David Egan Philosophy

I was a keen reader of Asterix comics as a child. They tell of a plucky village of Gauls that maintain their independence from Rome thanks to their grit and the magic potion of the village druid Getafix, which confers superhuman strength on those who drink it. The typical Asterix comic features some threat from the Romans that requires the shrewd and feisty Asterix and his oafish but genial sidekick Obelix to go on some great adventure.

The closest our heroes ever come to defeat is in Asterix and the Roman Agent. The principal threat in that one isn’t a Roman legion or some other military menace. The villain is a wily Roman called Tortuous Convolvulus who has the singular talent of turning people against one another. We first meet him as a prisoner in Rome—he’d been sentenced to be eaten by lions but he sparked a quarrel between the lions and they ate each other instead. When he comes to the attention of the canny Julius Caesar, Caesar spies an opportunity and ships him off to Gaul. Our Gaulish village, which has staved off legions of Romans, starts to fall apart as Convolvulus insinuates his way among them.

I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Asterix and the Roman Agent in the last decade. It seems in some rather ingenious ways to anticipate our current age of populist politics. The populist playbook places heavy emphasis on sowing division and eroding trust. Trust is a mysterious entity, so ubiquitous that we hardly notice it’s there until it’s gone. But when it’s gone, it’s very hard to recover. As the world lurches into a second Trump presidency, I thought it might be apposite to offer some reflections on trust.

Do you trust the government of the country you live in? I’m willing to bet $100 that you do—or £100 or €100 or whatever the local currency is. (I’d offer up 100 Turkish lira but that doesn’t amount to much.)

What makes me so confident? Not speculations about the subscribers to my newsletter. My confidence is baked into the bet itself. The $100 you’d stand to gain in proving me wrong has value only to the extent that you and others have confidence in your country’s central bank. When people lose confidence in their government’s ability to honour its debts, the value of the currency collapses, as has happened in periods of hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, Weimar Germany, and elsewhere. If at a deep level you don’t trust your government, you shouldn’t be trying to win bets in that government’s currency.

Trust mostly goes unnoticed. And yet, as the philosopher Sissela Bok writes, “Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.” Like the air we breathe, we don’t notice it precisely because we rely on it so universally. When I cross the street, I trust that no cars will plow into me. When I buy or order food, I trust that no one has poisoned it. When I ask a stranger the time, I trust that they aren’t willfully lying to me. Without this basic atmosphere of trust, we wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning—nor could we stay in bed without trusting that our home is secure and no one wishes us harm.

Human trust is a remarkable achievement. A couple days ago, I was on a thirteen-hour flight from Istanbul to Vancouver. Hundreds of strangers were crammed together in close quarters and yet, apart from a few crying babies, we all quietly minded our own business. Imagine, by contrast, cramming a few hundred chimpanzees into a sealed capsule for thirteen hours with recycled air and occasional turbulence. You’d probably be picking limbs off the floor after the plane landed.

Trust takes many forms, from the intimacy and vulnerability between lovers to the impersonal exchange of money that I mentioned above. Money is on the more impersonal end of the trust spectrum because it serves as an intermediary between people who have no particular reason to trust one another. I don’t trust you and you don’t trust me but we both trust in the value of money, and that means we can do business with one another. Legal contracts perform a similar function. As long as we trust the mechanisms of contract law, we can enter into relations with people we might not otherwise trust.

A lot of ethical theory has this contractarian form. On some conceptions of ethics, our moral life consists principally of rules: not to kill, not to steal, to keep one’s promises, and so on. We institute certain agreements about not stepping on one another’s toes and, within those limits, we’re each of us free to pursue our happiness in whatever way we see fit.

In a seminal paper on trust, the philosopher Annette Baier points out that this is an utterly sociopathic way of thinking about ethics. Part of the genius of money and contracts is that they conjure trust from nothing. We can have dealings with people who are nothing to us because these artificial intermediaries ensure our cooperation. But the idea of taking low-trust cooperation between strangers as your model for ethics sets a very low bar for what we can expect from each other. Most of our moral lives—most of our lives period—involve dealing with people with whom we stand in various relations of dependency, vulnerability, and intimacy.

