Trust ... What is it Good For?
December 9, 2004
8:42 a.m., MT
Music: Rush, Turn the Page
Those of you old enough to know the song I'm alluding to in my title were probably tempted to fill in the next line, as it's rather an automatic response to the song. (For those of you who are too young and/or musically-impaired to follow me thus far, the next line is "Absolutely nuthin'!")

That's a pretty harsh statement to make of trust (the original song was about war); and I'm not advancing or defending that view. However, it does us well to reflect on that question -- and related ones -- from time to time. Who do we trust, and why? Is trust earned years ago still valid, or have we become lax, and now rely on resources that are no longer deserving of our trust?

I was thinking about all this as I prepared a new addition to my freedom essays section. It's my chapter in the book National Identification Systems: Essays in Opposition, titled ID After the Revolution.


I decided to publish the original version here because it's better than the version that went into the book, and with the passage of the new "intelligence" bill the issue of the national ID raises its head yet again. There are lots of items in the bill that expect trust from us -- more trust in our federal and state governments. While those of us who love liberty typically know better (at least in some areas, if not all) than to automatically grant that trust, many, having grown up trusting it and being spoon-fed propaganda that glorified it, have a very hard time challenging that almost-implicit trust.

We're more likely to trust things that we label "the truth", and information from individuals we perceive to be telling us the truth. (Butler Shaffer addresses the issue of truth more directly in his new essay Inconstant Interests in Truth.) While the veracity of state-dispensed information has taken a beating over recent years, and "Good enough for government work" epitomizes many individuals' trust in bureaucrats' quality of work, for too many the trust remains fundamentally unchallenged. (I believe that this is in part responsible for many libertarians' willingness to participate in electoral politics -- they trust the state's tool [voting] while professing to be skeptical of the state.)

What will it take to sufficiently undermine the average U.S. citizen's trust in the state to speed its slo-mo crash that's already in progress? I don't know, specifically ... but there's certainly plenty of ammo around for the interested pro-freedom individual to fire liberally (but not indiscriminately) into the crowd (that being a good thing with this kind of ammunition). If the NID and other privacy-and-budget-sapping provisions of the new bill [PDF format] don't work, it's likely that Tenet's recent comments on government control over the internet will.

The pot's heating up, li'l froggies. I may be naive or unrealistically optimistic, but I do think that if pro-freedom individuals invest the time and effort into one-on-one communication with Joe and Joanne Mainstream, tactfully challenging their trust in the state, it can make a real difference in how the next few years play out. (However, I'm not so naive as to stop my preps for when the shit hits the fan.)

So, who do you trust? Why? What do you trust them with? Is that trust well-placed? Ask now, and recheck your answers periodically, because I predict that not so long from now, you're going to need to rely on that trust more than you ever have before.

[Musical note: Turn the Page [popup alert] is always near the top of my ever-changing list of favorite Rush tunes, in part because of this bit:
"Truth is after all a moving target
Hairs to split, and pieces that don't fit
How can anybody be enlightened?
Truth is after all so poorly lit"
You can buy it or hear excerpts at Amazon, o'course. I agree with many of the reviewers there that this CD is a rather under-appreciated Rush effort.]

Sunni

Replies: 2 individuals have opined

On Tuesday, December 14th, Elias Alias said:

Sunni, thank you for touching on a most-important idea. The idea of trust, the "act" of trust, is more important today than ever before. In coming times we shall find that all of our reality finally settles like the fine dust of history onto the bedrock of our culture and our society, and that reality comes full circle as "We The People".

What some of us here in Montana are doing presently is promoting community involvement, getting to know our neighbors, making friends in our locales, strengthening the human bonds of trust so that we'll better be able to withstand the coming crash. Your article is timely and much needed. Thanks, with a big ol' TMM Salute!

Elias

On Thursday, December 9th, charley hardman said:

sunni, i just zapped my original comment on this before posting. too depressing. anyway, i'm glad you're thinking and writing about it. hope to get to your links later.