Trust: necessary, but not sufficient

There’s this scene at the end of The Sound of Music* that I think about a lot, especially over the last several years. The von Trapp family, on the verge of escaping Nazi-occupied Austria, is hiding from soldiers behind a tombstone in an abbey cemetery.

*(I feel compelled to say that I don’t actually like musicals very much but for some reason have seen this movie—not usually voluntarily—several times.)

The soldiers dispatched to find them finally give up and leave, and the family emerges from their hiding place. But one soldier, Rolfe, the eldest von Trapp daughter’s love interest, had stayed behind on a hunch and spots them. Rolfe’s character had a pretty brisk embrace of Nazism over the course of the movie, so his involvement isn’t a surprise, but the family still has some hope that their lifelong connection will prevent him from betraying them.

“Rolfe, please!” cries Liesl.

Dropping his whistle, Rolfe points a gun at them. Georg (Captain) von Trapp tells Maria and the children to run while Rolfe threatens to shoot them. “You’re only a boy,” says von Trapp, and asks Rolfe to run away with them “before it’s too late.” Rolfe doesn’t shoot, and von Trapp takes his gun away. “You will never be one of them,” he says. Rolfe looks up, shocked and angry, and yells for his superior.

“Lieutenant! Lieutenant, they’re here! They’re here, lieutenant.”

Anyone who’s seen the movie knows that the family escapes thanks to the nuns who helped them hide and then stole parts of the Nazis’ car engines. (The real story is that the von Trapps did leave Austria due to the takeover of Nazism, but it was openly by train to Italy.)

This is a climactic moment where Rolfe is given an opportunity to draw from a lifetime of relationship to stay silent and let the von Trapps go. But he doesn’t. Frozen for a moment until relieved of his pistol, he shouts for his fellows, choosing ideology over the pleas of people he’s known all his life.

Though Rolfe is a fictional character, this scene lingers with me because at the heart of trust is relationship but relationship is not always enough to keep trust intact. Necessary but not sufficient. Sometimes the relationship and the trust shatter together.

But sometimes they don’t. Finding the shape and boundaries of trust in a community (or in a relationship) is—I think—partly about giving that “not” the best chance possible. To give everybody their strongest connection to their deepest humanity so that when they’re tested, they choose what is right over what is easy, what is kind over what is cruel. And that we each give ourselves the same chance.

I think of that scene a lot because a few years ago, when some local disagreement turned vitriolic out of all proportion, I saw someone look at me that way. I knew we disagreed about the issue that was on everyone’s minds, though I don’t think we’d ever even spoken to each other, but until that moment I hadn’t realized how fully animosity over the issue had penetrated many of the people concerned in it.

This look was distinctive. It caught my eyes for a moment before sliding away and I realized that for that person I’d lost my right to compassion, to humanity. That person had already dehumanized me, had chosen to dehumanize me and others, over what was, in the grand scheme of things, a very minor disagreement, and before we’d ever spoken a word to each other.

People often ask how something like the Holocaust could happen, how good people with supposedly honorable values could let it happen. They’ve asked the same about the Rwandan genocide and the war in Yugoslavia where so many former neighbors killed one another in the name of “ethnic cleansing” and are asking the same now about the massacres in Ukraine.

This, I think, is partly why. It starts with a willingness to dehumanize another, to decide that they’re not worthy of your compassion. And it doesn’t have to be over religion or race. It can be for any reason, even trivial ones. That doesn’t mean a small local disagreement leads to genocide; it means that we all have the capacity for dehumanization within us. We can choose to fight it, or give into its temptations.

I ran into this line years ago and have looked for the source but haven’t found it again: Every ideology eventually leads to eugenics.

I hear echoes of this all the time: If only these people would go away; if only those people would die out, or disappear.

This is in part why I think trust is so important for building community. We have to live together. Sometimes it absolutely sucks. A lot of times it absolutely sucks. There are people whose viewpoints, at least, we wish would disappear, but unless we’re willing to wipe out the people who hold those views, or unless we are actually engaged in life-or-death situations or conflict (including the stripping away of rights), we have no choice but to find ways to inhabit our communities together, to find the small intersections where trust might be able to thrive, even temporarily.

