The erosion of trust

Sorry to sound all maudlin on a Friday, I am coming over all Winston Smith - there’s something on my mind. It’s trust or rather the utter lack of it

Trust is such an evocative word. I’ve been thinking about it lots recently. It’s the most over promised and undelivered word there is. I saw a van the other day proclaiming that the company was ‘trusted to deliver’ Trusted by who, why should we believe them? Then the biggest explosion of trust occurred, the NOTW hacking scandal (creating one of the best headlines I’ve seen in ages in the Times this morning “Hacked to death”.)

Yes I know you can’t trust the media, which was no revelation in itself but the news the police had potentially received payments from journalists for information rocks the very foundations of trust in the UK. Can’t trust the media, can’t trust the police, can’t trust the politicians (see expenses scandal), can’t trust the banks. Those four institutions that potentially have so much power over our lives and not one of them can be trusted it seems. Too much knowledge, too much power too much greed.

Then there’s Google, one of the above or a genuine force for good? Unsure. They know more about us than all the others put together, they know what colour our curtains are for god’s sake. Knowledge is power, power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely after all. However in a similar way to how Bill Gates has used his fortune as a force for good, Google seems to be using its global reach to try to begin to tackle the world’s biggest problems. Google Ideas is forum that seeks to unite people to trust each other to search for solutions to world problems. The other week they had amassed the who’s who of the extremist world (the reformed types I hasten to add) to talk about how to fight extremism.

Perhaps it’s true that the older the institution the more likely corruption is going to happen while the optimism of youth keeps the new global super brands honourable in their motivations. But can we trust them? Who knows?