Tolstoy’s ethical architecture of trust begins with truthfulness. For him, truth is not merely the absence of falsehood but an active discipline: a refusal to hide motives from others and from oneself.
Characters who cultivate candid self‑knowledge and honest speech—who turn away from theatrical posturing—become capable of sustaining confidence in others. Pierre Bezukhov’s gradual shedding of vanity and affectation is, in this sense, a moral education in trust: only when he confronts his own contradictions can he enter relationships that depend on reciprocal candor.
Equally important in Tolstoy’s moral scheme is practical fidelity. Trust, he insists, is primarily embodied: it accrues through repeated acts of care and responsibility—the steady work of household life, the tending of land, the shared labor of a community.
Levin’s ethical maturation in Anna Karenina is not a sudden epiphany but a slow accretion of dependable habits—conversation, honest labor, care for family—that make him a trustworthy partner. Tolstoy thus values the ordinary over the spectacular: trust is built in kitchens and fields more reliably than in salons and declarations of passion.
Reciprocity and accountability are the mechanisms by which trust is maintained. Tolstoy’s most durable relationships are those in which obligations are mutual and failures can be named without spectacle.
By contrast, relations shaped by inequality or performance—affairs of status, ostentatious charity, the transactional marriages of high society—lack structures for genuine reciprocity and are therefore fragile. Pride and vanity, Tolstoy shows repeatedly, corrode trust: social honors often mask inner vacuity, and the appetite for status substitutes appearance for moral worth.
Formally, Tolstoy’s novels teach the reader how to judge. His narrative techniques—omniscient commentary, intimate interiority, and wide scale—work together to complicate confidence. Philosophical intrusions in War and Peace force readers to distrust grand historical theories; close free indirect discourse reveals characters’ self‑deceptions.
This double vision trains readers to evaluate trust by triangulating claim, motive, and repeated behavior rather than accepting any single voice at face value. The novels’ length and tonal patience also matter: moral reliability is portrayed as a slow process, a sequence of small acts rather than a single decision.
Tolstoy’s social diagnosis explains why trust matters so desperately in his fiction. Writing in the shadow of the Napoleonic wars, the decline of old hierarchies, and the rise of modern bureaucracies and markets, Tolstoy worries that institutions built on status and abstract authority will not command genuine confidence.
Military command, he suggests, often overreaches itself; the generals’ luminous plans collapse in the face of contingent human action. Conversely, small-scale solidarities—soldiers’ mutual reliance, peasant communal labor—produce practical trust precisely because they rest on face‑to‑face accountability and shared risk.
Tolstoy also perceives the corrosive effects of commodification: when relationships are mediated by exchange and reputation, trust becomes calculable and brittle.
Tolstoy’s treatment of trust is full of moral ambiguity. He recognizes trust as indispensable yet risky. Opening oneself to another can bring flourishing or ruin; excessive suspicion, he warns, deadens communal life as surely as credulity invites betrayal. He is likewise skeptical that legal or institutional reforms alone can restore confidence.
For Tolstoy the deeper remedy is moral renewal—an inward commitment to truthfulness and humility that finds expression in dependable outward acts.
Anna Karenina and War and Peace stage these claims in complementary ways. Anna Karenina juxtaposes a tragic romance based on urgent passion with Levin’s quieter experiment in durable fidelity, showing how one grammar of trust leads to collapse while another sustains life.
War and Peace extends the inquiry to public life: it diminishes the authority of great‑man histories and elevates the cumulative effects of small acts—courage, error, fidelity—that actually shape events.
Tolstoy’s shorter stories and later essays make explicit the ethical demands that underlie his fiction. Tales like “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” and his Christian anarchist writings press the same point: simplicity, truthfulness, and humble labor are the soil in which trust grows; vanity and appetite are its enemies.
The contemporary relevance of Tolstoy’s insights is striking.
In an age of institutional distrust, transactional relationships, and performative social media, his insistence on embodied practices—honest speech, shared responsibility, reciprocal accountability—offers a durable ethic for rebuilding confidence.
He reminds us that trust is not a sentimental disposition nor a technological fix; it is the slow outcome of moral work.