I think about this reality all the time on several levels. On the closely interpersonal after that moment of dehumanization—which came a few years after neo-Nazis tried to rip apart my town and destroy people within it—and on slightly larger scales because, aside from national and international tensions, I live in a liberal-leaning small town in a larger county population that trends, sometimes heavily, toward aspects of the far right. I know what kinds of indoctrination many people here are saturated in, the kind that says liberal-minded people are an enemy force trying to destroy their “way of life”** and that people like me must be stopped by any means necessary.

**(Whatever that happens to mean but around here it’s likely white, Christian, straight, and decisively sexist.)

How do people who think the way I do, who want to see the kind of world I hope for, humanize ourselves in the eyes of people being almost willfully radicalized?

I have no answer to that. That is, my answer is trust and connection but I’m not persuaded that they’re enough, not when for many dehumanizing and hating others can feel so good, so justified, so righteous. Again, trust is necessary, but not sufficient. I’m not here to give guarantees. But I don’t see a path forward or through except through trust and conection, even if I can’t see where they’ll lead.

What, then, does trust mean?

A few years ago Brené Brown gave a short talk on a concept she calls BRAVING, which presents a structure of trust:

“Trust is a big word, right? To hear ‘I trust you’ or ‘I don’t trust you,’ I don’t even know what that means. What is the anatomy of trust? . . . When we trust, we are braving conection with someone.”

The elements of trust in her definition are: boundaries, reliability, accountability, vault (“we share things that are not ours to share as a way to hotwire connection with other people,” or “common enemy intimacy”), integrity, nonjudgment, and generosity.

I imagine that for everyone the importance of each of these (if they apply at all) will vary. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about boundaries and reliability from the many, many people who serve with local non-profits where I live, for example. When I asked the director of one to organize some public comment on an issue I was helping bring to city council, they talked with me about “mission creep” and explained how important it was to maintain boundaries so you can actually do the work, and then explained why my project did actually fit in with their organization’s mission and why.

We were walking outside examining a dangerous highway crossing and I realized as the director spoke that I was being flooded with a sense of trust because they were being so clear about their boundaries. And that when I personally overcommit and say yes to too many things (still a problem for me), I am failing to be worthy of trust because the reality is that I either won’t be able to fulfill those commitments or I’ll do a poor job.

Trust is a project, an exploration, a way of being in the world. I’ve wondered recently if dismantling the culture of colonialism/capitalism/empire will require that culture to redefine, even rediscover, what this word “trust” really means. We might find that it’s simply an aspect of what many, many, Indigenous leaders, elders, writers, speakers, activists, and everyone else have been telling us all along: right relations. Kinship. It wasn’t, after all, any of the Native Nations or First Nations in North America or other colonized countries that broke treaty after treaty and lied and deceived and massacred to get what they wanted.

So what does trust do? In part, it makes life possible. One of the interesting things about Brown’s talk is her quoting of Charles Feltman’s definition of trust, which is “making something important to you vulnerable to the actions of someone else.” In the context of, for example, doomsday prepping and stockpiling weaponry in preparation for the whatever-apocalypse, you can see a society of people terrified of trusting anyone else with the safety and security of their family or their own self. Unfortunately, the only way to survive disasters of any kind is with some level of trust in others. All those billionaires building bunkers to escape into when everything collapses? Not only do they have to trust the people building them, they’ll have to have—and cultivate—long-term trust with people who help maintain them, who keep them stocked with supplies or fix water leaks or provide security.

So we can wall our own selves away (which will ultimately fail to give us the invulnerability we seek but it won’t stop people trying), or we have to take the risk of trust. And once you do that, you’re going to want community whose mutual trust has a good chance of making it through the upheavals of life, whether it’s surviving a hurricane or organizing a street fair or holding you together when grief and loss come to call.

