Surveys say we’re living through a “trust crisis,” and some version of that has been true since at least the ’70s. Confidence in the press, in the courts, in public health agencies, in elected officials, in one another has been down, and still going down. At this point, mistrust reads as our default civic posture. And yet here we all are, getting through our days by handing out trust more or less constantly and mostly without noticing. We tell a friend something we’d rather nobody else knew. We take what the pharmacist gives us without looking it up. We drive over the bridge, trusting that it will hold. 

So what is trust? A calculation about how somebody is likely to behave, or something closer to a relationship that can absorb being let down without collapsing? What separates trusting a person from merely depending on one? And why does betrayal land as a different order of injury than disappointment, when the practical damage can be identical? 

Whenever the day arrives that we are post-Trump, and it will arrive, plenty of us are going to demand that our institutions and, in some cases, our own friends and relatives earn our trust back. It’s worth working out ahead of time what we’d actually be asking for. A change in their behavior? Or a decision on our part to lower our guard? Because for a lot of people, distrust is hard-won knowledge about how things really go, and being told that it’s a lapse in civic virtue tends to land badly. 

Grab a drink and join us as we try to work out whether trust is something you decide to give or something that happens to you.