Preserving The Trust Network

One thing is for sure. Democrats don’t trust Republicans. And conservatives don’t trust liberals. Liberals don’t trust the Pentagon. The Supreme Court doesn’t trust the executive.

That’s all right. It’s just politics. But the problem is that trust has been eroding on the personal level. Women don’t trust their husbands to stick around. And no-fault divorce has made it easy to skip out on a spouse.

That’s a problem, according to conservative writers like Jennifer Roback Morse and Carolyn Graglia, because trust the the bedrock that a loving family needs to be successful in staying together and raising children.

For instance, children that don’t have a close and trusting relationship with their mother in the first year of life find it difficult to establish trusting relationships throughout their lives. Babies are needy, and if their needs aren’t met they experience the world as a hostile world. We are not just talking about material needs here, but the need for the baby to know that its mother is there for it.

We’ve rather forgotten all that in the excitement of the baby boom and the modern emphasis on contract theory in politics.

Radio host Larry Elder recently demonstrated how trust works in human society by relating a little story about his 91-year-old father.

When his mother died, he assumed that his father would want to come and live with him. But no. As Elder’s brother explained from the porch of his father’s house, pointing to the row of houses across the street and down our side.

"You see the lady who lives over there?" said Kirk. "She brings beans that she grows for Dad. The one over here uses the lemons from Dad's backyard to make Dad lemonade. See this house over there? Well, this lady, the man who lives next-door to her and the woman two houses away are all part of a sort of 'neighborhood watch.' If somebody sees something suspicious, they'll call the cops in a hurry. Same thing about an ambulance if somebody needs help."

His father needed to stay in his neighborhood. The neighbors needed him.

That’s how face-to-face society works: in reciprocal trust between family and between neighbors.

It is something we have lost as we have given up our birthrights to experts and professionals.