The disintegration of trust in language
A lot (too much?) has been written on declining trust — in political institutions, leaders, each other — in the last few years, and especially the last few weeks. Conservative HQ posing as ‘Fact Checkers’, it was said, completely undermined public trust in what was being said.
Despite the concern, there has not been a real shift in polls on trust; a small dip from an already shockingly low baseline. Although this hasn’t moved much, the Hansard Society’s research shows that people increasingly think something needs to change, increasingly willing to back a ‘strong man’ leader, and more likely to think Parliament needs to stand aside.
This poses a bit of an issue: how is this happening when trust is stable?
One answer is that those who already don’t trust are hardening their position. Another answer is that trust is changing qualitatively, not being picked up in quantitative measures that just ask about trust. Yet another is that, maybe, trust doesn’t matter after all.
I’m going to do a bit of hand-waving and focus on the second. In particular, I think something has shifted to the point where people don’t just not trust institutions or leaders to deliver, but simply don’t trust anything they say. Not just on manifesto pledges, but on anything at all. This might not be an original observation, but we should think through its consequences.
In Ancient Greece, politics was built on speech even more than it is now. Discussing the breakdown of civil order, Thucydides argued that ‘because speakers so commonly claim that some secret self-interest motivates their opponents, the Athenians distrust even good men with good ideas, so much so that everyone addressing the assembly lies in order to be trusted. Pervasive suspicion makes honest language and trust impossible, corrupting deliberation’. [1]
The result of this pervasive distrust was, he said, that ‘The man who first did some evil was praised, as was anyone who encouraged those who’d never thought of it’. In other words, in a situation of distrust in anything anyone says (even good people), backing evil was a positive. There were another two consequences:
- Without trust in language, reconciliation was impossible.
- Trust grows within polarised groups ‘precisely by violating the norms and laws that citizens had formerly shared’. This absence of secure and common actions to demonstrate trust meant that the language of trust was itself voided.
The ultimate conclusion? ‘Social relationships become unstable when language becomes untrustworthy’.
Although polling does not seem to pick up a decline in trust, it may have changed qualitatively, to the point that no one trusts what they read or hear. When that happens, it’s hard to see a way back.
[1] Steve Johnstone, Pistis and Citizens in Ancient Greece, in Trust and Happiness in the History of Political Thought.
