There is a crisis of trust in the world – trust in governments, institutions, media, science, and in each other, is plummeting. According to research, younger generations are losing trust fastest, and honestly who can blame them?
The loss of trust is a serious problem since it is the invisible glue which creates social cohesion and keeps communities safe and relatively stable.
The reason humans have been successful as a species is not down to competition or survival of the fittest as is often misunderstood, it’s because we cooperate and collaborate with each other based on trust. Stripped bare in a crisis, our human nature is to help each other and even risk our lives for one another.
Global cooperation saved the day in the 1980s when governments and communities came together to address the human-induced hole in the ozone layer that seriously damaged our stratosphere and threatened planetary catastrophe from our use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).
In the intervening years though, everything has gone horribly awry. Here we are at the existential precipice of systems collapse and planetary disaster and we don’t appear to be cooperating at all. Instead, we’re locked in competition to see who or what can spiral us to the bottom fastest.
The trust deficit
There are many complex reasons why we have arrived at this point, including complexity itself, but the trust deficit is at the heart of it.
Trust is built on truth telling and relationships, which in the atomised and digitised ‘post-truth’ world we’ve created, is in short supply. Objective facts are held hostage in echo chambers where truth is being choked to death in the digital equivalent of the Strait of Hormuz by media barons and tech bros with toxic algorithms and AI, deliberately designed to harm humans.
A lack of truth and trust leads to all kinds of craziness, as we are experiencing. Wars, conspiracies about conspiracies, and resource- hungry data centres popping up like toadstools all over the countryside. Meanwhile, our attention is being weaponised, so we turn on each other rather than addressing the root causes of our predicament.
Trust is also at the centre of our modern financial system. Money has no inherent value of its own, its value is derived from the trust we place in it. As trust collapses, will our financial system also go down?
British philosopher Mark Fisher opened his 2009 book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? with the chilling quote: ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’. Let that sink in.
Remember the good old days?
Increasing, uncertainty is pushing people towards leaders offering harsh simplistic ‘remedies’ for complex problems. They are like snake oil salesmen offering miracle cures and false comfort while manipulating the masses with nostalgia for the ‘good old days’. They blame everything on immigrants or Albo.
We urgently need leaders who can embrace complexity and understand its nuances, who can work together in an atmosphere of trust and cooperation to create a human pathway towards a liveable future.
If instead we turn away from each other towards the manipulated world of corporate AI and digital agents and relationships, we risk losing the most important aspect of being human – trust generated by healthy human-to-human relationships.
As we farewell yet another giant of our times, with the passing of feminist, activist and writer Gloria Steinem, who truly made the world a better place, I’m once more reminded of her great wisdom.
Steinem understood the importance of human relationships and expressed it in her living room circles and public gatherings where she spoke of the importance of getting together to generate some oxytocin, the secret sauce in human relationships.
When we have positive interactions with each other, the hormone oxytocin floods our system, reducing stress and promoting trust, empathy and social bonding. It’s a positive feedback loop between the brain’s hypothalamus which produces it and the pituitary gland that stores it.
Oxytocin production relies on human physical presence, skin-to-skin, eye contact and hugging. This doesn’t happen when we interact online, with robots or during AI simulated experiences of digital empathy.
Another of Steinem’s wisdoms, and subsequent title of her book is: ‘The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off’.
I love the way this quote takes things from the pulpit to the living room by stitching together lofty ideas with the everyday realm of human emotions.
Quick poll: in thinking about truth today, how pissed off are you on a scale from one to ten, with one being ‘yeah, nah’ and ten being ‘so incandescent with rage I could light up a dark alleyway’?
Judging by the collective mood, I’d say we’re nudging the upper end of the scale but are edging closer to the truth and freedom?
♦ Jo Immig is a former advisor to the NSW Legislative Council and Coordinator of the National Toxics Network. She’s currently a freelance writer and researcher.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