Tolstoy’s lasting lesson is austere but generous: trust must be earned and exercised through ordinary fidelity, humble truthfulness, and patience.
His novels do not sentimentalize trust; they show its precariousness and insist on the daily labors that make human communities possible.
In refusing both facile optimism and cynical despair, Tolstoy offers a practical, ethically demanding vision of trust as the measure of personal integrity and social health.
In the context of companies, it's the role of the Board to be outside of the rush of the day to day so as to be less susceptible to short sightedness. Ideally, the Board oversees trust as one a company's greatest assets.
What level of government is supposed to be delivering that board role, cabinet? I’m trying to understand how the short-termism of politics fits with the goal of retaining trust. The masks in Covid example from Dan still hurts - I viscerally remember my shock and disbelief when Dr Tam announced that. Would there have been cabinet discussions of the possible damage to trust that would cause?
IMHO trust is based on truth, which in turn is proved by evidence.
Its current erosion is not surprising given that the most powerful, most oft quoted person on the planet is a record breaking liar who seems to speak more lies than truth.
But the root cause of this may be that this epic liar's acceptance and elevation to power was enabled by a base that purports to believe evidence-free fairy tales.
In Don We Trust is almost as tragic as the quote on the coins.
Perhaps the problem is there is no stable high trust equilibrium. In a world where everyone has high trust in everyone else there is a big payoff for abusing that.
In a world with very low trust there is a payoff for being trustworthy.
This article is one of the most important things I've read lately. It is at once thoughtful, revealing and frightening, Trust is the 4th piller in a democracy - Legislature, Courts, Executive and Truth. Every Canadian, and American should read it. Our students should read it and have a discussion. Well done, Dan.
Possibly a bigger erosion of trust has been the growth of private equity PE ownership of business groups such as veterinary practices or other professional groups - the Management Services Organization or the Clinical Entity.
The financial mechanisms used by PE firms maximize financial returns over a short time (3 to 7 years), makes aggressive strategies like consolidation and cost-cutting necessary, that lead to higher prices.
1) Larry Sanger left Wikipedia in 2003 and immediately started slagging it off as a failed project while promoting his own alternatives. His alternatives never worked. He has been slagging off Wikipedia for almost a quarter century. You'll excuse me if I'm not impressed.
3) Perhaps more importantly, I corresponded with Woodgrains and he/she agreed that his/her criticism does not condemn Wikipedia in toto. It simply says it has some important problems. That's a critical distinction because it calls for reform, not dismissal -- unlike gross overstatements like the one you opened with.
I never said Wikipedia was totally condemned. I don't totally condemn the media which abused my trust re: Biden either. But you seem to agree with me that trust was abused in both cases, which was my point.
Moreover, it's great that you've engaged with Woodgrains 👍
Re: Sanger, I note that you don't tackle his arguments, but resort to ad hominem attacks, which feels like a weird thing to do. I've got the sense there's no love lost between him and Wikipedia, but that doesn't mean all his arguments are invalid.
In fact, I can give you direct evidence of one of Sanger's points: that Wikipedia is biased.
Open up the page on Imane Khelif and tell me whether you think that entry is biased. Particularly the point about "Khelif was born female" and "No medical evidence has been published to indicate she is transgender, nor that she has XY chromosomes".
Thanks for clarifying on the first point. I do wish people would be a little more careful in criticizing Wikipedia to distinguish the scope of those criticisms. It's often not done, and so a criticism of this or that element of Wikipedia becomes a criticism "of Wikipedia."
On Sanger, what I wrote isn't ad hominem: That article, like so many others, frames Sangers objections in a way that makes it sound like they are new. That makes the story much more powerful -- because it means that "even Wikipedia's co-founder" believes that Wikipedia has lost its way, or whatever. Hence, the fact that Sanger left Wikipedia almost at the start, and that he has been dismissive the whole way along, is highly relevant.
As to the substance of his complaints, I hope to write something that will at least partially touch on those sometime. He recently wrote suggestions for reform what would, I would argue, demolish Wikipedia and replace it with epistemic anarchy. Which may suit the time but it isn't good for humanity.