When you think about these kinds of relationships—between parents and children, between lovers, between neighbours, between friends—you can see how far a rules-and-contracts conception of ethics falls short of a full picture of our moral lives. I may owe a debt of gratitude to my parents, but (luckily for me) no one has written up a ledger of that debt and my parents don’t expect repayment in kind. Parents issuing their children with an invoice for services rendered are either making some kind of a joke or are—to repeat—utterly sociopathic.

An ethics that recognizes the centrality of trust emphasizes our vulnerability and our interdependence. It also emphasizes the importance of discretion in our dealings with one another. Even explicitly contractual agreements are underwritten by various kinds of non-contractual trust. If you owe me $50, I not only trust you to pay me, but I also trust you to pay me in certain standard ways: an e-transfer, say, or a ten and two twenties. If you show up at my door with a jar full of pennies (or I guess if we’re in Canada it would have to be a jar full of nickels), you’ll have lived up to the letter of our agreement while also violating my trust. I trusted not just that you would pay me but also that you wouldn’t be a dick about it.

A crude way of characterizing populist politics is to say that it’s a politics based on being a dick about it. Populist rhetoric is anti-trust: you can’t trust institutions, you can’t trust the news, you can’t trust one another, you certainly can’t trust immigrants. It advocates a policy of minimal public trust by arguing that the institutions we’ve naively trusted for so long have betrayed the people—are, indeed, enemies of the people.

The claim that public institutions have failed the people they’re meant to serve may have some merit in some cases. But populist politics doesn’t explore ways to restore that trust. The populist demagogue instead tries to redirect people’s dependence from these various institutions onto him (or sometimes her).

It’s worth asking who is best served by the erosion of public trust. I remarked earlier that trust acknowledges our vulnerability, our interdependence, and the importance of discretion in our dealings with one another. Those who have the least to lose when trust falls away are those who are least vulnerable, least dependent on others, and least scrupulous in terms of discretion. The dark irony of populism is that it purports to be speaking on behalf of “the people,” but, in undermining trust, it works in favour of the rich and the powerful.

It’s easier to destroy than it is to build. This maxim is evident in the shattered cities of Syria or Gaza, in the devastation in Sudan and Myanmar. But it’s a maxim that holds true not just of physical destruction but also of the destruction of trust. Part of what’s alarming about trust is that, because it’s so ubiquitous, we don’t recognize how much we were depending on it until it’s gone. Under normal circumstances, we sustain trust effortlessly and so it can be hard to reconstruct it deliberately. Rebuilding broken trust can be an awkward and clumsy affair, like a person with a spinal injury trying to learn all over again how to walk.

For what it’s worth, Asterix and co. do eventually rally together and give Convulvulus his comeuppance. In the process, Asterix, Getafix, and Obelix conspire to teach their sniping neighbours a lesson about trust. In most Asterix stories, they overcome their enemies with the help of a magic potion. What this story illustrates is that the real magic potion that rescues them time and again is mutual trust. 

1. Jonathan Swift was a pioneer of what we now call microfinance. He set up a fund to provide interest-free loans to poor tradesmen that would give them the capital to invest in their own businesses. His example inspired a system of “loan funds” in Ireland that, at its peak, provided credit to a fifth of the population. (source)
2. Obesity causes hypertension because the additional blood vessels serving fat tissue require greater cardiac output. For every additional kilogram of fat, the body needs about 650km of additional blood vessels. (source)
3. Tourists throwing coins into the Trevi Fountain in Rome yields proceeds of close to €2 million per year, which are then donated to charity. (source)
4. During the Second World War, the BBC would open its hourly news broadcasts by recording the tolling of Big Ben. German scientists learned to infer the weather in London based on minute differences in the sound of the tolling bells, which in turn helped them plan air raids on London. (source)
5. Money sent back or brought back home by foreign migrants amounted to $781 billion in 2021, most of it flowing from high-income countries to middle- or low-income countries. That’s nearly four times the amount of money sent to poorer countries as foreign aid. About $32 billion are lost in transaction fees that exceed the rate recommended by the United Nations. (source)
6. Aristotle’s Masterpiece was a big seller in early modern England, was continuously in print from the late seventeenth to early twentieth centuries, and even gets mentioned in Joyce’s Ulysses. Except it’s not a book by Aristotle. It was an early modern sex manual whose name came from the fact that Aristotle was regarded as an expert on sexual matters. (source)
7. The average American dairy cow produces about nineteen times more milk than the average African dairy cow. (source)