Tag: trust

On Betrayal

They were a juggernaut.

The Dallas Cowboys strode onto their home field with an air of confidence. All around them, 90,000 fans waved rally towels and roared.

Why wouldn’t they? The Cowboys had been straight-up dominant on this field for the better part of two years. They’d won 16 home games in a row, often by lopsided margins. Surely, another great performance was in the offing.

The game kicked off. And the Cowboys proceeded to get whooped.

The opposing team – the Green Bay Packers – found the end zone early and often. Meanwhile, the Cowboys offense appeared stuck in neutral.

Soon Packers players were taunting Cowboys cheerleaders, bragging into the lenses of TV cameras, and celebrating gleefully with the smattering of Green Bay fans in the stands. The Packers quarterback even mimicked a thunderbolt with his arms while standing on the iconic blue star at midfield.

Sitting at home in front of the TV, my expression was likely the same as the blue-and-white clad fans in the stadium. Steely eyed. Despondent. Stunned.

This team had shown so much more each week it had set foot on this field. And now, with the postseason upon us, this?!

We felt betrayed. And that stung most of all.

Et tu Brute?

These were supposedly among the final words of Julius Caesar before he was stabbed to death. Or at least William Shakespeare’s believed they were.

Brutus – or Brute, in Latin – was Caesar’s confidant. And when he saw his friend among the ranks of his assassins, the horror was palpable.

Caesar had not only failed to insulate himself from an imminent death. He had fallen victim to betrayal along the way.

And that hurt as much as any deep puncture to the ribs soon would.

Caesar’s experience was not unique, of course. Jesus was famously betrayed before his crucifixion. Benedict Arnold betrayed his fledgling country in the American Revolution. Even Bill Belichick once betrayed the New York Jets by showing up to his introductory news conference as the team’s head coach and instead announcing his resignation.

Such is the power of this emotion, that it’s written in the annals of history and widely recounted.

Betrayal, you see, has two elements that fuel its potency. It shatters the trust we’ve so carefully built in those around us. And it’s impossible to prevent.

Sure, we can put ourselves in position to avoid such an outcome. But the control lies in the hands of those we trust to protect our interests. And those hands can falter.

Ambition, stress, external pressure — these factors can compromise even the most trusted associates. In an unpredictable world, they can come and go with the wind. And in an instant, even those with the purest of intentions can find themselves gripping the dagger of darkness.

But building up our walls won’t do us much good either. Trusting no one lowers the odds that we’ll be turned on. But it also leaves us more vulnerable to the myriad dangers of the world around us.

It’s a brutal Catch-22. One we have no choice but to wrangle with.

It began with a broken bone.

My grandmother ended up in the hospital with a shattered hip. But unlike many her age with this injury, my grandmother hadn’t fallen to sustain it. And that left doctors suspicious.

Some follow-up testing brought the grim news to bear. My grandmother had cancer. Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, to be precise.

My grandmother’s cells were attacking her body from the inside – turning her bones to Swiss cheese. She would need to undergo chemotherapy.

I was 12 years old as all this occurred. And I remember being befuddled.

How could someone’s own body act like this? It all seemed so cruel and unfair.

Fortunately, my grandmother survived the treatment. She went into remission and remained in that state for the last 16 years of her life.

The Paradox of Trust

A friendly face.

It’s a lifeline.

When we’re faced with novelty, a friendly face can make all the difference.

Friendly is familiar. And familiarity can cut through the jitters of uncertainty.

So, we seek out a friendly face at any opportunity. We seek to build a stable of people we can trust.

We believe that we’re setting ourselves up for success by doing this. But we could be booking a one-way ticket to trouble instead.

I’ve often been described as trustworthy.

Many times, I get this feedback directly. Sometimes I see it through the actions of others.

I take this accolade as an honor and a responsibility.

While it’s great to have others believe in me, I know I can’t rest on my laurels. I must work continually to validate that trust.

For trust is not a rubber stamp. It’s a contract.

If I fail to deliver on my end of that contract, it evaporates. I lose the goodwill of family, friends, and associates. And I end up hurt, perhaps irreparably.

And if I abuse the contract entirely — blatantly violating its terms for my own gain — it ignites. I lose the goodwill of family, friends, and associates when the truth comes to light. And they end up hurt, perhaps irreparably.