On "Wikipedia is biased"... You are illustrating my point above. Your evidence (I'll take it at face value for present purposes) proves an article on Wikipedia is biased. It does not prove "Wikipedia is biased." There is a world of difference between those two statements. For further explication, please see the essay I wrote, linked in my previous response.
Of course.we're all familiar with the."sale" where the before price is one they never asked for but makes the product look a lot higher.quality.than it is and the current price look like a deal. Black Friday wnich starts just before Halloween and runs.right into the.pre-Christmas sales of early.December. I don't mind this so much except the tradition of actual sales was nice the way Xmas was nice. They have whole departments of psychologists devored to this, understanding that $3.99 looks way cheaper than $4.00. Can't wait for the AI to start.
You are on to such an important topicl: the preciousness of trust and what tends to erode it. I’d like to add anl angle : Acknowledging uncertainty
has come to seem like weakness or hesitation that would make “official” or expert opinion ineffectual, and this tempts officials to make unwarranted sweeping pronouncements with certainty. Which of course, backfires later, eroding trust. I think the public could have handled advice that acknowledged “we aren’t 100% sure but for now, this is the best bet”. Thanks for getting this topic going!
It seems to me that trust works on many levels - societal, community, specific issues or problems. For each I can imagine some kind of measurement which assesses the level of trust related to the group or issue being considered. Having public health experts make that kind of decision in 1965, it strikes me would have had a less severe or significant impact because the baseline level of trust in government was much higher. In the masking example, public health experts are making a decision on how to pitch the “don’t use masks now followed by you must your masks now” in a world where they likely already assume it would be folly to appeal to the goodwill of citizens.
I think we saw that debate play out in Canada concerning getting people to take measures themselves in order to protect others. Media reports played up the dissenters as if they represented up to half of the population, when, in fact, most Canadians ‘did the right thing for the right reasons’. Seth’s argument has some validity for me as I do think that a lot of the criticism of public health officials underplays the novelty of the virus and the need to make decisions on the fly. Still, I suspect that polling would show us a significant drop in trust of Canadians in public health officials after the pandemic ‘resolved’.
Trust isn't an abstract concept, it's a relatively general (rather than specific) one in the sense that it includes more possibilities. So the challenge different than that of trying to get people to think more abstractly.
I can see how you'd think a concept like trust is abstract if you assume all concepts are abstract given that they're mental constructions rather than tangible, concrete things. But if you think trust is a belief in reliability and so is abstract because it depends on the imagination, then I'd say that your imagination is still trying to be true to a context (i.e., the one involving the person you're trusting), and this suggests that it's not abstract after all. In fact, to trust someone is to engage in a context-dependent practice no less than, say, reading a book or sitting in a chair. Actually, I'd go even further: the very idea of a book or a chair is, in a sense, a context-dependent practice. As Wittgenstein once remarked, “Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist . . . they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs.”
Sigh ... I don't have time to write a full refutation. It's very sad you've been taken in by the right-wing lying campaign. It frustrates me so much to see, how THE LIES WORK!
This is "Brandolini's law / Bullshit Asymmetry Principle" in action.
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
The issue with Covid had to do with the fact that it was a new disease, and public health did the best they could at the time, with the knowledge that they had then. Quite a bit of that later turned out to be in error. A key aspect was the transmission mode, where it was assumed to be primarily droplet, but later determined to be "airborne". That was behind the changing masks advice. There was nothing like the imagined conspiracy. But one has to slog through it, explaining every point, while being sniped at with a literal conspiracy theory. I don't know how to counter this effectively, it's just a classic case of facts don't matter, "feelings" (worldview) do.
By the way, I know this is unworldly of me, but don't you find it darkly funny that you don't even get a co-author credit on a book about "Trust"? And if I asked you how much the alleged Sole Author actually wrote of it, I couldn't trust your answer?
Sorry, no. I was and always will be deeply sympathetic to officials trying to respond to a fast-moving, novel situation like a pandemic. I'll cut them a ton of slack. But read Tufekci's piece. There were many instances where they did things they knew were dishonest -- and were in clear violation of the classic standard of public health communications, which is transparency and honesty. And why is that the gold standard? Because everyone in public health knows that without trust are dead in the water.
