How do you decide whether to trust someone? A warm conversation can help, but it is rarely enough. You also want to know what they will do when telling the truth costs them something, when they make a mistake, or when they have power over you.
I have been thinking about those questions since listening to Michael Button’s video, Civilizations Become Dangerous When This Happens. Button begins with ancient Rome, where political rivals became less willing to accept limits on what they could do to win. It is an uncomfortable story because the damage was done by people who could usually explain why their own actions were necessary.
What Rome can and cannot tell us
In 133 BCE, the tribune Tiberius Gracchus proposed redistributing public land to poorer citizens. There was a serious problem behind his proposal: concentration of land and the loss of smallholders troubled Rome’s political and military order. When another tribune, Marcus Octavius, vetoed the plan, Tiberius had him removed from office by a vote of the people. He then sought another term. A group of senators killed Tiberius and many of his supporters. The measure he championed survived him.
The problem was no longer just whether land reform was wise. Romans had seen a tribune’s veto set aside and a political dispute settled with clubs. Tiberius’s brother Gaius pursued a broader reform programme a decade later; in 121 BCE the Senate authorised emergency action against him, and he and thousands of supporters died. In 88 BCE Sulla marched an army on Rome over a military command, returned during civil war, and used proscriptions against his enemies after his victory in 82 BCE. Each episode differed, but each made the next breach of a political boundary easier to imagine. Oxford’s account of the Gracchi and its account of Sulla support Button’s broad sequence.
I would be cautious about claiming that a simple collapse of trust caused the fall of the Republic. Rome was not a modern inclusive democracy, and land inequality, expansion, army loyalties and rivalry among elites mattered enormously. The evidence supports a narrower, more useful argument: when powerful people stop accepting restraints, opponents have less reason to believe that ordinary politics can protect them. Suspicion becomes a rational response. The Republic did not end in 133 BCE; its capacity to contain conflict was progressively tested over generations.
There are similarities worth noticing in our own politics, but ancient Rome is a warning, not a prediction. The question Button leaves me with is practical: what would make it reasonable for people who disagree to believe they can lose today, retain their rights, and try again tomorrow?
Trust needs institutions that deserve it
Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson provide part of the answer in Why Nations Fail. They distinguish inclusive institutions, which distribute opportunity and restrain the capture of power, from extractive institutions, which let a narrow group shape rules and rewards for itself. An effective state, enforceable rules, political participation and economic opportunity make cooperation less dependent on knowing the right person. A rule of law that applies to the powerful as well as the powerless makes a promise credible even when we do not know who will be in charge next year.
That is why corruption does more than waste money. If a contract, public decision or criminal investigation depends on private influence, citizens have to guess whose relationships matter more than the rules. Trust shrinks towards family, faction and patron. People may remain loyal to those close to them while becoming less willing to trust a stranger or an institution.
Their later book, The Narrow Corridor, complicates the picture in a helpful way. We need a state capable of protecting rights and delivering services, but a capable state can also dominate the people it governs. Acemoglu and Robinson describe liberty as a narrow corridor maintained by a continuing struggle between a strong state and a society strong enough to hold it accountable. Neither a powerless state nor an unchecked one offers a durable foundation for trust.
In other words, a society has to build the conditions under which trust is justified. Courts need independence. Public servants need the capacity to do their jobs. Journalists, unions, community groups, and ordinary citizens need the freedom to question decisions and organise when they see a problem. Elections matter, but so does the experience between elections of being heard, treated fairly and given an honest explanation.
The OECD’s research on trust in public institutions makes that experience more concrete. People assess reliability and responsiveness alongside openness, integrity and fairness; having a say is especially important. Those qualities reinforce one another. A transparent decision that is never acted upon disappoints. An efficient service delivered unfairly alienates. A fair rule with no competent institution to uphold it offers little reassurance. Trust grows through the working relationship between all of these parts.
That relationship needs tending. Trust is rather like a plant: good soil does not excuse us from watering it, and a few days of enthusiastic watering cannot revive roots that have been left to rot for years. The institutional soil is rule of law and accountability; its daily care is competent service, open correction and a willingness to include people in decisions that affect them.
