Is it possible to re-establish trust?

While I was drinking my morning coffee and watching television earlier this week, I was struck by two commercials that appeared almost back-to-back.

The first was the Wells Fargo ad that started out with familiar wagon riding over the plains and a warm, inviting voice saying, “We know the value of trust…”

The one-minute segment harkened back to 1852 when Wells Fargo was established and when the company was “trusted” to move gold and goods across the west.

I immediately thought of the song from the musical Music Man: “O-ho the Wells Fargo Wagon is acomin’ down the street, Oh please let it be for me! O-ho the Wells Fargo Wagon is a-comin’ down the street, I wish, I wish I knew what it could be.”

But the Wells Fargo wagon ran into some serious difficulty a few years ago when it was discovered that the now modern bank was behaving unethically.

Michael Corkery of the New York Times described the Wells Fargo infraction this way: “For year, Wells Fargo employees secretly issued credit cards without a customer’s consent.

They created fake email accounts that customers learned about only after they started accumulating fees.”

Their behaviour led to serious fines and a serious loss of trust with their customers.

The recent ad admitted the mistake… “we always found the way... until we lost it” and they committed to reestablishing the trust: “established 1852; re-established 2018.”

Only a few moments later, Facebook took me on a journey back to the time when the social media platform was just about connecting with family, finding old friends, and making new ones. Then, as they said, “...Something happened. We had to deal with spam, click bait, fake news and data misuse.”

Just like Wells Fargo, Facebook lost trust with its users. Their ad simply said, “That’s going to change.”

The promise is that Facebook is “going to do more to protect your privacy.”

It is no coincidence that two major corporations are apologizing and making plans to rebuild trust. Of all the colossal problems the world faces right now, a decline of trust is at the core of a great deal of the political strife that has seen the rise of populism and antiestablishment politicians.

I have written before about the critical need for trust in civil society and the relationship between trust and well-ordered democracies.Isabelle Breuskin, in a review of the scholarship on social capital that she wrote for Living Reviews in Democracy explained that: “The centrality of trust has been echoed by Francis Fukuyama… who describes social capital as the “capability that arises from the prevalence of trust in a society or in certain parts of it,” embodied “in the smallest and most basic social group, the family, as well as in the largest of all groups, the nation, and in all other groups in between.” … Fukuyama argues that the generation of social capital rests upon a community’s culture of trust, i.e. its history of habits of cooperation.”

These “habits of cooperation” are a critical part of long-term stability of many democratic societies. As Breuskin says, according to Fukuyama, “high-trust societies ...are characterised by non-kin associations that form bonds of trust to meet the challenges of modernity.... [T]heir trait to trust and cohere “spontaneously” in new organisations with strangers is the reason why high-trust societies are economically more successful...” The point here is that societies with lots of trust are marked by a capacity to develop relationships based on norms, values and morals that help to shape the underlying ethical context in which we conduct business and politics.

It is critical to note that democratic states are held together by the rule of law and the trust in institutions led by individuals. Democratic constitutions are built on the expectation that individuals will behave ethically and much of the philosophy of early liberalism assumed that individuals were capable of ethical practices even while pursuing their own selfinterest.

When this capacity fails we find that democracy begins to falter. Apologies are good.

Promises to do better are good, too.

Yet, we cannot ignore that the decisions that led to the failures in the first place existed in a wider culture in which trust is, at best, tenuous and, at worse, broken.