Her piece is a horrible hatchet-job. Again, Bullshit Asymmetry Principle - I'd have to go through it point-by-point. I don't have the time for that, and IT WOULDN'T WORK. Other people have done this. If I went and found a rebuttal - again, time - there'd be no effect.
Huh? Yes. It's exactly what prompted my impassioned response above. Look, I know this is not how one is supposed to approach convincing people. But *mea culpa*, I just can't do the stuff that one is told to do in terms of debunking misinformation. Part of it is me, how I am, because I'm a techie. But I don't know if it's reasonable for most humans either.
The masks issue came about because originally, transmission was thought to be *primarily* droplet, where masks won't be much help. Thus the recommendation was not for ordinary people to wear masks (health-care workers are around lots of extremely sick, *coughing* people - they are in a different situation!). Then *knowledge changed*. It was found Covid was airborne, and often transmitted before symptoms. Masks *do* help in this situation. It was completely explained and "transparent". But there was this enormous, massive, right-wing lying campaign because it could be portrayed as a political conspiracy - AND IT WORKED! It got into lots of people's lizard-brain, and it's just been repeated endlessly, and is basically impervious to refutation.
Dang. Reading all the way through, waiting for an answer to this problem…and then discovered that you are, too. 🫤
Tolstoy provides a perspective.
Tolstoy’s ethical architecture of trust begins with truthfulness. For him, truth is not merely the absence of falsehood but an active discipline: a refusal to hide motives from others and from oneself.
Characters who cultivate candid self‑knowledge and honest speech—who turn away from theatrical posturing—become capable of sustaining confidence in others. Pierre Bezukhov’s gradual shedding of vanity and affectation is, in this sense, a moral education in trust: only when he confronts his own contradictions can he enter relationships that depend on reciprocal candor.
Equally important in Tolstoy’s moral scheme is practical fidelity. Trust, he insists, is primarily embodied: it accrues through repeated acts of care and responsibility—the steady work of household life, the tending of land, the shared labor of a community.
Levin’s ethical maturation in Anna Karenina is not a sudden epiphany but a slow accretion of dependable habits—conversation, honest labor, care for family—that make him a trustworthy partner. Tolstoy thus values the ordinary over the spectacular: trust is built in kitchens and fields more reliably than in salons and declarations of passion.
Reciprocity and accountability are the mechanisms by which trust is maintained. Tolstoy’s most durable relationships are those in which obligations are mutual and failures can be named without spectacle.
By contrast, relations shaped by inequality or performance—affairs of status, ostentatious charity, the transactional marriages of high society—lack structures for genuine reciprocity and are therefore fragile. Pride and vanity, Tolstoy shows repeatedly, corrode trust: social honors often mask inner vacuity, and the appetite for status substitutes appearance for moral worth.
Formally, Tolstoy’s novels teach the reader how to judge. His narrative techniques—omniscient commentary, intimate interiority, and wide scale—work together to complicate confidence. Philosophical intrusions in War and Peace force readers to distrust grand historical theories; close free indirect discourse reveals characters’ self‑deceptions.
This double vision trains readers to evaluate trust by triangulating claim, motive, and repeated behavior rather than accepting any single voice at face value. The novels’ length and tonal patience also matter: moral reliability is portrayed as a slow process, a sequence of small acts rather than a single decision.
Tolstoy’s social diagnosis explains why trust matters so desperately in his fiction. Writing in the shadow of the Napoleonic wars, the decline of old hierarchies, and the rise of modern bureaucracies and markets, Tolstoy worries that institutions built on status and abstract authority will not command genuine confidence.
Military command, he suggests, often overreaches itself; the generals’ luminous plans collapse in the face of contingent human action. Conversely, small-scale solidarities—soldiers’ mutual reliance, peasant communal labor—produce practical trust precisely because they rest on face‑to‑face accountability and shared risk.
Tolstoy also perceives the corrosive effects of commodification: when relationships are mediated by exchange and reputation, trust becomes calculable and brittle.
