The collapse of community

What we have here is an accelerating -- and alarming -- collapse of trust.

Advanced societies need a great deal of trust. Every day we place ourselves in the hands of other people, most of whom we don’t know, for our most basic needs. I had orange juice this morning. I didn’t pick the oranges off my own tree, so I need to trust that someone else grew good oranges and didn’t inject them with dangerous chemicals; that the people who pressed it into juice did it in a clean environment without contaminants; that they didn’t (as has happened with some wines) mix in antifreeze to save money. Because I believe those things, I drink store-bought orange juice and thus contribute to the support of a whole industry with many thousands of jobs. And I’m hardly awake yet.

For forty years now there has been a decline in trust across the industrial world. Polls show a marked decline in public confidence for all the “big three” social institutions at the core of the postwar period of prosperity: government, business, and unions. In the U.S. the percentage of people who believe the government is “run by a few big interests looking out only for themselves” has more than doubled since the 1960s and now stands at around 80%. About half of all adults now say that no businesses are “generally honest and trustworthy.” There has also been a marked decline in the personal trust and its foundations: Robert Putnam has traced sharp declines in everyday social interactions like bowling leagues, and polls show a steady drop in various measures of personal trust, such as the percentage who agree that “people try to be fair.”*

We know that trust decline can develop into vicious downward spirals. Anyone who has played one of the trust games common in negotiation seminars knows that people, if encouraged to act according to pure self-interest, will try to undercut each other when they get a chance, leading to cycles of mutual destructiveness. This is really just an updated version of Thomas Hobbes’ 17th-century argument that only collective constraint prevents the “war of all against all.” We also know that systems that fall into negative spirals may hit abrupt “tipping points” at which the downward trend rapidly accelerates.

There are disturbing indications that we may be close to such a tipping point. Since the 2008 recession and the election of a President who is liberal and black, significant parts of the country have withdrawn in anger from the social compact and have adopted an “every man for himself” mentality. Examples now appear every day on the front pages. Trayvon Martin was shot in Florida because a new law essentially legalizes personal vigilantism and abandons reliance on the formal system of policing. A judge in New York ruled that law students could not expect schools to give accurate data about their success in getting jobs for graduates: it was, he ruled, up to the students to check and verify the schools’ claims. Recently a house burned in Tennessee because fire department no longer put out fires unless the homeowner has paid a yearly fee. Even more extreme, Tea Party enthusiasts yelled in a campaign event that the way to treat people without health insurance is to “Let ‘em die!”

All of these recent events stem from a common mentality -- that you can’t trust anyone but yourself, you should check and verify and fight for your interests at every step of every day. That sense has been growing for a long time, but now it is becoming a guiding principle of the core institutions of the society. It’s not just that some people carry guns because they don’t trust the police; now the legislature is telling you that’s the right thing to do. It’s not just that people grumble about deadbeat neighbors; now the law says you have no obligation to help them. When banks cheat their customers, the law and regulatory agencies say that we can’t really control it and that you’d just better watch your money carefully.

We don’t really know how to predict tipping points, but this seems like a very dangerous moment. Mistrust is crossing a threshold – moving from an uncomfortable sense that things aren’t right, to a justified sense that that’s the way it is and ought to be. It is as important to pay attention to the health of relations of trust as to the health of government and economic institutions. We need to fight hard, not for ourselves, but for each other – and for the belief that, as Benjamin Franklin once put it: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”