(First off — I’m very much a liberal dude far more for Bernie Sanders than Joe Biden — and I don’t consider myself at all wrong about that. But yeah — I’m writing about the importance of trust.)
This is about our shared power.
That is — the power of the left, and where it comes from.
Conservative power comes from confidence — in the sense of confidence games. They tell you that you can get ahead if only you oppose those that will stop you — and those that will stop you are those pesky liberals trying to help everyone evenly together. They distrust everything about everything we all share — but feed on the largely false confidence that they can get ahead with these leaders.
It’s not proper rational skepticism, mind you— but the blindness of greed and confidence in greed that is the core motivation. This is important if you’ve ever seen the way conservative power treats truth — it denies the truth of everything not feeding the confidence game. It is “trust no one” instead of rational skepticism.
Liberals power comes from trust. Trust that helping eachother will make us all better off together. Trust builds an economy of scale that builds the most powerful societies in history.
Ironically, it is exactly that shared trust that you need to build up to proper rational skepticism.
See — with no trust, you’re kind of paralyzed. Unable to find any tentative shared truth to even communicate anything but a kind of hatred… which might remind you of some political movements.
You need trust for facts to mean anything — for education to mean anything — and to have a shared sense of progress we can build together.
All that takes a LOT of trust. In fact, without a pretty large amount of trust, any future we can possibly build together crumbles. Things like science are impossible without that kind of trust.
What’s important — crucially important — is to distinguish pushing for better things, from distrust.
In many ways, to push for better things together requires much more trust than just ignoring your leaders. It means that instead of just thinking of your leaders as good enough to likely benefit you — instead of just having confidence in your leaders — you trust them as you do yourself, and think them capable of working together to build something better than you can imagine just on your own.
That’s what President Obama was constantly asking us to do — to DEMAND more of him, to pressure everyone we could to do better.
That’s also why the Tea Party movement leading to the Trump movement has been funded and fostered the way it has — to tear down our shared trust, our shared power — our ability to make things better. Because they think that’s the only way to excel on their own terms — while throwing away science and shared resources, and praising distrust as wisdom.
If you want power — real power, you must understand how trust works, and why it’s different from just confidence.
I can definitely trust President Joe Biden — I can trust our shared world. I do want better — and will push for us to do better whenever I can — but only BECAUSE I trust in what we can do together — but I’ll only get what I care about, and what we all care about — if we can trust together.
Where we’re going — we can only get there together.