Tolstoy’s treatment of trust is full of moral ambiguity. He recognizes trust as indispensable yet risky. Opening oneself to another can bring flourishing or ruin; excessive suspicion, he warns, deadens communal life as surely as credulity invites betrayal. He is likewise skeptical that legal or institutional reforms alone can restore confidence.
For Tolstoy the deeper remedy is moral renewal—an inward commitment to truthfulness and humility that finds expression in dependable outward acts.
Anna Karenina and War and Peace stage these claims in complementary ways. Anna Karenina juxtaposes a tragic romance based on urgent passion with Levin’s quieter experiment in durable fidelity, showing how one grammar of trust leads to collapse while another sustains life.
War and Peace extends the inquiry to public life: it diminishes the authority of great‑man histories and elevates the cumulative effects of small acts—courage, error, fidelity—that actually shape events.
Tolstoy’s shorter stories and later essays make explicit the ethical demands that underlie his fiction. Tales like “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” and his Christian anarchist writings press the same point: simplicity, truthfulness, and humble labor are the soil in which trust grows; vanity and appetite are its enemies.
The contemporary relevance of Tolstoy’s insights is striking.
In an age of institutional distrust, transactional relationships, and performative social media, his insistence on embodied practices—honest speech, shared responsibility, reciprocal accountability—offers a durable ethic for rebuilding confidence.
He reminds us that trust is not a sentimental disposition nor a technological fix; it is the slow outcome of moral work.
Tolstoy’s lasting lesson is austere but generous: trust must be earned and exercised through ordinary fidelity, humble truthfulness, and patience.
His novels do not sentimentalize trust; they show its precariousness and insist on the daily labors that make human communities possible.
In refusing both facile optimism and cynical despair, Tolstoy offers a practical, ethically demanding vision of trust as the measure of personal integrity and social health.
Worth considering.
In the context of companies, it's the role of the Board to be outside of the rush of the day to day so as to be less susceptible to short sightedness. Ideally, the Board oversees trust as one a company's greatest assets.
Yes, indeed. It's likely my view of boards has been jaundiced by excessive time observing Tesla.
Fair!
What level of government is supposed to be delivering that board role, cabinet? I’m trying to understand how the short-termism of politics fits with the goal of retaining trust. The masks in Covid example from Dan still hurts - I viscerally remember my shock and disbelief when Dr Tam announced that. Would there have been cabinet discussions of the possible damage to trust that would cause?
IMHO trust is based on truth, which in turn is proved by evidence.
Its current erosion is not surprising given that the most powerful, most oft quoted person on the planet is a record breaking liar who seems to speak more lies than truth.
But the root cause of this may be that this epic liar's acceptance and elevation to power was enabled by a base that purports to believe evidence-free fairy tales.
In Don We Trust is almost as tragic as the quote on the coins.
Perhaps the problem is there is no stable high trust equilibrium. In a world where everyone has high trust in everyone else there is a big payoff for abusing that.
In a world with very low trust there is a payoff for being trustworthy.
Why do we keep damaging the very thing on which we all depend?
Because the profits from doing so all comes to the person doing the damage, and all the damage to everyone else.
This article is one of the most important things I've read lately. It is at once thoughtful, revealing and frightening, Trust is the 4th piller in a democracy - Legislature, Courts, Executive and Truth. Every Canadian, and American should read it. Our students should read it and have a discussion. Well done, Dan.
Pleased to sub. Appreciate same. Thank you
Possibly a bigger erosion of trust has been the growth of private equity PE ownership of business groups such as veterinary practices or other professional groups - the Management Services Organization or the Clinical Entity.
The financial mechanisms used by PE firms maximize financial returns over a short time (3 to 7 years), makes aggressive strategies like consolidation and cost-cutting necessary, that lead to higher prices.
And an erosion of trust.
Pretty ironic to write a book about trust with the founder of Wikipedia.
Why? Wikipedia had to develop internal and external trust to work, so trust is integral to its story.
Wikipedia is a perfect example of how trust is abused.
How so?
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashes-mao
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin
https://unherd.com/newsroom/wikipedia-co-founder-i-no-longer-trust-the-website-i-created/
Ah. Ok.
