The
loss of trust between people in modern technological society is still another
component leading to the rise of fundamentalism. A loss of trust leads to a
lack of a sense of certainty in daily life, which leads people to search for
certainty someplace else – namely the spiritual world. To obtain that sense of certainty, one must
make a complete surrender to God and to the religious practices and beliefs that
surround a particular religion’s interpretation of God. And this, of course, leads to fundamentalism.
In
this article, I’m going to explore this line of thought more thoroughly,
discussing what trust means, and how the loss of it is so pernicious to the
people who live in modern technological society. There are different ways of approaching the
subject of the nature of trust, but I propose discussing it from the notion
that there are two basic kinds of trust.
There is instrumental trust which is a belief that another person will be
able and willing to perform a particular task as an independent figure,
completing the task in the way that is expected of him. This can be an expectation that a person will
perform a task or tasks in one particular instance or that a person will
continue to perform a task or tasks over time whenever he is asked to do
so. This is an operational trust that
doesn’t speak to any aspect of the nature of a person outside his capacity and
his willingness to perform one particular task or group of tasks.
The
second kind of trust is intrinsic trust.
This is trust in another person’s nature insofar as the nature can
provide an unconditional emotional grounding for the person doing the trusting. It is a more intangible kind of trust that deals
with the very essence of the person being trusted. On another level, it assumes that the person
being trusted has a coherent sense of self that is at once both accessible to
the person doing the trusting as well as totally reliable.
In
the first kind of trust, the focus is on how reliably a person can function,
much the same way we would focus on how reliably a machine functions. To the extent that there is an emotional bond
based on instrumental trust, it is a bond of conditional liking or loving. The instrumental trust leads to an emotional
bond the duration of which is contingent upon the continued effective
performance of the tasks for which the receiver of the trust has been
designated responsible. In pure cases of
instrumental trust, when the receiver of the trust ceases to effectively
perform the tasks for which he has been designated, the giver of the trust
ceases to maintain a positive emotional bond with the receiver.
This
is very different from intrinsic trust where the receiver of the trust is
trusted as a reliable person whether or not during any given period of time he
is performing tasks which demonstrate his reliability. In this case, a strong flowing continual
emotional bond is maintained with the receiver of the trust and goes on existing
even during periods of time when there is no necessity to perform trustworthy
tasks. This is an emotional bond that
typically exists among primates and other evolved animals. It involves the kind of trust on which
families are based. Without some
intrinsic trust, families cannot exist. The
children of primates and other evolved animals need to have intrinsic trust in
their parents, if they are going to develop and grow up to be normal members of
their group.
But
the problem is that as modern technology takes over more and more aspects of
daily life, modern machines increasingly act as mirrors and models for all the
humans that live among them. And people
increasingly adopt their expectations for machines as their expectations for
themselves and other people. Which means
that people increasingly focus on instrumental trust in their dealings with
other people rather than intrinsic trust.
They will trust another person to perform certain agreed-upon tasks, but
the trust doesn’t go beyond the surface activity of those tasks. It doesn’t go to a person’s deeper nature,
trusting who a person is, such that the trust would extend to the person both
in terms of how he performs in unforeseen situations, as well as how he relates
to people. Instrumental trust doesn’t
delve into whether or not a person has a trustworthy character. Or whether or
not he is an honorable person. These
kinds of questions aren’t being asked, because people are increasingly expected
to act like machines rather than like primates.
Intrinsic trust is not expected in situations where employers show
little loyalty to workers and increasingly use contract workers. There is no need to have deeper trust in a worker,
when a person is simply required to do certain work projects and then the boss
is done with him. And the worker knows
that he can’t trust the boss to give him constant employment.
Few
people today like to make the deep commitments that involve intrinsic
trust. Many couples feel more
comfortable living together indefinitely rather than getting married. Children frequently allow their work to take
them to distant cities far away from their home
cities with their family ties. And as
people move around for work, their friendships shift as well. In today’s world, human connections are increasingly
contingent upon the functional needs of the moment. For many people, this contingency in human
bonding and the lack of opportunity to have deep grounded intrinsic trust in
others creates a very troubling situation for them.
There
is still another level in which people experience a lack of intrinsic trust and
this is in a lack of trust in themselves.
If a person, in unconsciously modeling himself after machines, becomes
reduced to a series of different functions required for the different areas of
his life (work functions as well as functions required for romance, friendship,
family, recreation, religion, etc.), then there is no core self in which to
feel intrinsic trust in himself. He
loses his capacity to feel a global confidence in himself - a flowing,
continual, blendable bond with himself.
He has a lot of self-definition with all of his different separate
functions, all his different mental parts, but he lacks self-coherence, a sense
of unity of self. He feels fractured and
emotionally stressed and in danger of losing himself.
One
way to feel a sense of coherence again is to become a part of a larger
coherence that will help to grow the person together again. And if that coherence cannot be easily found
among all the fragmented people that typically surround a person, then a person
can look someplace that is not a part of mainstream life in modern
technological society. I’m talking about
the enveloping cohesive world created by fundamentalist religion. Fundamentalist religion provides an emotional
certainty, an emotional grounding missing in most other interpersonal areas of
modern society. A firm belief in a
demanding God or an enveloping spiritual force provides the ultimate grounding
and the intense emotional bond that many modern people need in order to feel
whole again. And the other adherents of
the religion help to reinforce a person’s commitment, so that he can sustain
the benefits that come from a strong bonded connection to God and to the
principles of the religion.
Of course,
as has been previously pointed out, a fundamentalist believer has to repeatedly
hammer his connection to his religion onto his field of experience through many
rites, rituals, prayers and other religious ceremonies, in effect because it is
hard to sustain his intrinsic trust in his God and his religion, when he is
surrounded by so much distracting confusing sensory distortion from the modern
technological living environment. He
operates out of a posture of what I have called conative acceleration - a
speeding up of his will - in order to push aside the distracting sensory
distortion in his living environment and focus on building a sense of grounding
in his religion and spiritual community.
But because he is constantly hammering onto his field of experience with
repetitive actions, with rites, rituals, prayers and other religious
ceremonies, he begins to increasingly become like the modern technology, the machines
from which he is trying to stand apart, with his fervent religious path.
So, in truth, the problem
today is not a loss of all trust, but rather a loss of intrinsic trust. Fundamentalism
can lead a person to gain back a sense of intrinsic trust through absolute
faith and through a tight religious community, but in the process he becomes
robotized. Certainly there have to be
other more natural methods of restoring a sense of intrinsic trust and a
coherent sense of self apart from taking the pathway of fundamentalism.
The topic for this
article was suggested by Dr. Jorge Cappon.
© 2015 Laurence Mesirow