Trust in Habit: A Way of Coping in Unsettled Times

Abstract

With the re-conceptualization of modernity in terms of high levels of risk, complexity and uncertainty, trust has come to be seen as the essential asset in the unsettled times without which we can make no decisions and take no initiatives. More generally, trust is a fundamental resource, as with trust societies flourish and ‘when trust is destroyed, societies falter and collapse’ (Bok 1979: 26), thus it is the important condition of societal well-being. Presently, the growing demand for trust is accompanied by the growing deficit of trust. The current breakdown of trust is evident all over the world; it is observable in many Western political systems (Hosking 2014), it is noticeable among many industrialized nations (Sasaki 2016), there is empirical evidence of the erosion of trust in professions on the global scale (Drezner 2017) and the growing distrust of facts is reported around the world (Greenfield 2017). As the erosion of trust has reached a new global level, the loss of trust in established institutions is particularly evident; for example, in the United States, where people’s trust in Congress fell from 42 percent in 1973 to 7 percent in 2014. Americans have also lost confidence in unions, public schools, organized religion, business, healthcare, police and media; in 2016, a Gallup poll found that only three in ten Americans trusted mass media to accurately report the news (Drezner 2017: 23–5). The noticeable decline of the trust levels in the contemporary world, together with the continuous demand for it, calls for searching for new ways of regaining the feelings of continuity, security and strength to face change. In other words, as ‘we are doomed more and more to trust under complex conditions’ (Sloterdijk 2016: 161), we need to debate how to manage the discontinuity, risk and change without having ‘to combine trust with alarm systems’ (Sloterdijk 2016: 162). This paper asserts that one of the ways to address the issue of trust deficit should start with the appreciation of the habit’s capacity to reinforce trust. While realizing that habit is still often seen as a very old-fashioned notion connected with such ideas as tradition, irrationality, reproduction and passivity, it focuses on trust’s links with habit and the habit’s plasticity (Bernacer, Lombo