On Trust

Published on Aug 31, 2025, filed under philosophy, misc (feed). (Share this on Mastodon or Bluesky?)

Some people approach life with the idea that “trust needs to be earned.” I believe that’s nonsense, and not how the world works.

When we look around, we see how trust is being extended. Trust is not passive—trust is active.

Nothing would work if we’d always need to earn trust first. That’s because mistrust is slow and expensive and ultimately repelling. Imagine on the first meeting of a new person you’d tell them to wait until you ran a background check on them. That’s slow and expensive—and by the time you have your results, there’s no new acquaintance waiting for you.

We notice the opposite, rather, in every interaction in which we meet new people: We extend trust to the foreigners on the street, the people in the supermarket, the new colleagues at the company we joined, the partygoers at the festival, the other drivers on the road.

We extend that trust. Trust is active.

Now, trust can be disappointed and broken. Absolutely.

That’s a mess.

When this happens, the stakes are being raised. We watch over our shoulder, we check the receipts, we ask other colleagues for confirmation, we guard our drinks and turn down the flirt, we buy a tank to muscle our way through traffic.

And here it gets a little complicated.

We don’t only deal with trust now, or the difficulty of it being rebuilt by people we may never see again (and who, perhaps, aren’t even aware they shattered our trust).

We also deal with fear, of our trust being broken again, of us being violated in our sense of cooperative safety.

Broken trust and fear of our trust being broken beget mistrust.

And with that mistrust, our lives become expensive and we ourselves become repelling.

But I mentioned trust being rebuilt. So there is something about earning trust?

Maybe.

“Maybe,” because this assumes a relationship where the trust-breaking person makes a decision to make it easier for the person whose trust they broke to regain it.

This is also a bit complicated (which is why we don’t see it that often).

We need to assume a relationship here because the person who breaks our side mirror and disappears doesn’t have a relationship with us. They may not even know they broke mirror and trust, and will not make any decision to restore trust with us.

Anyone deciding to rebuild trust only make it easier for us, because still it’s on us to—extend trust again. The other can do whatever they want, if we don’t extend trust yet again, that’s that. We probably see this all the time in broken relationships, where the side who broke trust will not be “forgiven” again—because the person whose trust was disappointed is just not extending it again.

So we’re back at the beginning—rebuilding trust also requires extending trust.

We still have another problem, however.

Trust requires truth.

What we’ve been seeing from lobby groups for many decades (whether for Big X or entire countries, like Israel) and from political parties for many years (especially the Far Right), is the short-sighted but effective hollowing out of truth.

The play is simple:

1. Just claim something, something that either shines a good light on you or a bad light on someone else.
2. If someone agrees, shine a good light on them—positive reinforcement.
3. If someone disagrees, shine a bad light on them—deterrence.
4. Rinse and repeat.

The problem? This playbook involves no truth. These statements can be anything, like “Palestinians are terrorists” (they aren’t) or “immigrants take jobs away” (they don’t).

With enough energy at your disposal (time, money, people, resources) you can out-truth anyone and anything.

Here it gets complicated once again:

First, this makes total sense. Philosophically speaking, this is how the world works, because our reality is subjective. (Actually, it is both subjective and objective, but the point is that here, only subjectiveness matters.)

But just because it makes sense, doesn’t mean it’s practical. The reason we need truth is that it’s a form of a compass.

We cannot get anywhere if our compass is broken.

That metaphor is useful because truth is literally an instrument for navigation.

It works in the most basic sense: If we’re in Spain and we choose to drive to Germany, then we need to head north-east (for this example there’s no need to print out specific directions—you get the point). If we drive south, we won’t get there. If we drive north, we don’t get there. So to reach our goal, we need… truth.

It’s the same with everything else. Any accomplishment requires truth. We see this the most in science, where the scientific method is fundamentally a truth-finding exercise. Just working with claims, the method of lobby groups and political parties, will not reach any scientific goal, because that method doesn’t rely on truth.

Yet here’s the ultimate complication:

Truth also requires trust.

We really can only be truthful if we trust.

We may not feel like lying to people we don’t trust, but we’re far less open and transparent when we don’t trust them. We do lie, by omission.

What we observe around us, and probably within us, is a growing crisis of trust.

We extend less and less trust to each other.

We are less and less truthful to each other.

By being less truthful to each other, we end up less trusting to each other.

Some people, like aforementioned lobby groups and political parties, use this to skip truth altogether. They use any remaining trust to spread untruth, not realizing how ultimately, they keep withdrawing from the trust credits extended to them. (It’s a separate topic, but over time, no one will look favorably at any lobby effort or any extremist political agenda. That’s because they’re not built on truth.)

Other people withdraw. Their trust keeps getting disappointed by untruth from people and in statements. On some level, they know that they have to trust in order to stay close to their truth, any truth; and so they choose to trust, but less so; and they withdraw and they eject.

What’s going to happen?

Given how we choose to f up, this crisis will keep spiraling, and we will see less trust and less truth until it all collapses in some form of catastrophe—we will get “surprised” by climate disasters, by economic collapse, and/or another world war.

Does this all follow from… trust?

Yes—and, as shown, truth.

Ultimately, the argument is this:

Our world is a collaborative endeavor. (Competition is Darwin-inspired and, together with property and scarcity, capitalism-affirming BS.) Collaboration requires trust. Trust requires truth—and truth requires trust. Just making and aggressively pushing on claims, like lobbyists and political extremists do, is untruthful and therefore undermines trust. Without trust and without truth, there’s ultimately no collaboration—and, ultimately, no world.

We’re at the end, though it’s only getting complicated again: Elsewhere, there’s the idea that truth, joy, and love are essentially synonymous. And if you were wondering if a world without truth would really collapse, then consider if it would without joy—or without love.

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a web developer, manager, and author. I’ve been working as a technical lead and engineering manager for companies you’ve never heard of and companies you use every day, I’m an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (I value you being critical, interpreting charitably, and giving feedback.)