Yes, what builds us up can also tear us down.

And so, I am deliberate when it comes to trust. I strive to model trustworthy behavior, but I don’t overtly seek out the trust of others.

I simply put myself in a position to earn that label. And once I receive it from someone, I work extra hard to maintain it.

The stakes are too high to act otherwise.

Confidence artists.

We have a complicated relationship with them.

We love it when our favorite characters on the silver screen are putting on a ruse. But we loathe seeing such sequences play out in real life.

The gap between these two examples might seem stark. But they’re closer together than we might want to admit.

Whether it’s James Bond or Bernie Madoff, confidence artists draw from the same well — our sense of trustworthiness, and our unwillingness to question it.

And while it’s easy to trivialize those victimized by confidence schemes — labeling them as the naïve, the uber-rich, or the movie villains who had it coming — such dissonance misses the point.

All too often, we play fast and loose with the concept of trustworthiness. We hand over the keys to the Rolls Royce that is our life. And we just expect the valet in its charge not to go joyriding with it.

We hope that everyone’s better angels will shine through. But what if they don’t?

We have no contingency plan for the devil in our midst. We head out into the chaos of the world without an inch of armor. And the results are predictably tragic.

Perhaps it’s time to change the calculus.

My parents are both educators.

Ever since I was a child, they’ve been entrusted with the well-being of schoolchildren. During the busiest part of the day, they share a classroom – with no parents in sight.

This alone isn’t noteworthy. Or it shouldn’t be.

After all, the school system has been set up this way in America for two centuries. We entrust educators with our kids, no questions asked.

But recently, things have changed.

Revelations of physical abuse in the classroom by teachers have shattered any sense of trust. Schools have had to face tough questions about how they operate.

This has impacted my parents. They’re consummate professionals who have proven worthy of the trust bestowed upon them. But they now face a bevy of regulations and restrictions that impact how they teach.

There’s no question that these changes were needed. The old method of blind trust allowed predators to lie in plain sight, and plenty of lives were ruined in the balance.

Still, the current climate in classrooms isn’t exactly sustainable either. Education can’t happen in a trust vacuum, with all its mechanisms eroded away.

The solution lies somewhere in the middle, in the gray area between carte blanche and a surveillance state.

And it’s there, in the fog and the mist, where the path forward is so difficult to navigate.

Trust but verify.

Back when I worked in television news, I internalized these three words.

Speed was the name of the game. Getting the scoop, being the first to report — that meant everything.

But accuracy was the name of the game too. Putting the wrong information out there could get you in a boatload of trouble.

Choosing between these two edicts wasn’t an option. So, I went with the trust but verify approach.

Essentially, our news operation would implicitly trust the information we came across. But we’d still check with a second source to verify that intel, ensuring it was accurate.

This trust but verify approach speaks to the paradox of trust. We need it, but we can only rely on it so much.

There’s no true guidebook for this paradox. There’s no silver bullet that leverages the upside of trust without exposing us to those nasty downsides.

The best we can do is to approach the situation with eyes wide open. To lean into our vulnerability and to prepare ourselves for the worst outcomes.

We can do this by honoring the trust placed in us. Instead of taking this goodwill for granted, we can act to validate it day in and day out.

And when it comes to the trust we place in others, we can take our time. Instead of diving right in, we can verify that our faith is indeed justified.

On their own, these actions won’t mean much. Trust can still be broken. People can still get burned.

But as more and more of us follow these principles, those risks will diminish. We will bolster our faith in each other while working together to deliver the goods.

That’s a future we can all get behind. But it starts with our actions today.

So, let’s get started.

The Failure of the Fourth Estate

I entered the newsroom on a mission.

It was my first job after graduating from college. My first time interacting with the big, bad world of adulthood. And I was as idealistic as I was young.

I viewed my new role as an evening TV news producer in West Texas with purpose and responsibility.

I would be providing information to improve the lives of my station’s viewers. What could be more important than that?

Sure, I had heard the doubters and the naysayers. The ones who stated that news was nothing but garbage. I was determined to prove them all wrong.

The path to this objective turned out to be a jagged one. I had my fair share of bumps in the road.

There was the time I bungled some breaking news. There was the election night coverage felled by a graphics mishap. And there was the time my boss chided me for featuring too many crime stories.

But I learned from my mistakes. I iterated. I improved.

