Who has stolen the trust of the Chinese people?#
Without trust, there is no social order, and there is no economic motivation. People feel no warmth, only endless loneliness and pain. This is a description from the blue book on social mentality published by the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences a few years ago.
Who has stolen the trust of the Chinese people? To answer this question, I thought of a joke. It says that in today's China, those who sell buns do not eat the buns they make, those who grow vegetables do not eat the vegetables they grow, those who sell medicine dare not take the medicine they produce, and those who sell milk powder never consume domestic milk powder... This joke itself answers my question well from one perspective. When fraud and deception become a trend, even a fashionable norm, all that remains for everyone is two things.
- One is to only trust oneself
- The other is to never trust others
More and more Chinese people are suffering from a fear of deception. They have been warned countless times since childhood not to talk to strangers, and reality has reinforced this judgment. In the past, natural disasters were fewer than man-made disasters; now, there are many natural disasters and even more man-made ones. Everyone is reluctant to easily give trust to others.
The deeper reasons for the trust crisis#
The more terrifying distrust lies in the huge divide in group psychology and values: between officials and the public, people do not believe in debunking rumors but tend to believe in spreading them; between businesses and the public, there is distrust of domestic products and a blind preference for foreign brands; parents do not trust teachers, patients do not trust doctors, tourists do not trust shopkeepers... The rift in values, worldviews, and cognition between men and women is quite severe, leading many to choose not to marry or have children, preferring to grow old alone, absolutely avoiding emotional connections, with men not trusting women and women not trusting men... How tragic!
When people encounter situations or individuals, they always place doubt before trust, which is fundamentally abnormal. The trust of the Chinese people has never extended beyond the family sphere, and now there are many conflicts even between children and parents...
Economist Arrow once asserted that many economic backwardness in the world can be explained by a lack of mutual trust. The biggest crisis is not an economic crisis, but a crisis of trust between people. As long as currency can circulate normally in society, the economy will surely improve quickly. But even if we know the truth, no one will take the first step to be the big fool.
The foundation and restoration of trust#
- Without trust, there is no social order.
Sociologist Simmel said, "Trust is one of the most important integrative forces in society. Without the universal trust that people enjoy among each other, society itself will disintegrate. Modern life is built to a much greater extent on trust in the honesty of others than is usually understood." Trust is one of the main tools for establishing social order. It can perform this function because trust allows a person's behavior to have greater certainty.
For example, if you pursue a girl, if she can make you firmly believe that you can go all the way with her, then this marriage is bound to happen because you have enough certainty. But if the other party is a fool, not only does she not give you a sense of security, but she also does not give you hope, is often coy, cannot distinguish good from bad, and has an incorrect worldview. If you do not choose to leave, then you are not normal! Increasing the certainty of behavior is accomplished through the role that trust plays in customs and reciprocal cooperation. Trust has long become an important virtue in personality and has entered customs, which not only shape personality during the growth period but also, afterward, constrain people's behavior through social pressure applied to those who breach contracts and betray trust.
- Once trust is shattered, it is extremely difficult to restore.
Simplifying complexity is a strategy evolved by humans from survival. In human society, trust specifically undertakes the function of simplifying complexity. Overall, trust can be divided into three categories: personal trust, monetary trust, and expert trust.
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Personal trust is the oldest form of trust among humans. In primitive times, when each social member's circle of life was relatively small, trust at that time was basically personal trust. When selecting partners for cooperation, people chose specific individuals rather than roles, scores, or graduates from certain universities. Knowing someone inside out means they are trustworthy. This type of trust is called personal trust.
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Monetary trust arises as life circles expand. Once we step out of the circle of kinship and acquaintances, we can no longer find trusted individuals to protect us, exchange with us, or cooperate with us. We enter unfamiliar circles, largely bidding farewell to acquaintances, but we still need cooperation and exchange because social life is based on social exchange. At this point, people have to seek to establish another type of social trust mechanism, one of which is money. When you have money, it doesn't matter if you don't know anyone in that place; you can rely on your cash to stay in a hotel, take a boat, ride a car, or fly, and there will be no problem. The structure of monetary trust is based on conformity, meaning that money (especially paper money) has been proven to be viable during circulation and has passed the test of people's daily life experiences, making it widely accepted.
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Expert trust arises when there is no one among "acquaintances" who can help you solve a specific problem, so you need to turn to "experts." A simple example is if you fall ill, you need to find a good doctor. But who do you go to? You can't specify, you don't know anyone, and you certainly don't know such doctors. So what do you do? You look for a good hospital and find a well-known doctor, a professor-level doctor, or an attending physician, and pay 14 yuan for a consultation, which will make you feel more secure. This is expert trust.
Personal, monetary, and expert trust systems support all trust in our society. However, now that monetary trust has issues, other forms of trust have also encountered serious problems. People trust nothing but money, but extreme trust in money, without other trust systems, means that while you believe in money and like money, you won't earn money because the nature of money is based on the returns from transactions and connections between other trusted individuals.
To a greater extent, we must still rely on personal trust; trust among acquaintances remains the cornerstone of our society. Since "killing familiarity" has become a common phenomenon in Chinese society, the most fundamental trust structure we rely on has begun to collapse. "Killing familiarity" signifies not only a lack of trust among strangers but also a growing loss of trust among acquaintances, indicating that social trust has dropped to its lowest point.
Trust within a society is the result of thousands of years of civilization, which has led to some societies having higher levels of trust among their members, while others have slightly lower levels. However, every society enjoys a certain degree of trust. This is a product of thousands of years of civilization. But once society shatters it, restoring it becomes extremely difficult, even requiring generational changes to transform it!!
Perhaps we all know where the problem lies, but in the end, we can only talk about it because we cannot change anything. This is reality.