1) Larry Sanger left Wikipedia in 2003 and immediately started slagging it off as a failed project while promoting his own alternatives. His alternatives never worked. He has been slagging off Wikipedia for almost a quarter century. You'll excuse me if I'm not impressed.
2) I wrote this response to Tracing Woodgrains and some other critics: https://dgardner.substack.com/p/has-wikipedia-become-wokepedia
3) Perhaps more importantly, I corresponded with Woodgrains and he/she agreed that his/her criticism does not condemn Wikipedia in toto. It simply says it has some important problems. That's a critical distinction because it calls for reform, not dismissal -- unlike gross overstatements like the one you opened with.
Thanks for the response!
I never said Wikipedia was totally condemned. I don't totally condemn the media which abused my trust re: Biden either. But you seem to agree with me that trust was abused in both cases, which was my point.
Moreover, it's great that you've engaged with Woodgrains 👍
Re: Sanger, I note that you don't tackle his arguments, but resort to ad hominem attacks, which feels like a weird thing to do. I've got the sense there's no love lost between him and Wikipedia, but that doesn't mean all his arguments are invalid.
In fact, I can give you direct evidence of one of Sanger's points: that Wikipedia is biased.
Open up the page on Imane Khelif and tell me whether you think that entry is biased. Particularly the point about "Khelif was born female" and "No medical evidence has been published to indicate she is transgender, nor that she has XY chromosomes".
Thanks for clarifying on the first point. I do wish people would be a little more careful in criticizing Wikipedia to distinguish the scope of those criticisms. It's often not done, and so a criticism of this or that element of Wikipedia becomes a criticism "of Wikipedia."
On Sanger, what I wrote isn't ad hominem: That article, like so many others, frames Sangers objections in a way that makes it sound like they are new. That makes the story much more powerful -- because it means that "even Wikipedia's co-founder" believes that Wikipedia has lost its way, or whatever. Hence, the fact that Sanger left Wikipedia almost at the start, and that he has been dismissive the whole way along, is highly relevant.
As to the substance of his complaints, I hope to write something that will at least partially touch on those sometime. He recently wrote suggestions for reform what would, I would argue, demolish Wikipedia and replace it with epistemic anarchy. Which may suit the time but it isn't good for humanity.
On "Wikipedia is biased"... You are illustrating my point above. Your evidence (I'll take it at face value for present purposes) proves an article on Wikipedia is biased. It does not prove "Wikipedia is biased." There is a world of difference between those two statements. For further explication, please see the essay I wrote, linked in my previous response.
Of course.we're all familiar with the."sale" where the before price is one they never asked for but makes the product look a lot higher.quality.than it is and the current price look like a deal. Black Friday wnich starts just before Halloween and runs.right into the.pre-Christmas sales of early.December. I don't mind this so much except the tradition of actual sales was nice the way Xmas was nice. They have whole departments of psychologists devored to this, understanding that $3.99 looks way cheaper than $4.00. Can't wait for the AI to start.
You are on to such an important topicl: the preciousness of trust and what tends to erode it. I’d like to add anl angle : Acknowledging uncertainty
has come to seem like weakness or hesitation that would make “official” or expert opinion ineffectual, and this tempts officials to make unwarranted sweeping pronouncements with certainty. Which of course, backfires later, eroding trust. I think the public could have handled advice that acknowledged “we aren’t 100% sure but for now, this is the best bet”. Thanks for getting this topic going!
Thanks again for a stimulating read.
It seems to me that trust works on many levels - societal, community, specific issues or problems. For each I can imagine some kind of measurement which assesses the level of trust related to the group or issue being considered. Having public health experts make that kind of decision in 1965, it strikes me would have had a less severe or significant impact because the baseline level of trust in government was much higher. In the masking example, public health experts are making a decision on how to pitch the “don’t use masks now followed by you must your masks now” in a world where they likely already assume it would be folly to appeal to the goodwill of citizens.
