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Accountability is Perhaps More Important than Trust
Forever trying to place us on the right path, David Brooks (in his opinion column in the New York Times June 10, 2021) lays out a chart for building trust. Admirable. But he may be teaching the wrong subject and reaches for the ethereal where more earthly stuff would get us there.
Style is a convenient wrap when critiquing design, paintings or football. It’s the ambience — the overall feeling we get about a work, person or sport. Trust can be thought of in this way too but it also has something much more valuable — it can be quantified. It’s the sum of the credit and debit columns over time. A pattern of behavior or experience that deserves a stamp of approval — or not. Banks do this kind of stuff all the time and if only we could apply the same rigorous accounting ourselves to the many parts of our lives we could make better decisions and have more confidence in them.
But we are living in an age where facts and figures are subordinate to our emotions and terms like “trust” float in a world of how we feel about things rather than ground us in reality. I have friends say that they don’t trust Dr. Fauci and I don’t know what that means exactly.
