Trust (I)

Every once in a while an idea is presented so strikingly that it forces you to look at things in a wholly different way. Sometimes the insight comes from a teacher; sometimes a friend, or a parent, or a coach; sometimes a peer or coworker. Sometimes it’s a random encounter on the street, or even one of the clucking heads on Fox — everyone is allowed the occasional, if unintentional, flash of brilliance. Frequently the new insight becomes, in hindsight, obvious: how could I have missed that? And often the answer is: because earlier proponents were simply not as articulate, or perhaps so blinkered by their own perceived brilliance that they struggle to communicate their ideas.

So it was that I attended, about thirty years ago, a panel discussion on public key cryptography. One of the speakers — whose name is on one of the critical pieces of that now-critical infrastructure — began by explaining the principle of trust. Asymmetric encryption — in which there is a public key known to the world and a private key known only to the holder — is important to electronic commerce because it assures the parties to the transaction that they are who they say they are. It is a trust mechanism: not an enforcer, but a reliable conveyor of fact. A message encrypted with the recipient’s public key can only be deciphered by her private key — ensuring message integrity; a message encrypted with the sender’s private key can only be verified using her public key — proving identity.

Well, yes, I was thinking, even then. But so what? “Trust,” said my panelist, “is what makes the world work.” And there it was. Simple. Obvious. And rarely articulated so starkly or so clearly. Trust that you are who you say you are; trust that you own what you say you own; trust that you will deliver on your promises to pay or to perform. The public key infrastructure (PKI) assures the first of these (identity) and goes a long way to assuring the second (truthfulness). It does nothing to assure the third — the kind of trust that is earned (reputation).

I mention all this because the Trump era presents a particular problem of trust: trust in government, trust in institutions, trust in the mechanisms that protect our liberty and propel our national and individual success. Americans no longer trust their government to keep them safe, help them thrive, and ensure that their children grow into a better world than they received from their own parents. Ironically, the solution for a very vocal minority has been to repose trust in a man who is utterly untrustworthy, who never tells the truth (except perhaps inadvertently), whose appalling and bottomless need for validation is his only motivation. He is incapable of empathy — and for that reason alone he cannot be trusted: he will never act for the common good because his personal benefit is the only thing he is capable of seeing.

Trust — like its fraternal twin, Respect — is earned. Without that foundation a leap of faith is a headlong plunge into the abyss. And yet: “Trust me. Believe me. I alone can fix it.” These words ring hollow to most people, but strike a chord with just enough of our compatriots whose faith in government was already so broken and battered that they opted for the grinning autocratic mountebank rather than the charmless competent technocrat.

Popular culture is full of references to the notion that America is not a country, it is an idea: the American Experiment, we call ourselves. The foundational document of our republic speaks of “a more perfect union”: the experiment is always evolving, always changing, always growing. This is — quite literally — progress. There have always been those who want to arrest it, or at least slow it. This idea finds spectacularly clear expression in the penultimate scene of “The American President”:

We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who’s to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections. You gather a group of middle age, middle class, middle income voters who remember with longing an easier time, and you talk to them about family, and American values and character, and you wave an old photo of the President’s girlfriend and you scream about patriotism. You tell them she’s to blame for their lot in life. And you go on television and you call her a whore.

Decades have passed and this speech is stunning not just for its clarity, but for its prescience. “He is interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid, and telling you who’s to blame.” This is the Trumpian tactic; this is McConnell at his cynical and dishonest worst. Replace “whore” with “anarchist socialist who wants to destroy America” and we are in the present. This is not the language of statesmen or problem solvers; it is the sentiment of men interested in power for its own sake, not for its use towards the common good and a common goal.

The question we all should be asking — and the press should be leading the way on this — is also simple: Why do you think that American citizens want to destroy America? What, exactly, is the reason for that? How do they benefit? And if you can’t answer that question, why are you saying such things? Why, in short, if you so claim to love America, do you so obviously hate your fellow Americans? Why do you not grant them the same courtesy, trust and respect you demand?

This is a nation of divergent and often opposing views. Democracy assumes that compromise will be reached in the back-and-forth of the legislative chambers. The winner-take-all view of today’s Republican Party does not acknowledge the possibility that theirs is not the only legitimate vision for America and its people; it takes instead the autocratic position that might makes right. “Trust us,” they say. “We know best.”

Trust and respect are earned every day; they are never given as of right. Electoral outcomes do not repose unfettered confidence; they are a signal that the winner should, instead, proceed to prove his case. That is the American way — and we stand on the precipice of forever losing it.