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Can anyone be trusted anymore?
Trust is the glue that holds our social world together, yet it’s one of the most fragile bonds we have. In this episode of Hotel Bar Sessions, Rick, Leigh, and Devonya dive into the complexities of trust—what it means, how it functions, and why it’s so easy to break but so difficult to restore. From everyday acts of trust, like believing the grocery store clerk’s name tag, to the deep-seated political crisis of trust in institutions and democracy, the hosts explore trust as an epistemic, moral, and affective structure that shapes our relationships. Along the way, they discuss Derrida’s take on truth-telling, the role of consistency and shared values, and why mistrust often seems more apparent than trust itself.
- govwaybackmachine.com (developed by Brian Moore, @lane.winfield on TikTok)
- Jazz vocalist Diane Moore
- President Ronald Reagan’s 1987 claim “Trust, but verify”
- Andy Kaufman’s “I Trusted You” bit
- Our previous discussion (Season 8, Episode 107) on “Forgiveness” (where Leigh discusses her yard full of buried hatchets with the handles sticking out of the ground!)
- Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin (1996)
- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
- William James, The Will to Believe (1896)
- Our previous discussion (Season 3, Episode 43) on “Superstition”
- “cone of silence”
- J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962)
- Separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution
- Social contract theory
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762)
- Onora O’Neill, “Questioning Trust” (in The Routledge Handbook of Trust and Philosophy, Ed. Judith Simon, 2020)
- Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (1997)
- Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (1988)
- Charles Mills and Carol Pateman, Contract and Domination (2007)
- Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (1867)
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)
@bernie Oligarchs are waging a war on the working class, and they are intent on winning. But this is what I know: The worst fear that the ruling class in this country has is that Americans come together to demand a government that represents all of us, not just the wealthy few.
♬ original sound - Bernie Sanders
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