# Misplaced trust can lead to distrusting everyone.

# Misplaced trust can lead to distrusting everyone. Sometimes we ending up trusting people for the wrong reasons. Then when we get burned, it carries over into our relations with people we ought to trust.

One of the big issues in Europe in the early 1940's was whether or not to collaborate with the Nazi occupiers, and how far; whether, in the face of overwhelming might, even a little bit of cooperation would be OK. How to deal with their tormentors was a matter of life and death for individuals and communities. Jean Vercors wrote a novel called Le Silence de la mer, which "stresses, first, the dignity of rejection [of the occupiers, including a German officer who is a Francophile musician ] . . . ; secondly, the impossibility of collaboration: even if the occupier, as a person, possesses every good quality, he is a cog in a machine designed to destroy France" (Burrin 193).

I bring it up because of the ways we think about our leaders. The point is not that our leaders or allies cannot restructure their self-interest stories, but that, until they do, we cannot expect what they cannot deliver. We must not expect people to act against their understanding of their own self-interest.

So it always surprises me a bit that people care whether in 2003 Halliburton (or Hillary, for that matter) really, truly believed they were saving the U.S. from attack and the Middle East for democracy is not the right question. Rather, we should have asked from the get-go: Is there substantial evidence that we were about to be attacked? and What will happen if we start a war?

Instead, lots of people still defend the Iraq war by saying that the architects had nothing but good intentions. We put a lot of stock in intentions as a guide to how folks will act in the likeliest futures. One problem is that intentions are hard to judge-- even our own. Generally we look at folks' track record. Past actions reveal understandings and priorities, and results show competence. But we see only fragments of what other people do (especially if they are professionally secretive or deceitful). It’s hard to see specific behaviors from the perspective of the actor herself. Does the ex-general or terrorist newly come to Jesus adopt new tactics as a party leader, or does violence remain a central part of her toolbox? Junior Bush’s religiosity reads differently in the context of his party-animal reputation and lifelong search for replacement daddies, than if he’d just grown up in a fundamentalist family. But who knows for sure how he thinks?

I like to go back to that guy who said, "By their fruits shall ye know them." The results are what count-- how many children murdered or fed, communities shattered or enriched, and so forth. But many results are hard to know in time to make the right decision.

So another partial way to understand people is to look at the benefits they get or try to get from their actions. The war helped defense contractors far more than any other segment of our society, and, given minimal competence, could easily have helped the oil industry and the war-promoting politicians, while peace and democracy could only be in their way. We can't know for sure how they see their self-interest, but we add up the bits and pieces to give us a fairly reliable picture.

When we look to leader-types or potential allies, we can't just go by what they say, or how nice they are to their moms, or how sad they look when they see the victims of their policies. Don't expect them to act contrary to their own self-interest.

And when they mess us over, don’t use that as an excuse to put everyone in the same untrustworthy category.


# Defining our community is necessary, risky, and insufficient. Our yearning to belong to a group probably precedes language; may be hardwired into our brains. But because we can think and talk, we can choose what kind of community we want to join and build. So it’s very important to figure out what kind of people we are and belong with, because it helps us understand what choices we have and who can help us. Always we also decide what kind of people and ways of walking in the world we don’t respect and don’t want to follow; and there are a million ways to slice and dice the boundaries of us versus them.

Democratizers, too, try to distinguish the beloved community from abusive outsiders. At their best, they draw lines not in terms of identities folks are born with or assigned, such as gender and ethnicity, but in terms of behavior: we don’t like people who push others around, or act irresponsibly in other ways, endangering the community. It would be nice to say that we’re all god’s children, that everyone is unique and precious, that we extend to all humanity the unconditional acceptance the best parents extend to children. But even in families we expect members to take responsibility and contribute to the common good. We rightly expect those with more resources, skills and opportunity to contribute more. And we stop helping people who don’t help us back. Such wayward relatives may have decided they can cut a better deal outside the family, and choose to invest elsewhere.

