The Importance of Trust to a High Functioning Society
Three Symptoms of a Society without Trust
Western society is in shambles. Everyone can see it. The foundations have been removed and the feeling of instability is palpable. Among the most important of those foundations is trust. One cannot have a high functioning society without a trusting society. And there can only be a trusting society if there is trustworthiness among its leaders and institutions. That trustworthiness is something that is sorely lacking in our day, and its importance is being exposed by the breakdown in its absence. These are some of the symptoms of a society without trust, all of which we see in our current western context.
Anxiety
We are an anxious society. Anxiety naturally arises from perceived instability and unpredictability. If you want to pinpoint where our cultural anxiety comes from, you need to find that instability.
If you ask anyone in America what the next year will bring, you are likely to receive an unstable answer. Why? Because our leaders and institutions have consistently proven by their actions that nothing is off the table in the pursuit of their aims. People are anxious because we literally have no idea what our nation is going to look like tomorrow.
Anger
A large portion of our society lives on the edge of an angry outburst. People will armchair quarterback politics for a long time, but there is a breaking point. There comes a moment when the quarterback leaves the chair and decides to do something about it. It’s a slow boil, but the resulting eruption can be disastrous for a nation. That boiling point is usually reached for the individual when the politics are creating devastating consequences in his own personal life.
For example, when he is not allowed to be at his dying mother’s side because we have to “slow the spread” of an overhyped virus. Also, when he has to bury her without a funeral because the “experts” say it’s too dangerous to be around people. And don’t forget that this person is watching his money run dry because his family’s monthly groceries are now more than his mortgage. Of course, there is also the fact that at any time he knows his sons could be forced to go die in some war overseas; a war that he doesn’t even believe in, and that he knows is corrupt. And that is not to mention the fact that his neighbors had their child removed from their custody because they refused to allow her to have gender reassignment surgery. Another person in his neighborhood was recently killed in a hit and run by an illegal immigrant.
At some point, the dam is going to break. He may or may not do the right thing. But he will do something. We have seen these breaking moments often in recent years. Riots, cities on fire, vigilante justice, violent marches, and even groups taking over police stations and turning them into neutral zones. We’ve seen all of these things in America in recent years. We are an angry culture.
Division
Division has happened in our society on both a large and small scale. There are clear national divisions. Conservative and liberal. Black and white. Straight and LGBTQ. Vaxed and unvaxed. But the worst divisions are on the smaller scale. Families, friends, communities, and even churches have been fractured over these issues. Because of our loss of trust, no one knows where we are going. That means the direction of the country is up for grabs. Therefore, there is a tug-of-war on both the national and local level in the attempt to control that direction.
What’s the Plan?
The leaders of the western world are foolish, but they are not stupid. Why would they want to drive their societies into anxiety, anger, and division? It’s simple really. In order to reshape a clay figure into something different, one must crush the figure and drive it into chaos for a time. First, society has to become anxious, angry, and divided. Then, once people are desperate enough, the leaders can produce a plan that guarantees stability, peace, and unity. Of course, this plan will ultimately give them more control and access. When a person is desperate enough for symptomatic relief, they will accept anything to that end regardless of the long-term consequences.
The first step in this process was simple. If you want to drive a culture into desperate instability, you must first remove God from it. Once God is removed, there are no remaining moral absolutes. There can’t be. The culture then plunges into moral confusion and chaos. Once this has peaked, the state is all too ready to step in as the new god, bringing its own promises for redemption and restoration. This has all happened before. Indeed, there is nothing new under the sun. In 1983, the Russian historian, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, penned this reflection of the Soviet Union:
More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” (Solzhenitsyn, “Men Have Forgotten God,” in In the World: Reading and Writing as a Christian.)
We want to be a high functioning society again. We want trust restored in our culture, leaders, and institutions. There are many steps to be taken to that end and it will not be an easy process. But the first step is basic. We need to put our culture back under submission to God. When we left that position is when the chaos began. Otherwise, the state will inevitably step in to become an imposter in that sovereign role. We will then inevitably go the way of societies like Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union. The state promises salvation to their people only to become their oppressor. These regimes always crumble, leaving generations to put the pieces back together.
I believe there is still time to turn the ship for our nation, but it’s running out fast. Let us use the time we have. Let us determine that we will not forget God and we will not allow the state to replace Him. Instead, we will demand that the state remember and serve Him also.