By the time I left that job, I’d figured out how to handle breaking news. I’d successfully produced an election night newscast — during a presidential election year, no less. And I’d diversified my news coverage beyond a parade of mugshots.

Ultimately, my desire to stay in the media dwindled, and I left the industry behind.

Yet, I never blamed the media for my decision to leave it.

I never questioned the devotion of the reporters, anchors, and producers who poured their hearts into their work. I never questioned the integrity of journalists who often brought home smaller paychecks than Walmart associates. I never believed the claims of bias and corruption from the naysayers.

For years, I would continue to defend the media against all comers. But those days have come to an end.

The Fourth Estate.

It’s an old term for the role of the media. So old, in fact, that many have not heard of it.

The term comes from eighteenth-century England. In those years, there were three estates of British society: the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners. The press — the Fourth Estate — disseminated information between all three.

Of course, the colonists in North America didn’t think much of this system. They broke away from England, forming a nation that separated church and state. They also removed the formal distinction between nobility and commoners in favor of representative democracy.

And yet, the fledgling nation left the Fourth Estate intact.

The role of the media has been cherished ever since America’s earliest days. Journalists have been given the liberty to disseminate information and hold power to account. And they’ve been largely protected from censorship.

Journalism has chronicled the growth of this nation. It has helped expose corruption. And it has even restored our dignity at times.

But it also has an insidious side. And that element has never been more apparent.

March 2020 was a surreal month.

A deadly virus spawned a global pandemic. And in America, life as we knew it abruptly stopped.

As Americans sequestered themselves, many turned to the news for assistance. With so much fear and uncertainty percolating, the Fourth Estate would be our truth-teller.

But the truth we were provided came with an angle. A dark, insidious angle.

As the lockdowns set in, there were endless reports of overrun hospitals. There were harrowing tales of medical professionals reusing contaminated protective gear. And there were the chilling images of refrigerated trucks acting as makeshift morgues.

The sights and sounds of the first wave were jarring enough. But as we sought further guidance, the media provided us with little reassurance.

The point of the lockdowns had been to limit interpersonal contact. Public health officials believed this would keep the virus from spreading and hospitals from getting further overrun.

Journalists seemed to latch onto this message. And, as we sought guidance for everything from getting exercise to grabbing groceries, the media pounced.

There was the example of the young woman who defeated the virus, only to drop dead after a run. There were all the tutorials about the safest way to scrub down groceries. There were all the other anecdotes of someone doing something menial and ending up on a ventilator — or worse.

The underlying message was supposed to be clear. Stop trying to play the angles. Follow the public health guidance. Stay home. Stay safe.

But the grizzly examples used to drive this point home were outliers. And they painted an alarmist picture, causing undue dread. Even I, the media veteran, had a panic attack after scrubbing down groceries.

There was no denying it. The Fourth Estate had failed us.

Back in 1906, the media changed forever.

That was the year muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair published The Jungle — an insider account of conditions inside meatpacking plants.

The revelations in that book were horrifying. So horrifying, in fact, that they led to a spate of new regulations on both factory labor and food processing.

By showing how the sausage gets made, Sinclair had reformed major swaths of society. He had proved that the media could do more than bear witness. It could affect positive change.

That revelation proved true, time and again. It was the media that exposed the Watergate Break-In. It was the media who showed police brutally beating civil rights demonstrators in Alabama. It was the media who held the government accountable for its bungled response to Hurricane Katrina.

Each of those bombshells had us looking on in horror. But the collective outrage forced our country to move forward.

And yet, I don’t view Sinclair’s work as a net positive. At best, it was a mixed success.

For while The Jungle might have ushered in a new age of investigative journalism, it introduced a new element to the mix.

Sensationalism.

No longer was reporting the facts satisfactory. To be sensationalist, the story had to spark emotion.

After all, that’s what the reader — or listener or viewer — wanted. That’s what would grab their attention and keep them coming back for more.

There is no doubt that the media became more sensationalist in the 20th and 21st centuries. If it bleeds, it leads has been a well-known adage for years. And when I was cutting my teeth in the news industry, I was constantly told to find stories with a good hook.

But now, in the wake of a global pandemic, it feels like media sensationalism has hit reached a tipping point. The overpromotion of cautionary tales and the incessant parade of gloomy headlines has crushed the psyche of millions. It hass heightened anxiety, sowed distrust, and even led to despair.