In the larger society, and contrary to the platitudes of some politicians, there are real conflicts that no amount of inspirational rhetoric can wish away. We’ve learned how to manage some of the on-going conflicts, to keep them from becoming crises. At times in the last 100,000 years, people have even been able to share resources on some basis other than armed robbery. The more fundamental conflict, the one that provokes or poisons all the rest, is that between the gangsters and the rest of us.

So we have to draw the lines. Members of any group, especially those formed in struggle, have to develop a sense of a shared values and shared identity. We also have to have a way to recognize stakeholders --those with a legitimate claim on a share of resources and voice in decisions-- as opposed to false claimants. We make certain claims on the larger society by virtue of our membership in a particular group--what we sometimes call identity politics. We struggle with foes and negotiate with allies on the basis of how they define themselves and their interests.

Sometimes, though, it’s tempting to draw the circles too narrowly or rigidly, so that we lose potential allies and the ability to respond to changing circumstances. We may draw the lines so zealously that they get tighter and tighter, till they’re a noose around our own necks.

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"The 'politics of identity' could easily slip into a politics of victimhood and guilt, its focus more purity of consciousness than effectiveness of social change" (Segrest 47).

People are not epistemically trapped inside their cultures, their gender, their race, or any other identity. They can choose to think from other perspectives ("Feminist Epistomology").
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Even grassroots movements can end up targetting the wrong enemies: kulaks, white guys, anyone over 30, the police, the boozhwah. Rarely do we see any more a fat tycoon in top hat riding through the streets on the shoulders of a nicely sculpted proletarian in chains. Instead, we mostly have to deal with the gangsters' flunkies, the trustees, the overseers, the stoolies, the collectors of gold fillings, who'd be just like you and me but for bad luck or even greater terror.

Let’s say that a group of workers is struggling with an unfair boss. The strongest unions can sometimes reach into corporate boardrooms, but for the most part, the battlefields are the communities. And it’s not the CEOs who are on the front line, but their managers at various levels, local notables, cops and informers. The front lines move back and forth, as people’s allegiances shift. The only way for the rank and file to win is to act with great unity, even as the rewards for betrayal rise with the employer’s increasing desperation.

It's real easy, in targetting the low-level servants, to shoot at each other, until our mutual distrust spirals out of control, and our solidarity shatters. That’s why Halliburton hires these servants in the first place.

But it’s not just the running dogs who hurt us. We jeopardize our program when we let opportunists can take hold of the boundaries-drawing process and manipulate it to reward clients and zap challengers. Our need for a united front is so great that we can invest a lot of power in the leadership, without building strong enough structures of accountability. Or, conversely, we’re not prepared for the fact that, even when democratic people try their hardest to share the burdens fairly, different members have different roles and responsibilities; we snipe jealously at one another, lest one person get too much credit. Crabs in a barrel, as I’ve heard folks say, pulling each other down.

Meanwhile rich men and their servants take care to sow their poisons unevenly, punishing some and rewarding others, to make us distrust everone-- and it works. From bitter experience we’ve learned to distrust powerful outsiders. Frustrated by a hundred obstacles and sabotages, we can turn those suspicions inward. Sometimes we end up fighting among ourselves more than against the thieves in power.

We have some good accounts of how groups strengthen or bust apart in the course of the struggle. Payne describes a sad point in the work in Mississippi:

I also suspect that the accusations of cutting deals and selling out were overused. In an emotionally charged situation, it too easily becomes the all-purpose explanation for whatever one does not understand or like; it is too easily used to discredit any opponent with whom one disagrees. Leaders have to negotiate with the other side, but once the bonds of trust begin unraveling, any negotiation can look like deal-cutting to people who have been dealt on all their lives (358).

The essence of the demoralization in Greenwood probably had more to do with uncertainty than with dishonesty or truly self-seeking behavior. What to believe? Whom to trust? Courage was essential to the early movement, but so was the ability of movement people to trust one another. In the changed conditions of the middle sixties, trust was more important than physical courage, and it could not be sustained. What had been a politics of community became increasingly just a politics (362).

