The global West has faced a fair few crises’ in recent decades.

From pandemics to warfare, market crashes, terrorism, and declining mental health across the board, the 21st century has been relatively turbulent.

But in the last decade or so a new kind of threat has emerged – one that’s far more abstract, and tricky to counter.

The global West is facing a crisis of trust.

Inter-personal trust, trust in institutions, professionals, and especially media, has steadily plummeted in recent years.

A study posted in The Atlantic recently reported that back in 1972 researchers logged that 45 per cent of Americans saw others as generally trustworthy. But by 2006 the number had dropped to 30 per cent (and it’s sure to have dropped further since).

According to the Edelman Trust Index, updated in 2024, Australia sits at number 15 for ‘most trusting countries’ in the world.

Meanwhile, the United States comes in at 22nd, South Korea at 24th, and the UK 27th.

With 195 fully recognised countries in the world today, those numbers don’t seem so bad – but there’s been a steady decline since the turn of the millennium that’s picked up pace in recent years.

Events like the collapse of entire business sectors (for example: the devastating impact of crypto-trading platform FTX folding), the AI and deep fake revolution, and the rise of alternative media – alongside the “fake news” phenomenon – have only served to sharpen a sense of distrust in the wider community. 

The collapse of FTX saw hundreds of customers lose their life savings, and severely rattled the trust of customers in tech companies

Tom Simpson – an Oxford Professor who researches trust – is concerned by the general move towards distrust.

After all, he says, trust is better for us in the long run.

“The normal reason that we trust other people is because doing so enables these positive outcomes, these valuable outcomes,” Tom said, speaking on Undeceptions.

“The social utility of trust is that it preserves a culture, and a context, in which someone gives their word on something, or makes a commitment, and we thereby have reason to believe them.

“When a community highly values trustworthiness and, conversely, socially disdains untrustworthiness, people tend to act more trustworthily, and so we reap the benefits of trusting.”

That benefit, according to experts, is massive.

One finding, cited by Tom, was that high levels of trust corresponded with a 2 per cent growth rate in GDP.

“High levels of generalized trust matter in areas such as the economy, in terms of economic growth, matter for public legitimacy for government, and therefore compliance with government orders,” he said.

“Countries where there’s high generalized trust (also) have a higher life expectancy, and higher reported health and happiness.”

The numbers on this are especially interesting.

According to a 2019 paper in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health:

“High levels of individual and contextual generalised trust protect against mortality, even after considering numerous individual and aggregated socioeconomic conditions. Its robustness at both levels hints at the importance of psychosocial mechanisms, as well as a trustworthy environment.”

Given these benefits, trust under threat poses a serious problem.

Tom believes this can remedied though, with a renewed focus on faith, flag, and family.

“Flag doesn’t have to be construed as the nation – I mean by that a cohesive political community, which has a sense of its self and a sense of loyalty and belonging (like a neighbourhood),” he said.

Similarly, family is shorthand for a shared community, which both fosters a sense of growth and in which participants have each others best interests at heart.

But perhaps the most interesting of Tom’s proposals (and controversial) is the role of faith in restoring trust.

“I take it to be (there is a) fundamentally continuous line between trust of God and trust of other people”, he said. 

“I don’t see any deep reason to view these as fundamentally distinct …  all the important things that we want to say about faith we can capture in talking about trust.

“It matters for me as a Christian that the word faith, and the idea of faith in wider culture, has come to be seen as a deliberate irrationality about believing against the evidence. 

“I think that misunderstands the nature of faith, certainly of true Christian faith.

“The notion of trust isn’t so attached in that way, and I think that’s partly because all of us trust every single day … we’re instinctively aware of that, we’re aware both of our dependence, but also that our dependence is not irrational … but it’s also not arrived at through reasonable means.”

Tom’s “Three F’s” thesis is a challenge – particularly to naturally sceptical people.

Ultimately, rebuilding a trusting society depends on the individual doing their bit.

Doing so isn’t just good for the individual – it’s good for the entire world at large.

Adapted by Alasdair Belling from Undeceptions episode 133 ‘Why Trust?’ with Tom Simpson. Listen here

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