In fact, I believe our society will emerge from this pandemic worse off than we could have been, thanks to the work of the media.

I’m not the only one with these views. A scholarly article from the National Bureau of Economic Research identified a negativity bias amongst journalists. And even The New York Times took note of its findings.

I found some of the explanations for this phenomenon to be lacking. No, people don’t want incessant negativity in the stories they encounter. If they did, Disney films would never have become a commercial success.

But the main point of the research still rings true. The media has failed us with a barrage of sensationalism. They’ve exploited our emotions too many times. And they’ve left a trail of psychological concerns in their wake.

The Fourth Estate has failed us.

It’s time for the media to change its tune.

It’s time for journalists to treat readers, listeners, and viewers with the dignity they deserve. It’s time for the industry to recognize the damage caused by playing to emotions. And it’s time for the media to handle that power responsibly.

The Fourth Estate can be great again. For our sake, it must.

Keeping it Consistent

Consistency.

It’s an attribute that I treasure more than just about any other.

Being consistent means being reliable. And, when it’s done right, it means being trustworthy.

Basically, it means being exactly what others think you are.

I see great value in this predictability. It provides for deep understanding and meaningful social connections.

And it keeps us at ease.

For, while we say Variety is the spice of life, constant spontaneity is stressful. When we don’t know what to expect from our family and friends from minute to minute, we tend to put up barriers. We become a skeptical observer of the world around us, instead of a participant in it.

Even the biggest hermits among us don’t want this. For if we can’t count on anything, if we can’t even rely on a roof over our head or clothes on our backs, the load can be too much for our mind to carry.

Make no mistake, consistency is a basic condition.

Yet, it’s an incredibly difficult one to pull off.

You see, keeping it consistent means producing the same output, time after time. No off days. No slip-ups. Consistency doesn’t allow for excuses, regardless of their validity.

But to err is human. Our actions and emotions can vary by nature. And this can make consistency seem like an impossible dream.

So, what can we do in the face of this conundrum? We can continue to work at it.

Take Words of the West as an example. Two years ago, I launched this website with four words, I am not perfect. I wasn’t perfect then, and I’m certainly not perfect now.

But I’ll be darned if I haven’t been consistent. I’ve put out an article every week since then.

This is not as easy as it seems. There are some weeks where the inspiration is lacking. And others where life simply gets in the way.

Yet, I continue to fight through these obstacles to put out fresh articles each week. I demand this of myself because my readers expect it from me.

And I can’t bear to break their trust by becoming unreliable.

We can all benefit by taking a similar approach.

By keeping it consistent, we can build connections. We can demonstrate our own reliability. And we can live more fulfilling lives.

This isn’t easy, by any means. It requires grit, determination and sacrifice.

But it’s certainly worth it.

Ending Evil

Speechless.

This is how so many of us have felt in the wake of so many recent events. But perhaps never more so than after the rampage in Las Vegas — the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.

There are simply no words to describe our reaction to an incident as horrid as this. Anger, despair, sadness, grief and shock might come to mind. But, all too often, what actually comes out of our mouth is silence. Something this awful and incomprehensible takes our breath away.

Why don’t we speak up? I believe it’s because we are terrified of being rendered helpless. And devastating events such as these remind us just how little control we really have.

For there is no plausible way to eradicate evil. It can weave its way into our lives by any means possible. To put a spin on an iconic line from Jurassic Park, “Evil finds a way.”

This is extremely unsettling. It undermines any attempts to fully contain the effects of evil. And it proves that a concert in the open desert outside of Indio, California is no safer than one in the shadow of the Las Vegas Strip.

There is no amount of planning that can lower the threat level to zero. Evil is pervasive enough to skirt any barriers we might throw in its way.

If you’re questioning this point, remember that the Twin Towers in New York were designed to withstand airplane strikes. But those best-laid plans went down with the towers on one of the darkest days in American history.

So, if evil is unpreventable, what can we do to respond to it?

We can start by banding together.

You see, evil lurks in the darkest, loneliest places. It thrives in environments of division and doubt.

But, by teaming up with our friends and neighbors, we can find strength in numbers. By emphasizing our commonalities over our differences, we can draw light to the shadowy areas where evil would otherwise populate.

