麻豆社

Good morning. We鈥檙e experiencing a loss of trust in many of our public institutions, while the growing impact of false news and decline in serious debate continues to undermine our social and political systems.

Yet trust is essential to all our relationships. It would be impossible to go about our daily lives without fundamentally trusting the people around us. That鈥檚 why random acts of violence against the public or wilful negligence, however rare, have such a devastating impact on society as a whole. The driver who deliberately mows down pedestrians. The smooth talking liar who cheats somebody out of their life savings. The politician who knowingly seeks to mislead people. The builders and planners who put profits before safety and thereby endanger hundreds of lives. All these are betrayals of trust that have catastrophic social consequences.

But none of us is immune from those impulses and desires that can lead us to betray and deceive others. We are responsible for our actions, but our capacity to nurture our better selves can be supported or undermined by the values promoted by our public institutions. It becomes easier to adopt attitudes of greed, selfishness and dishonesty when those are the values shaping our society. We rightly remember those rare individuals who stand out against the crowd in times of tyranny, risking their lives to defend justice, freedom and truth. Yet we also know from history that such courageous individuals are not the norm. Most people tend to collude and keep quiet rather than resist and speak out, and that silence is the fertile soil in which cultures of abuse spread.

The strength of resistance sometimes comes from having faith in a transcendent source of justice. To say this is not to be na茂ve about the nature of faith. Jesus told his disciples, 鈥渢rust in God, trust also in me鈥�. This was no anodyne religious platitude. It was said just before his arrest. That little community was about to undergo the worst imaginable trauma 鈥� Judas would turn traitor, Jesus would be tortured and executed, most of his disciples would abandon him, and his followers would become the target of some of the Roman Empire鈥檚 most harsh persecutions. It must have been very difficult to believe that their trust in God had not after all been betrayed.

Trust is the most difficult and the most necessary quality of human life, even or perhaps especially when it seems most absent from our institutions and public interactions.

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