and algorithms, that many layers of verification would prove strong enough to endure potential inaccuracy.

Is it odd that many of our institutions carry the unspoken assumption, "Trust the many"? From one angle, this is not a new phenomenon. Just think of the word 'accord.' To say something is 'according to' means that what is said is in conformity to the person who says it. In every age, the affirmation that what someone says accords to who they really are deepens with the affirmation of others. Your trustworthiness came from a shared consensus. Today, trustworthiness comes from a similar consensus of aggregation, checks, and balances. We assume the trustworthiness of institutions because of all the people required to aggregate an institutions expertise, verify that expertise or knowledge, and push back on other institutions in the same sphere.

But, what happens when institutions fail? If the strength of our age comes from an implicit concession to the trustworthiness of the many, then what should we make of the apparent frailty of our institutions? And this is only one narrow avenue of inquiry! However, this particular line of inquiry proves troubling. If we tend to ask the question, "Do I trust you?" at the beginning and the middle of a relationship, what happens if we ask this question of an institution, and the answer is, "No."? It would appear to be the end of that institution.

I have provided a sufficient definition for neither trust nor trustworthiness. Still, I ask you to consider, "What institutions do you trust and consider trustworthy?" For those that you do not trust, how essential are they the next generation? That's a question of trust that haunts me. If I could provide any challenge to you, reader, it would be to begin offering solutions and not just doubts to these essential institutions (whether the support education, healthcare, government, employment, humanities, etc.). As we discovered above, trust requires reciprocity. One of the greatest gifts you & I can give the next generation are trustworthy institutions, and those will never be until we begin to offer solutions and not just problems.