And by giving evil less room to operate, we give ourselves a greater change to build trust. This, in turn, can lead to a safer community — one aligned on the commonality of goodness.

While these initiatives can never bring back those lost to acts of evil, it will at least help us build a world that properly honors their memory.

Yes, ending evil may be a tall order. But the start of that process is certainly within our grasp.

Let’s get to work.

Trust the System

Who can we trust?

This is a fundamental question in life. One that permeates from the board room to the dining room.

Trust is perhaps the most critical element for productive relationships. Yet, it’s both as difficult to obtain and as easy to destroy as fine china. And when trust is broken, it’s as if the knife’s being twisted in our back.

So, we do what we can to protect ourselves from this outcome. When encountering new people, we toggle our trust switch to Off by default. We indicate trust must first be earned, and then be kept.

This indication runs both ways. It requires that we prove our worth to others. And that others prove their worth to us.

We implicitly understand this construct on an individual level. But what about on a wider scale? Can we implicitly trust the systems and constructs our society has built?

Seth Godin says no.

The marketing guru recently penned an article decrying unbridled capitalism. Godin claimed that capitalist utopias can’t exist because people can’t be trusted. That without regulation, the free market system will fail. And that it will fail because it’s human nature for those with unfettered power to unethically exploit those without it.

I’m a huge fan of Seth Godin. I read his blog voraciously and I take his sage advice to heart. I even model my Words of the West articles after his.

But I must admit that Seth is wrong in this instance.

Why? Because he directly implies that people can’t be trustworthy. That without someone watching over our shoulders, our natural instinct is to hurt others.

I find that description upsetting. In part because it kowtows to the wave of divisiveness engulfing our society. And in part because it indicates that we have no free will.

You see, it is true that without anyone lording over a capitalist society, some bad apples would do all they could to exploit others. Heck, these bad actors would probably do this without any remorse.

But would all of us do this by default? No flipping way!

Most of us do have an intact moral compass. We know where True North is, and we are committed to following it.

We learn about right and wrong early in life. And we learn about the fragility of trust through the connections we build with others as we mature.

These principles can help us stay ethical, even when no one’s watching. After all, we recognize that the Golden Rule is still in effect.

To dismiss this behavior as a byproduct of regulation is just plain wrong. It completely discounts the goodness inherent within us.

With that said, here’s what I believe:

I believe the system deserves our trust.

I believe humanity deserves the benefit of the doubt.

And I believe that a free market system is more beneficial than one saddled by regulations.

Most of all, I believe that we need to trust in something in order to trust in each other. So why not trust in a system our own society has built? One that speaks to the inherent goodness within us.

The system works. Trust it.

A Foundation of Trust

What’s the most precious thing in life?

Some might say life itself, or love. And they’re right, in a way.

But I think there’s one clear answer, that stands tall among the rest.

Trust.

You see, trust is one of the most difficult sensations to describe, yet one of the most encompassing. It provides us with a sense of security, and its absence can literally destroy our health.

Trust is one of the most difficult things to attain. (Heck, we often don’t trust ourselves, or our ability to trust others.) And if trust is earned and broken, it’s nearly impossible to regain.

Trust allows us to share secrets, to step on the roller coaster, to pay attention to our teachers. Lack of trust is why we lock our doors at night, why we scour Web MD every time we have a slight headache, why the thought of someone else driving our car for the first time gives us angst.

Trust is what draws us to our routine, or allows us to stray from our routine.

If you’re looking for a common theme in all this, well — there are two.

Trust is about protection, but also about control.

These feelings are at the heart of human nature, which is why trust is the Holy Grail of all commodities.

So yes, trust is precious — and increasingly scarce.

As bad things happen in our increasingly connected society, we become inherently suspicious. Trust erodes, tensions flare — and more bad things happen as a result.

But there’s an alternate ending to this narrative. One that — surprise, surprise — relies on our collective ability to trust.

If we get to know our neighbors, or at least give them the benefit of the doubt, we can set a common foundation. A foundation of trust.

With this foundation in place, we can more productively respond to the crises our society faces with one voice. A voice of multiple perspectives, but of unified purpose. A voice free of the divisive seeds of deceit.

Now, this process ain’t easy; the important ones hardly ever are. But it is necessary.

For while we may never leave our doors unlocked, we should be able to unlock our hearts.