The Destruction of Trust
Why do we keep damaging the very thing on which we all depend?
Why do people do things they should know may undermine trust?
That’s a question which has gnawed at me ever since I started working with Jimmy Wales on The Seven Rules of Trust. (Now on sale. Makes a fine Christmas present. Etc.)
It’s hard to overstate the importance of trust. For humans to cooperate, trust is indispensable. And without cooperation, humans can’t get anything done. Without cooperation, even bare survival is in doubt.
Not surprisingly, economists find trust and economic development are highly correlated. High-trust societies are places you want to live; low trust societies are best avoided.
So why would people do things they should know will undermine trust?
That’s not really the focus of the book, which is about how trust is built. But this is 2025. We can see the damage done by falling trust all around us, particularly in the United States. From all-time highs in the early 1960s, American levels of trust — in government, in media, in each other — has been sliding down a toboggan hill for decades. It was a quarter-century ago that Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, about the long-term decline in American social capital and the trust that is its beating heart. But that decline has accelerated in recent years and today, whatever your politics, whatever your place in society, any American has to know that the ties that bind the nation are fading along with trust. At an absolute minimum, not further diminishing trust must be a national priority.
And yet consider what happened in the Biden administration.
For years, while critics screamed that Biden’s mental acuity was plunging, I dismissed the noise. For three reasons. One, Biden had always been a verbal stumblebum. Two, many of the claims were blatant political smears, not good-faith expressions of legitimate concern. But most importantly, Biden was surrounded by dozens of smart, accomplished people who had to know — absolutely had to know — that if they were to hide a genuine mental decline, their coverup may fail. The truth would be exposed. And Americans’ trust in government would be dealt a body blow at one of the most fraught times in American history. It would be insane to risk that, I reasoned. So they wouldn’t.
I was wrong. There is substantial evidence that’s exactly what Biden’s people did.
That was only the latest instance of smart people doing things that jeopardize trust. Consider the early weeks of the Covid pandemic. Public health officials needed to stop people from panic-buying masks to ensure the supply for healthcare workers, so many officials explicitly told the public that masks were useless at preventing transmission. That may have helped with the immediate problem. But only a short time later, public health officials were loudly insisting masks were so important for stopping transmission that wearing one in public should be mandatory. Surely, when officials made the first statements, they had to know that masks may actually be important in subsequent efforts, and emphatically saying masks are useless risked undermining trust in what they’re saying. Clarity and honesty are cardinal rules in public health communications for a reason. Yet they still did it.
Last year, Zeynep Tufekci, a brilliant and fearless sociologist who writes in The New York Times, recapped a host of actions and statements by public health officials that fell like hammer blows on trust. Those officials, she wrote, had delivered a masterclass “on how to destroy trust.”
This week in The Times, another example of smart people endangering trust was vividly exposed. In this video segment, The Times shows how American corporations are increasingly dispensing with set, transparent, same-for-all prices, and replacing them with “dynamic pricing.” In practice, this means algorithms trawl the oceans of data to find clues about you — your wealth, your motivations — to predict how much you would be willing to pay. It means different people pay different prices. So they can squeeze out maximum profit.
In a sense, this is only old-fashioned haggling, although it’s haggling where one party has the huge advantage of access to personal data and staggering powers of computation. Good luck winning that back-and-forth. But set that aside. There’s a more obvious problem here.
In The Seven Rules of Trust, we tell the story of how Quakers came to be famously successful businesspeople.
For religious reasons, the Quakers were compelled to be absolutely honest at all times and treat everyone equally. Initially, that meant not following standard social practices, which offended non-Quakers. Which was bad for business. But in time, people learned that when a Quaker said something was so, it was so. They trusted Quakers. Which was fantastic for business.
One factor helping Quaker success was that haggling was standard practice in the 17th- and 18th centuries. So sellers sized up every buyer and, just as with dynamic pricing, tried to figure out how much they could squeeze out of you. That meant there was always a shadow over whatever price was agreed to. Was the seller offering the same to others for less? Was he ripping you off? You could never be sure. So you could never trust. Quakers increasingly saw charging different customers different prices as a form of dishonesty. They did away with haggling. Instead, they set one price for anyone who asked. And you knew they were telling the truth because they were Quakers.
