Trust, the Coin of a Realm
“Would you mind watching my stuff for a few minutes while I go to the restroom?”
“Of course. I’m happy to.”
I have had this interaction in libraries, sometimes in airports, many, many times. I’ve come to see how vital and valuable this very small action is. To be able to trust someone — especially a relative stranger — to watch your things for a short period of time is truly a source of great common wealth.
I’m often with a friend at the library here, and it’s easy this courtesy for each other when the need arises. It’s riskier with strangers, but the value of trust among strangers is when trust’s goodness is most obvious, even pleasurable. When it comes to one of the most elementary features of life (everybody’s gotta go!), we all need safety and security, and thus discover our shared and basic human need of trust as well as our culture’s relative wealth or poverty in trust.
When trust shatters, how do we repair it? Grand gestures of repair almost always fail by overpromising and underdelivering. And, unfortunately, the painful wound of having one’s trust exploited can make one even more vulnerable to further exploitation. It’s why politicians, car salespeople, advertisers, and erstwhile televangelists — (our contemporary moment has new forms of these religion-for-sale figures) — are so distrusted. The methods of overpromising and underdelivering tend to create and expand deserts of distrust that leave people gasping and craving, and thus tempted by new exploitative promises.
Small, faithful gestures manage to deliver and accrue profitable value. To use the metaphor of currency, the profit might be just a penny, a seemingly insignificant unit of value representing the smallest of actions. But as Annie Dillard reminds us, we can get turned around, even blind, to the value and significance of what’s small. Those who cannot find delight in discovering a penny are to be counted among the truly impoverished.
The strength of what is small and seemingly invisible catches Jesus’s notice too, like when he refers to the powerful organic strength of yeast in dough or tiny seeds that will, in time, grow into mature woody bushes or trees. These aren’t just inspirational aphorisms, or nuggets of religious wisdom; they are observable, experiential evidence found in reality — among believers and unbelievers alike.
Denmark is called a high-trust culture, and there are a lot of ideas as to why that is the case that I cannot explore exhaustively here. What I can bear witness to, what I have experienced for myself, is that high-trust cultures are incredibly relaxing and pleasurable. They take a real cognitive load off! They let you take a deeper breath. The experiential happiness is like that of soft, warm light, not dramatic spectacles of fireworks.
Tourists flock to Denmark from all over the world to sample the country’s simple pleasures. While they can rent bikes and taste cardamom buns, they also enjoy its trust, whether they are aware of it or not. Study after study places Denmark high on lists of general happiness and well-being, as well as among the least corrupt on earth.
Experiencing the pleasures of trust fires the imagination for what’s possible, in reality. High levels of trust aren’t magic, nor a mere aesthetic performance, whether the coziness of happy vibes nor the bizarre sense of “home” touted by heavy-handed discipline. Strongman governments, like strongman congregations or even strongman families, tend to perform a theatre of strength and project a facsimile of security, but are often slovenly, chaotic, and corrupt. (Hence, Denmark is also ranked very low when it comes to public corruption too.) The performance of strength and security is almost always a sign of weakness, deep insecurity, and distrust. Pouring more of that usual kind of “strength” into that kind of wound only deepens and infects it more.
Alternatively, performing the aesthetic “opposite” doesn’t really deliver either, as if one could just perform a trusting vibe. One can slap the word “hygge” onto only so many consumer goods before it is flushed of real meaning. In the end, hygge isn’t just something that money can buy, nor can be actually performed on social media platforms. Hygge - that “cozy” sensation and lived experience of shared, provisioned well-being - is a happy, ultimately human byproduct of habitual cultural decisions and individual participation through a set of real and even limiting behaviors. It’s available to rich and poor people alike. Like a vaccine, when it reaches a threshold of participation, trust offers real good to all, even to the so-called free-riders. (And, to be sure, if you risk free-riding, there are serious fines for doing so!)
Trust might be invisible, but it is still palpably experienced and its riches compounded when built through shared participation. That’s genuine abundance.
High-trust cultures are still made up of real people with contestable levels of authentic interior freedom. Bikes still get stolen here. Yet even though trust can be squandered, abused, and exploited, it is only a real fool who lets go of trust altogether, or who tempts others to do so as well. It is always wise to invest in, protect the real value of, and find ways to build trust with others, including beyond the traditionally fragile fences of faith, family, and flag. (Jesus had some words to say about those so-called bedrock modes of belonging, and especially for the higher good of caring for those who are altogether other from one’s faith, family, or national origin.)
So, if you have an opportunity to build trust, like by watching over a strangers’s belongings in a library while they use the restroom, I hope you’ll savor the joy of that small action, especially in how it defies the usual dividing clamor of distrust, paranoid suspicion, and standard-issue demonization (e.g., “Those people are not to be trusted; we only trust our kind”). Or, if you see an opportunity to build trust by asking another to do the same for you, risk it with discretion! Yes, there’s risk, but the costs of failing to risk (and possibly succeed) are far greater than never to have risked at all.