Trust (Part 2): What we believe in makes it true
Belief is the go-between in the affair between truth and trust, writes George Pitcher
The UK government continues to enjoy relatively high poll ratings, even with a Prime Minister who seldom tells the truth. New Health Secretary Sajid Javid believes that he will be able to relax all Covid restrictions on July 19th, though infections are rising across Europe. England isn’t the strongest side in Euro 2020, but manager Gareth Southgate believes they can go all the way.
All these propositions rely on an irrational assumption. All of them demonstrate that belief doesn’t rely on a simple summation of the facts. And they show, along with any number of other everyday examples, that belief trumps (and I choose that verb deliberately) truth when it comes to populist decision-making.
It’s a commonplace at this stage to rehearse that the absolute truth, as expounded by the ancient Greek school, has been usurped by post-modern moral relativism, which itself has its roots in the empirical philosophies of the Enlightenment.
“Your truth…”
That heavy little paragraph can be leavened anecdotally – witness the desk editor on a national newspaper when I complained that a story I’d written, for which I was being sued for libel, was true. He replied: “George, there’s your truth, there’s my truth and there’s the truth.” Cue fake news and post-truth politics.
While that’s all true (let it go), it’s a well-worn path. I’m more interested here in the relationship between truth and trust and how belief is the active factor in their equation.
Last week in this space I proffered the notion that trust was transactional, that it depends on investment and return, but that it isn’t subject to conventional market behaviours. I promised this week to unpack the intimate, if as we shall see occasionally faithless, relationship between trust and truth.
The go-between in this affair is belief. To prove that contention, it would be at least polite to apply an Enlightenment empiricism. So, all three statements at the start of this article depend on belief to stand them up.
Indeed, all the trees that have been felled and all the silicon that has been mined to record our post-truth era and fake-news society rest on this premise: Populist politicians and social-media journalists have heralded a new millennium with the proposition that voters and readers care less about what is true than what they believe to be true.
Empirical scrutiny
The US election was stolen from Donald Trump and Boris Johnson got Brexit done. Neither claim bears a moment’s empirical scrutiny, but they are believed by hundreds of thousands – possibly millions – because they believe them to be true and because they want to believe them to be true.
The very fact that we have expressions such as post-truth and fake news reveals some resistance to this development. But the liberal consensus that does the resisting is itself flawed. It assumes that postmodernism, with all its slippery relativity, abolished the distinction between the real and the made-up and therefore betrayed the Enlightenment thinkers who held (generally speaking) that truth is independent of opinion and enjoys hegemony over it.
Legendary Guardian editor CP Scott articulated that distinction perfectly with his assertion that “facts are sacred, comment is free”. But it was the Enlightenment that sowed the seeds of the relativism that has destroyed the principle he claimed.
As the political philosopher John Gray puts it in his review of two books on post-truth by journalists Matthew d’Ancona and Evan Davis: “The postmodern assertion that reality is socially constructed is a footnote to the Enlightenment rather than a departure from it.”
Commercial advantage
So the provenance of the idea that an absolute truth is of less value than what we believe to be true is historically well founded, not some passing aberration from which we’ll recover (cf Trump), and we should get used to it. It can be turned to commercial advantage and many have already done so – the advertising and public relations industries have successfully adapted the philosophy for decades.
But such practitioners – and their clients and audiences in politics and journalism – may be unaware of a further implication. If belief is the active agent that acts between truth and trust (and, as we’ve explored, trust is transactional), then it’s not so much the case that when a trust is betrayed the cost is truth than the other way around. More specifically, when objective truth becomes personal belief then trust is betrayed.
The costs of that in politics and business will be considerable. And it provides some urgency to the idea that we should know what we believe to be true if we are to trust one another.
To make a start with my first paragraph: The PM may believe in nothing beyond his own ambitions. Javid might believe in personal freedom through herd immunity for the invulnerable. Southgate believes his players should believe in themselves.
It’s a kind of belief audit. If we don’t trust what we hold to be true, but rather believe to be true what we trust, then it’s more than worth knowing exactly what it is that we believe in.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.