A politics of shared prosperity
In What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, Acemoglu argues that democracy’s promise has been weakened when large groups have ceased to experience shared prosperity or meaningful political voice. Deindustrialisation and inequality have had civic as well as economic consequences. He calls for a “working-class liberalism” with stronger communal roots, good jobs, effective public services and a wider coalition for self-government and the rule of law. Workers organising in their workplaces can be part of that civic power.
Higher wages alone, he says, will not restore confidence if people still feel unheard or despised. That is a useful corrective to the idea that trust can be purchased with one policy or summoned with a speech. People need material security, a practical say in shared decisions, institutions that work, and leaders who accept limits on their own power. Those are mutually supporting building blocks, rather than a single magic ingredient.
This brings us back to the question in the title. A nation cannot ask people to trust a process that routinely humiliates or excludes them. Equally, I cannot reasonably ask you to trust me merely because I sound sincere. Trust has to survive contact with what I actually do.
What we owe each other
David Horsager’s eight pillars of trust are useful here, although I am not usually a fan of turning human relationships into a listicle. His terms are clarity, compassion, character, competency, commitment, connection, contribution and consistency. I find them most helpful when I imagine what happens if any one of them is missing.
Start with clarity and compassion. If I explain what I can do, what I cannot do and why, you can judge whether to rely on me. If I also listen to what the situation means for you, that explanation becomes a relationship rather than an announcement. Connection grows from this attention, but friendliness without character can become manipulation. Doing what is right when it is inconvenient is how concern acquires substance.
Good intentions still need competency and contribution. If I promise to help you and cannot perform the work, I may be kind but I am not yet reliable for that task. If I remain committed when the task becomes difficult and deliver something useful, you have more evidence. Consistency turns that evidence from a pleasant surprise into a reasonable expectation. The little things count because they tell us whether the bigger promise is likely to hold.
The same logic operates at the scale of a city or country. Clarity looks like intelligible rules and reasons. Compassion looks like listening to people affected by a decision. Character is refusing a corrupt advantage. Competency and contribution are public services that actually work. Commitment is staying with a difficult reform. Connection is the space for people to participate, and consistency is equal treatment over time. An institution cannot smile its way around a failure of fairness any more than a person can.
None of us can demonstrate all eight qualities perfectly, and trust should allow for honest mistakes. The revealing test is what happens next. Do we acknowledge the error, repair what we can and change our practice? Or do we use a plausible explanation to avoid responsibility? Repair is one of the ways a promise becomes believable again.
Making trust normal without making it blind
Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony helps me think about how such behaviour becomes normal. He argued that a social order is sustained partly by consent and by the ideas people absorb through schools, associations, media and everyday life, rather than by force alone. What a society treats as common sense is made and remade in those settings. Power is involved in deciding whose version of common sense prevails.
I want trustworthiness to become a shared expectation in that ordinary sense: a powerful person explains their decision; a professional admits uncertainty; a neighbour expects to be heard; a citizen can challenge authority without being cast as an enemy. But Gramsci also gives us a reason to be careful. A demand that everyone “trust the system” can protect those who benefit from it. A healthy norm is that trust must be earned, checked and repairable. Dissent and scrutiny keep it honest.
We can practice that norm in more places than we might think. We can ask for reasons without assuming bad faith, tell the truth about what we can deliver, honour small commitments, welcome a correction and defend fair procedures even when our side loses. We can also join and support the civic organisations that give people a voice, and expect leaders to make public services worthy of reliance. These personal and public habits feed each other.
So, how can you trust me, and how can I trust you? We begin with clarity about our promises, compassion for the people affected, competence in what we undertake and character when doing the right thing costs us. We keep showing up, doing useful work and correcting mistakes. Beyond the two of us, we need rules that bind the powerful, institutions that work, and a society able to question both. We will never remove uncertainty from trust. We can make it a more reasonable risk to take.
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