One thing I think Brown misses in her definition is “repair.” She talks about accountability but I don’t think that’s really the same thing. Trust is going to be broken, and in a society where admitting fault or saying, “I’m sorry” is something many adults choke on, repairing broken trust seems like a a skill that’s almost quaint. Without repair, the shape of trust feels incomplete, an unspoken expectation of fulfilling those qualifications without ever stumbling, ever failing. But we will fail all the time. I fail as a parent, as a friend, as a spouse, as a daughter, as a community member, on a regular basis. Being able to find ways to repair, to say that I am sorry, feels like the only way of keeping broken trust from becoming the final form of any given relationship—as long as it’s done authentically. (If, that is, the other conditions are already met. Plenty of people use apology as a way to enable betrayal or abuse.) To have the room to make mistakes, to apologize for them, and (importantly) to be allowed to apologize and to move on, keeps trust a live, vibrant thing.

Trust is one of those things that when I step back reminds me of our embodied interconnection. In an episode of Vaccine: The Human Story, the host describes how the first large-scale smallpox vaccine campaigns in England often failed because the people they were trying to reach had very good reasons for doubting that the government had their best interests in mind. They had little reason to trust. I have to trust the person who replaces the brake pads on my car, have to trust the factory where those brake pads were made. Trust that my town actually does need to raise water rates to upgrade the wastewater treatment plant. Trust that election officials are faithfully and honestly administering elections. Trust that my coffee beans come from the region declared on the label, trust that when I publish this essay Substack won’t glitch and fail to send out the email like it did last time. My clients have to trust that when I agree to a copy editing contract I’ll fulfill its terms, and I have to trust that they’ll pay me. Everything we buy, trade, consume, or do has elements of trust mixed in with it. When that trust fails, or we break it, the journey of repair has to begin if we’re to salvage anything of the relationship.

And trust can be used to bad ends, too, by people from cult leaders and con artists. By religious heads or yoga gurus who abuse their followers. By friends who betray our secrets for personal gain, by caregivers, by politicians. It can be used to turn us against one another. To create out-groups, to dehumanize.

Trust can be broken intentionally in the interests of capital—where trust, relationship, and reciprocity fade, money can step in. In Doughnut Economics, which I’m reading at the moment, economist Kate Raworth describes several studies in which the mere introduction of monetary compensation for behavior reduces feelings of trust. It seems to weaken, somehow, the human connections that nurture relationship, a phenomenon that David Graeber and David Wengrow also noted in The Dawn of Everything when talking about one of the three basic freedoms, that of forming relationships:

“The freedom to make promises is about the most basic and minimal element of our third freedom, much as physically running away from a difficult situation is the most basic element of the first. . . . How could that most basic element of all human freedoms, the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build relationships, be turned into its very opposite: into peonage, serfdom, or permanent slavery? It happens, we’d suggest, precisely when promises become impersonal, transferable—in a nutshell, bureaucratized. . . .

As money is to promises, we might say, state bureaucracy is to the principle of care: in each case we find one of the most fundamental building blocks of social life corrupted by a confluence of math and violence.”

I wonder if a market-based or capitalist attitude toward nature not only teaches us to commodify it and forget our relationship to it, but contributes to breakdown of societal trust. One of the quotes I keep on my desk, from Jack Turner’s book The Abstract Wild, prompts thought on this question constantly, in a section discussing decline in consensus and the increasing failure of economic thinking to serve either ecological or moral needs:

“When trust erodes, personal relations, and family, communities, and nations delaminate. To live with this erosion is to experience modernity. The modern heirs of the Enlightenment believe that material progress is worth the loss of shared experience, place, community, and trust.”

What do you do, then, when you can’t trust? Right now, as a female and a parent of a daughter, I do not trust that those in control of my state government and most of my national government wish to allow us, but especially my daughter, a future of freedom and self-determination, not when those with barely concealed Christian nationalist leanings hold so much power and speak openly of a desire for women to limit our activities to the realms of motherhood and housekeeping. I can’t imagine that anyone within any traditionally marginalized community can trust that our state legislature in Montana wants to create a world where they, too, have a future of freedom and self-determination.

What do you do when you live among people who make little secret that their worldview necessitates your non-existence, or at least only existence within very narrow confines acceptable to them?

