Trusting a person is not always easy, but over time, it can develop. To earn the trust of others requires a consistent effort and a commitment to your own personal integrity. Brene Brown says “Integrity is choosing courage over comfort. It’s choosing what’s right over what’s fun, fast, or easy.” Integrity, she says, is more than just naming our values. It’s living according to our values.
It is far more difficult to trust a system or an organization. I was recently talking to a friend who was repeating several points of view that sounded crazy to me. Trials were rigged, personal behavior in politicians doesn’t matter, elections were fixed, and conspiracy theories were true. Sometime during our conversation I realized that there was nothing that I could say—nothing—that could change his opinion. There were no objective facts I could point to that he would trust. It became simply my opinion against his. I could quote sources all day long, but it was easy for him to say that they are tainted in some way, no matter how prestigious the journal or how clear my argument.
We used to trust mainstream news outlets. Walter Cronkite was an unquestioned truth-teller. Once it became clear that there was bias even in those sources that were trying to be even-handed, then even the nuttiest broadcasters and podcasters were given the same amount of credibility as the major news outlets.
One thing that my friend said has stayed with me. He said, “I know a guy who personally met this politician. He said he’s just a regular guy. He did business with him.” This information had an outsized impact on my friend. If someone he knew personally said the man was a regular guy, that was all my friend needed to know.
We don’t know many politicians personally, so all our information about them is filtered through the media, which we believe to be biased. It makes it hard to know which politicians to trust, so we rely on those stories that make the most sense to us.
In order to find evidence that we can rely on to make judgments, we must find resources that we can trust. This will require careful scrutiny of what we read and view, and the willingness to reference a variety of sources. Many of us have chosen to only seek out the viewpoints we already agree with. That strategy leaves us highly vulnerable to biased reporting.
We have to begin using our own common sense. When I am working with someone in therapy, one of my favorite questions to ask is, “What is the evidence for that?” Often, they have a feeling, but it is not backed up by anything.
There are plenty of things that I believe, but I can’t prove. I believe that vaccines work, that there is a continent called Australia, that my plane will stay in the sky, and that Tide is the best laundry detergent. I developed these opinions from various sources, but it would take an enormous amount of effort for me to prove these things to myself, so I choose to trust that they are true.
The Atlantic magazine’s Jedediah Britton-Purdy writes, “what we need is not more trust exactly, but healthier trust, which, somewhat paradoxically, includes skepticism—skepticism toward those who haven’t earned our trust. Trust and skepticism, if not cynicism, are two sides of a delicate balance.”
This is particularly true right now, when there is so much misinformation flowing everywhere, and even photographic evidence can be faked. We need to listen carefully to others, whether we agree with their positions or not, and try to judge their integrity. Do they tell blatant lies? Cross them off your “trust” list. Do they say what they really feel, even if they see things differently? They may be worth listening to, even if just for perspective.
This is a challenging time, but there have always been challenging times. Our job right now is to doubt everything we hear, and to cultivate those rare sources of truth, openness, and transparency. Those are the places to put our trust.