I think we saw that debate play out in Canada concerning getting people to take measures themselves in order to protect others. Media reports played up the dissenters as if they represented up to half of the population, when, in fact, most Canadians ‘did the right thing for the right reasons’. Seth’s argument has some validity for me as I do think that a lot of the criticism of public health officials underplays the novelty of the virus and the need to make decisions on the fly. Still, I suspect that polling would show us a significant drop in trust of Canadians in public health officials after the pandemic ‘resolved’.
Social media is another example of losing trustworthiness. If 10% of Meta’s ad revenue is scams, then people and legit advertisers will avoid Meta.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/
Trust isn't an abstract concept, it's a relatively general (rather than specific) one in the sense that it includes more possibilities. So the challenge different than that of trying to get people to think more abstractly.
If trust isn't abstract, I either don't know what the word means or don't know how you are using it.
I can see how you'd think a concept like trust is abstract if you assume all concepts are abstract given that they're mental constructions rather than tangible, concrete things. But if you think trust is a belief in reliability and so is abstract because it depends on the imagination, then I'd say that your imagination is still trying to be true to a context (i.e., the one involving the person you're trusting), and this suggests that it's not abstract after all. In fact, to trust someone is to engage in a context-dependent practice no less than, say, reading a book or sitting in a chair. Actually, I'd go even further: the very idea of a book or a chair is, in a sense, a context-dependent practice. As Wittgenstein once remarked, “Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist . . . they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs.”
Sigh ... I don't have time to write a full refutation. It's very sad you've been taken in by the right-wing lying campaign. It frustrates me so much to see, how THE LIES WORK!
This is "Brandolini's law / Bullshit Asymmetry Principle" in action.
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
The issue with Covid had to do with the fact that it was a new disease, and public health did the best they could at the time, with the knowledge that they had then. Quite a bit of that later turned out to be in error. A key aspect was the transmission mode, where it was assumed to be primarily droplet, but later determined to be "airborne". That was behind the changing masks advice. There was nothing like the imagined conspiracy. But one has to slog through it, explaining every point, while being sniped at with a literal conspiracy theory. I don't know how to counter this effectively, it's just a classic case of facts don't matter, "feelings" (worldview) do.
By the way, I know this is unworldly of me, but don't you find it darkly funny that you don't even get a co-author credit on a book about "Trust"? And if I asked you how much the alleged Sole Author actually wrote of it, I couldn't trust your answer?
Sorry, no. I was and always will be deeply sympathetic to officials trying to respond to a fast-moving, novel situation like a pandemic. I'll cut them a ton of slack. But read Tufekci's piece. There were many instances where they did things they knew were dishonest -- and were in clear violation of the classic standard of public health communications, which is transparency and honesty. And why is that the gold standard? Because everyone in public health knows that without trust are dead in the water.
Her piece is a horrible hatchet-job. Again, Bullshit Asymmetry Principle - I'd have to go through it point-by-point. I don't have the time for that, and IT WOULDN'T WORK. Other people have done this. If I went and found a rebuttal - again, time - there'd be no effect.
Well, take the point about masks as I outlined it in my piece. Is that inaccurate?
Huh? Yes. It's exactly what prompted my impassioned response above. Look, I know this is not how one is supposed to approach convincing people. But *mea culpa*, I just can't do the stuff that one is told to do in terms of debunking misinformation. Part of it is me, how I am, because I'm a techie. But I don't know if it's reasonable for most humans either.
The masks issue came about because originally, transmission was thought to be *primarily* droplet, where masks won't be much help. Thus the recommendation was not for ordinary people to wear masks (health-care workers are around lots of extremely sick, *coughing* people - they are in a different situation!). Then *knowledge changed*. It was found Covid was airborne, and often transmitted before symptoms. Masks *do* help in this situation. It was completely explained and "transparent". But there was this enormous, massive, right-wing lying campaign because it could be portrayed as a political conspiracy - AND IT WORKED! It got into lots of people's lizard-brain, and it's just been repeated endlessly, and is basically impervious to refutation.
Oh? If this is all the product of a right wing lying campaign, why is it that Tufekci was already writing about it, in March 2020?
Answering that is a rhetorical trap, so I will have to decline.
I rest my case on the specifics of the changing knowledge of Covid transmission.