Who’re you gonna trust? That’s a tough question these days. For a lot of Americans, the answer seems to be, “nobody.” And that’s pretty sad. It’s something we need to think about.
Gallup is out with its annual look at the ethics ratings of various jobs, based on polling of American adults. And once again, as we’ve seen for about 25 years, people don’t trust most professions. Nurses are viewed most positively, with 75 percent of Americans saying that nurses’ honesty and ethical standards are “high” or even “very high.” Only two other professions get above a 50 percent honesty-and-ethics rating: medical doctors and pharmacists.
As for all the rest, well, our fellow citizens don’t think so much of us. Only 37 percent are impressed by the ethical standards of police officers; 20 percent trust lawyers generally, and 9 percent have confidence in stock brokers. My line of work, journalism, gets an ethical ranking in the high 20s, along with clergy – and while that’s better than, say, building contractors and telemarketers, it’s not good, because it means that most folks think that we’re dishonest. They don’t trust us.
Things have been going downhill for a while. Take members of Congress: At the start of this century, about a quarter of Americans thought their representatives and senators had high ethical standards, but now they’re seen by their constituents as deserving a spot in the basement, at a 7 percent ethics rating – right alongside car dealers.
I mean no disrespect in citing these numbers. In fact, they bother me. And I think we need to do something about this world of mistrust that these statistics reveal. Because trust is the glue that holds society together. For a democracy to function well, we have to have some confidence that our government is looking out for us – I mean, that it is ultimately trustworthy, even if we don’t like what it is doing on one topic or another – and we need to believe that we can ultimately trust each other so that we’re all pulling in the same direction.
Mistrust was understandable when our prehistoric ancestors on the savannah faced the peril of saber-toothed tigers and such. So civilization emerged to protect our species. Over the millennia, humans forged systems to make us safer and bring us order: Science helped us figure out how to handle the challenges of the natural world, schools expanded knowledge from one generation to the next, and governments were forged to promote our well-being. All this worked because we came together in community to care for each other.
But we are being bombarded these days with attacks on science and education, with assertions contrary to fact, and with disrespect toward people who aren’t like us. We have a president whose masked agents are literally tackling people on the streets because of the color of their skin – as that president asserts that an entire ethnic group is “very low IQ” and “bad for our country,” in his words, and that some people are “animals.” You might have missed some of that, understandably – because it’s hardly news these days when our nation’s leader denies the humanity of others. It’s a daily event.
Respect matters. Psychologists tell us that respect leads to value, and value leads to trust. Society can disintegrate if we conclude that most people aren’t trustworthy.
This requires, really, a one-person-at-a-time solution. We need to shift away from identifying some people as being less valuable because they’re not like us, which makes them less trustworthy. We have to try to see that we’re all trying to do the best we can – all of us influenced by our home, our social world, our biology, the way others see us. We need to trust that we’re all in this together, because we are.
Experts on these matters urge us to start to rebuild trust with small moments of connection – with, say, the barista making your coffee or the service manager handling your car repair. Try eye contact and laughter and conversation. These little moments can lead others to do the same. And we need to consciously put ourselves in situations where we’ll encounter people not like ourselves. We need to reach out, that is, not contract.
Connection is key to understanding, understanding builds trust, and trust restores that glue of society. You don’t have to take my word for it – I’m one of those ethically challenged journalists you probably don’t trust, right? But just give it a try: Reach out, even in tiny gestures and acts. And, by the way, you trustworthy nurses and pharmacists and doctors: Thank you.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
