The Trust that Has Gone Quiet

When I was a child, my parents did not lock the door during the day. The neighbours came in if they needed sugar or a hand with something. Mr Dodd the milkman knew where the money was kept for the bill. Mrs Gorse at number thirty-one minded us if my mother had to go to the doctor.

I lock the front door now, even during the day. There is no milkman. If I hire someone to fix something, there is paperwork, and a photograph of their identity card, and a review afterwards, because if he is bad I want to warn the next person, and if I am bad he wants to warn the next person. We are all watching each other, because nobody trusts the old unspoken arrangements any more.

Trust was one of the quiet miracles of the world I grew up in. It was invisible, because it worked. Nobody counted it. Nobody priced it. It just sat there, under everything, making everything else easier.

People trusted the news, because there were three channels and they all seemed serious. People trusted the banks, because the banks were solid and boring. People trusted the doctors, the teachers, the judges, the police, the government, the church — not entirely, but mostly, enough to get on with life.

Most of those trusts have gone quiet. Not at once. One by one, and then faster, and then nearly all at once near the end. The news became a thousand pieces of news and nobody knew which to believe. The banks collapsed and were bailed out and carried on paying themselves bonuses. The experts disagreed in public and each side was paid by somebody. The government lied about things everyone could check. The church, in some places, protected the worst of itself. The judges, the teachers, the police — each one got its scandal, and the scandals did not stop coming.

A low-trust society is a more expensive society, in every way. More locks, more contracts, more insurance, more cameras, more lawyers, more verification. All of this costs money, and the money has to come from somewhere, and it mostly comes from the people who are paying to be verified.

A low-trust society is also a lonelier society. You cannot easily befriend people you do not trust. You cannot easily help strangers you do not trust. You cannot easily leave your children with them for an afternoon. Trust was the lubricant of ordinary kindness. Without it, ordinary kindness gets rarer and more expensive too.

The quiet loss of trust, across the last forty years, is under everything else we have been walking through. The tribes, the silences at dinner, the lonely young men, the thinning friendships, the state reaching for harder tools. All of it is made worse by the fact that, as a society, we no longer quite believe in each other.

Trust, once gone, is hard to rebuild. It took centuries to make, in the places it was made. It took decades to lose. It may take more than a lifetime to find again.