Payne also points to the changes in expectations over time, so that “ . . . some of what was called selling out in 1968 would have been called progress had it happened in 1963” (358).

It may well be that a profound sense of trust is itself one of the prime draws in the early stages of a struggle, much as soldiers remember the love of wartime comrades. (See Michaela Wrong’s discussion of idealism, love and grief on the front lines during the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, pp. 290-5.) But as resistance movements gain success and more and more people join, the enlarged group can no longer nurture the profound, intimate trust experienced by some of the pioneers. At the same time, more power, resources and responsibility mean more opportunities for misunderstandings, mistakes and outright rip-offs. When the original high levels of trust can’t be sustained or recaptured the disappointment, hurt and backlash are all the more intense.


So how can we stick together against the leeches? Historically, communities have applied the whole range of pressures on people who collaborate with unfair bosses. But that can backfire, even setting aside for a moment the rulers’ control over how such sanctions are reported. For one thing, how do we know who’s a snitch? A lot of destructive collaboration takes place in secret. Second, we have the problem that, as far as I can tell, all of us collaborate at one time or another. What act is so dangerous at this point in the struggle that it has to be punished?-- squealing to the cops? crossing a picket line? paying taxes? having sex with a manager? shopping at Walmart?

Meanwhile, I continue to pay my war taxes without a murmur. Farmers who grow drugs for warlords, truckers who dump toxic waste, bureaucrats who resent their constituents, teachers who teach obedience-- we need to help each other figure out better ways to live in the world. We collaborators need to forgive our own participation in a rotten system, without pretending it never happened. We have keep open a path to rejoin the community.

“Much of what was dynamic in SNCC is reflected in [Charles] Cobb’s attitude, and that dynamism would be lost in a more dogmatic climate. The more doctrinaire climate also meant a tendency to see one another in increasingly stereotypical, one-dimensional terms. Ella Baker and Septima Clark understood clearly that the matron in the fur coat or the self-important preacher were hardly models of progressive thought, but they still assumed that such people could be worked with and could make a contribution. This ability to see people in their full complexity was increasingly lost in the more dogmatic phase of the movement . . . ” (Payne 375).


# Sometimes, though, our stories of distrust are nothing more than rationalizations after the fact. It’s very convenient for opportunists and collaborators to put down others for their untrustworthiness: we’d like to help you, but you’re unworthy or incapable of making use of it. When I was beating up other kids on the tobacco farm, I could somehow blame them for my own humiliation. “The members won’t go for it,” citizen group staffers complain when they’re too scared to press forward. Others blame their failures on the apathy of their constituents. “They just don’t care,” they say, meaning “They don’t care about what I think is important,” but even that version is suspect. Working women deride other women’s work, to drown out their doubts about their own choices. People who haven’t yet lost their homes, jobs or children to the death machine make fun of those who have, blaming them for their suffering, as they might whistle past a cemetary, hoping that catastrophe strikes only the stupid. And bosses, of course, even little bitty ones, attribute their own authority to their personal genius and the unworthiness of subordinates.

Payne writes about the rivalry between established and upstart leadership during the civil rights movement:

. . . the non-active part of Black Greenwood, especially those who had traditionally been thought of as community leaders, had an interest in believing that COFO workers were irresponsible, sexually immoral, and out for their own ends. If the people leading the movement were devoid of character, one cannot be blamed for not participating.

Once we make these excuses, no matter how unjustified, they influence how we see and act in the future.


I’ve described some of the distrusting types I’ve met and am. No doubt there are more. These are not exclusive categories. I don’t think any of us uses just one strategy. Werner Rings describes wartime collaboration with the Nazis as a shifting landscape of contingent attitudes and strategies. In the 21st century U.S.A., we've stabilized war as an ongoing program of the capitalist state, right up there with building highways and policing poverty, but we still have to adapt our complicities to changing personal circumstances. That makes it tough to know at any given moment what the biggest threat is, and who's responsible. The only way to manage and win the fundamental conflict is by relentless analysis and mutual education. What is the crime? Who is responsible? How can we stop it? And the answers to all these suppose that we understand what our common goals are.