I don’t have an answer to that one either, though I think finding responses is necessary because those who wish to control or limit or erase others will not stop at the boundaries of any given region, but I also think it makes being a person of trust even more important. One of the strongest tools of authoritarianism, described by Hannah Arendt and more recently by Zeynep Tufekçi, is isolation. Loneliness. A complete inability to trust others due to fear for your life or for harm to those you love. It’s what defined the society of my father’s childhood under Stalin, and what many in Russia are remembering or learning anew right now. I wrote a bit of his experiences in A Walking Life:

“‘I remember,’ he told me as we walked around his small Montana town together one summer, picking chokecherries in the park, ‘after Stalin started going after “enemies of the people,” how fast trust was lost, even in families. Wives against husbands, children against parents.’ Trust was a precious, almost unknown commodity in the Soviet Union. People were persecuted for practicing Russian Orthodoxy, for being of Jewish descent, for being a doctor or a poet, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, for having a job that someone else wanted. Denunciations from friends or colleagues or family members came thick, smothering and choking normal human relations like an invasive weed.

My father was raised in this atmosphere, but in a family that valued honesty above all else. He was lucky. He was free in one of the only ways possible in the country of his childhood, able to indulge in freedom of speech and thought in the confines of his family’s apartment in Leningrad, and free to roam his city with friends he could trust.”

When I find myself doubting my community, my state, my children’s future, I look around for the people I know I can rely on, the people I trust. These can be friends, local leaders, family, or the outspoken people writing for local papers—like brewery owner Maggie Doherty and organic farmer Mike Jopek, whose columns I rely on to remind myself we’re not alone in this community—to Forward Montana, which has dug in hard to build a better Montana by fighting for a community and future where all are welcome, and even to my local daily paper itself, which is imperfect but has repeatedly shown me its dedication to highlighting local stories that matter to the people who live here.

To be a person of trust is to keep alive a networked knowledge that we are not alone. I wrote about this at length last year (and before that here), and I think it’s crucial that we give ourselves regular reminders of this: You are not alone.

There are no guarantees that things won’t fall apart. I’m not particularly optimistic about climate change or the rise of authoritarianism in its various forms. But that’s why trust, especially trust within one’s community, matters so much. Everything I read or listen to comes back to it, and it’s where we find the wherewithall to work for a better world while learning to love what we can in the world we have.

At the end of an older interview by Patrick Farnsworth with journalists Dahr Jamail and Barbara Cecil, Jamail quotes environmental activist Joanna Macy saying perhaps the only thing we need to hear on the subject of trust:

“I’m doing this work so that when things fall apart, we will not turn on each other.”

(That podcast episode is very much in the climate collapse realm, just to forewarn anyone who might want to listen.)

The thing is, while helping to build communities resilient against that turning, I wonder: what could we be unintentionally saving in the process? Rebuilding connection and trust feels a lot, to me, like what I’ve found with walking: with each step, we might discover tiny universes of possibility and ways of being that we had no idea were there all along.

Just last night I read a chapter of We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on a Changing Earth, a collection of interviews edited by Dahr Jamail and Cherokee elder Stan Rushworth. In writing of his conversation with Dr. Kyle Powys White about kinship and communication, Rushworth wrote:

“The trust is what it’s all about, and we can’t create a policy around that. We can’t institutionalize that. It’s something we have to live, and we have to want to live it.”

The concept of trust is threaded throughout White’s ideas. Kinship almost seems to be a manifestation of trust in the ways he describes both, and I think it’s here that we come back to why trust is so hard to define: we don’t know it because we have so little relationship with it. In such broken cultures defined by domination paradigms, trust feels terrifying. It lives in exile.

An enormous amount of trust was broken—and continues to be broken—during the pandemic, from trust in institutions and leaders (for those who had trust in them to begin with), to friendships and family relations. I imagine a lot of people are finding trust shaky or difficult or at least reevaluating what it means for them. As with many things, I don’t think trust is any given thing, that is has some universal quality we can pin down and aim for. It’s a relationship we are each exploring, as individuals and together. And, as with many things, I think we’ll find ourselves on firmer ground if we begin looking it fully in the face, finding its structure and shape in our lives. Turning trust into something necessary and sufficient, vital and alive, like the planet itself.