Our Deepest Trench: Distrust
By Jiner Huang ’28
In December 1914, a strange sight graced the battlefields of World War I. British and German soldiers climbed out of their trenches, crossed No Man’s Land, and gathered to bury their dead—despite strict orders not to cease fire on the enemy. On the front lines across Europe, soldiers independently evolved a similar strategy of temporary, peaceful cooperation called “live and let live.”
We warn every child against talking to strangers because the world is filled with suspicious people. Trust is nice, but it can let others take advantage of you or shoot you as you come unarmed out of a trench. Distrust is rational, but it seems to me that today there are more un-trusting people than un-trustworthy people. Some of us do not even believe what our doctors say. Modern conditions make trust irrational: language is losing its shared meaning, relationships are becoming less accountable, and miscommunication is happening more often than ever. But if trust could turn enemies into friends during wartime, its absence renders our friends enemies in peacetime.
The foundation of any cooperative structure is a shared language. Friedrich Nietzsche once questioned whether language could serve as “the adequate expression of all realities.” Today, the problem is far more immediate: we have lost the semantic contract between the speaker and listener. As Anna Deavere Smith writes in her 2000 book Talk to Me, the sheer volume of language we experience every day has stripped words of their meaning. Moreover, the English language has been compartmentalized. We cannot believe each other, as we cannot understand each other. Universal terms are replaced by incomprehensible, meaningless slang like “six-seven” or technical jargon like “quantitative tightening.” This linguistic fragmentation makes us vulnerable to the contortion of rhetorical framing. According to the Albert Shanker Institute, 68% of Americans support “spending money on aiding the poor,” but if the concept is labeled “welfare,” the number plummets to 24%. No wonder we do not trust our politicians anymore; their language makes all the difference.
In addition to clear words, trust requires repeated interactions. In his 1984 book The Evolution of Cooperation, Robert Axelrod explored how cooperation works only when people are expected to encounter each other again, allowing the consequences of their cooperation or betrayal to play out. Cooperation emerged in the trenches of World War I because soldiers faced the same opponents day after day, meaning that mercy could be reciprocated and aggression punished. A trustworthy reputation matters more in a smaller, more consistent community because the consequences of betraying someone follow you. But with the rise of fleeting, algorithmically mediated interactions, these consequences diminish. Duke University reported in 2006 that the average number of close friends Americans have dropped from three to two between 1985 and 2004. The more limited and anonymous our interactions become, the less betrayal will cost, and the more distrust will spread.
Our weakening communication exacerbates this social thinning. Modern media technology, as much as it has helped us increase communication, has also increased miscommunication. Some level of misunderstanding is inevitable and even healthy for human interaction; it creates opportunities for clarification and forgiveness. Trust requires the crucial assumption that not every mistake constitutes a betrayal.
But in a digital world stripped of tone and context, that assumption becomes difficult to maintain. Marcel Proust wrote in his 1927 novel Time Regained, the final volume of his work In Search of Lost Time, that “nothing is more painful than this contrast between the mutability of people and the fixity of memory.” Indeed, the permanence of an online footprint makes this even more true today. A misunderstood text invites retaliation, and mistakes are reinterpreted as intention. As a result, our misconstrued actions create a feedback loop of escalating suspicion.
Our faith in each other has many names: the Golden Rule, reciprocal altruism, and live and let live all count as examples. Still, our heightened distrust persists because our environment works against the evolution of trust, and we are each other’s environment. Trust emerges from structure rather than kindness. We need to rebuild it by restoring the conditions that make it viable: a shared language that carries meaning, relationships that endure over time, and a willingness to interpret each other with generosity. Only then can we stop firing at each other, climb out of our trenches, and come together in peace.