Bo Diddley revolutionized rock 'n roll when he asked "Who Do You Love?" He was the first badass. But I gotta say, his description of himself and his lifestyle doesn't exactly instill confidence - "A rattlesnake necktie" and "a chimney made of human skull." Not what I'd be putting on my Tinder bio (if I had one). He's basically saying to his girl, take a chance with me. Which suggests he understands that the more important question is Who Do You Trust?
"In God We Trust" is what it says on the American greenback - until this week the most trusted currency in the world - which is bizarre enough. Aside from the fact that it suggests only God is trustworthy ie. people can't really be trusted, Americans seem to equate God and money.
But the more important message is that everything is built on trust: Every relationship, from love and family to business, every time you go to see the doctor, every time you get into your car to drive somewhere, every time you open your phone to get the news. Trust is literally the glue that holds the entire world together. And the more interconnected the world has become the more complex and confounding the network of trust is.
It wasn't too long ago when doctors made housecalls. You knew your 'green grocer' and dairy was delivered to your home by a milkman. Ours was named Maurice, and he drove an orange Guaranteed Milk Truck that had sliding doors, sort of like the Amazon Prime delivery vans you see today. Maurice would give me and my friends rides down the block with the doors open. But trust was not only a function of neighbourhood relationships. A sense of trust existed at many levels of society. For instance, in every household we watched the 6 o'clock news on television when dad got home from work. It was a national ritual everyone shared. There were four or five channels, the broadcasts delivered more or less the same information, and CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite was called 'the Most Trusted Man in America'.
I'm not saying this to wax nostalgic, but rather to describe how fragmented our world has become, and the tangible way that fragmentation has impacted our daily activities and interactions. Sixty years ago, it was much easier to decide if people were trustworthy when you dealt with them face to face on a regular and ongoing basis, and I believe this translated into a general feeling of trust and security in society at large. The world we live in is impersonal and remote. The crises we are facing today - and I use the plural term because it's multiple crises political, economic, cultural, layered one on top of the other, like a cake - is actually only one crisis: A crisis of trust. People don't know who to trust, so they end up trusting no one, and the reality they live in loses meaning and coherence. They self-cocoon with their screens. When that happens they become susceptible to believing the most outlandish ideas; conspiracies, fanatical religions, extreme politics, grasping for anyone and anything that projects certainty and confidence.
A talent for gaining the confidence of people is the main trait of every snake oil salesman and swindler - that's why they call him a con-man. Trump is not the cause of the crisis we find ourselves in, he is a symptom of it. His main talent for exploiting insecurity could not have asked for a more fertile environment in which to operate. A person like him, without principles, values or morals, thrives in an environment where trust is low. His followers are devoted to him not because they are stupid, but because they are desperate. The one thing he offers his constituents that the Democrats have failed miserably at, is vision, even if it's the most absurd, impractical, cynical and backward-looking one. In trump's case, it's a vision of security provided by a fence that Mexico would pay for, or the security of manufacturing jobs that would come flooding back to America once the tariffs start working their magic, or the security of Russia making peace with Ukraine in 24 hours etc. It doesn't matter if the vision has any relationship to reality, it's the vision that counts. In some sense the more outlandish the vision the more deeply committed the followers of the visionary become, often at their own personal expense. And once the followers have committed it's nearly impossible to get them back - the hardest thing to admit is that you're wrong. Trumpism is unique in that it combines elements of nihilistic religious devotion and craven individual self-interest, which makes it an undeniably potent and dangerous political force. Trump will inevitably self-destruct, but it won't be because the cheering crowds will suddenly realize that the emperor has no clothes. He'll push the envelope too far. He's done it several times before, but got lucky and survived. His luck will eventually run out, as it always does at some point.
In the meantime, he will continue to do further damage to the already-deficient and declining level of trust that exists in society. I'm not sure what we can do to restore it at this point. I'm just hoping that it doesn't take a catastrophe to do a re-set.
2 comments:
Where are all these cartoons coming from?
Thank you ChatGPT
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