The set-price model became standard in retail starting in the mid-19th century. And lots of businesspeople finally figured out what Quakers knew all along: Sharp business practice may lead to temporary advantage but it undermines trust, and in the long run there is no asset more valuable in business than trust. That’s the philosophy James Sinegal used to build Costco. It’s what Warren Buffett brought to everything he did in business. And the Quakers figured it out centuries ago.
But now all sorts of super-smart, MBA-holding, computer-empowered executives want to throw all that out and replace it with “dynamic pricing.” What effect will that have on trust? Seems to me that’s easy to predict. Read the history of business. It’s a terrible idea.
So why do it?
I have a theory about why people keep making decisions that will damage trust, and are thus contrary to their longterm interest.
Consider those public health officials in the Covid pandemic. Cases are starting to rise rapidly. Pandemics are exponential, so they know cases may soon explode. If the public buys up masks in vast volume they could quickly find themselves unable to equip healthcare workers. That’s a catastrophe. They must act now.
Solution? Anyone? What do we do?
“Tell people not to buy masks.”
Why would they listen?
“Tell them healthcare workers need the masks.”
We’re going to appeal to high-mindedness and social responsibility? Come on! They’re scared!
“OK, tell them masks don’t work.”
Done. Let’s go with it.
Granted, someone could have interjected that this is dishonest. “If that dishonesty is ever exposed, it could badly damage trust. That’s why pubic health communications put a premium on honesty. Don’t do it.” But how much weight would that interjection carry?
Trust is an abstract concept. Abundant research shows that in human psychology abstractions pale next to the concrete. And whatever risk this poses to trust is way out there, in the future. People naturally discount future events. So this interjection would be discounted for being abstract and further discounted for being in the future. Conclusion? “Don’t bother me with that airy-fairy crap. We have to deal with this problem now.”
See the core dynamic? There is a temporal mismatch between the problem executives face and the trust they risk damaging: The problem is now. The risk is way off in the hazy future. In those situations, now will win nine times out of ten.
There’s a further problem. It is the speed of information.
In the era when Quakers were demonstrating the long-term value of trust, information moved at the speed of a horse or a sailboat. Today, everyone and everything is connected and information moves at the speed of light.
This means the volume of information is orders of magnitude greater. But more importantly, the speed of events has accelerated spectacularly. So has the pace at which executive must make decisions.
Picture the driver of a car. Moving at 10 miles per hour, the driver has excellent peripheral vision and plenty of time to think before deciding how to respond to developments around him.
At 50 miles per hour, peripheral vision shrinks badly. Time to decide is a fraction of what it was.
At 100 miles per hour, peripheral vision narrows radically, all the driver sees is a tight tunnel straight ahead. There is no time to think. He can only react.
Increasingly often, executives are drivers doing 100 miles per hour. Under those circumstances, they aren’t likely to unreasonably discount the future so much as ignore it entirely. When you’re driving 100 miles per hour, there is no future. There is only now.
React. React again. Keep reacting until the end of the work day. Then get up and do it all over again. That’s what modern life has become for too many executives.
“Stamping out grass fires” is the favourite cliche in business: Everyone spends all day running around stamping out grass fires. When you do that, you don’t have a moment to spare for abstractions like trust, or a moment to think about the future — when the actions you take today damage the trust on which your enterprise depends.
If this model is correct, and it is operating as widely as I suspect it is, it will surely bring continued destruction of trust, and all that entails. I don’t know how it can be stopped. A determined leader could at least occasionally carve out time and space for executives to stop reacting and start thinking. A particularly determined leader could even defy the gods of efficiency and hire enough people so that some are permitted to think as a regular matter.
That may work for a single organization. But at the scale of a society? A country? How we can stop ourselves from undermining the very thing on which we all depend?
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.