The Busting of American Trust

By Frank Trippett

"Trust is a social good to be protected just as much as the air we breathe or the water we drink." So argues Sissela Bok, a lecturer on medical ethics at Harvard Medical School, in her book Lying. Most Americans would readily agree. Yet Americans are finding it ever more risky to trust the world about them. Duplicity crops up so often and so widely that there are moments when it seems that old-fashioned honesty is going out of style.

That is certainly not the case. Most Americans are dependable and forthright--most of the time. Enough people fall short of square dealing, however, to have left Americans a keen hunger for someone to trust. While political lying may have entered an "era of mass production," as Critic Robert Adams says in Bad Mouth, the problem of deception goes far beyond politics. Many people in academia, in science, in engineering, in medicine, in law, in the crafts--all have been caught in the act of exercising the scruples of a fly-by-night lightning-rod salesman. Skulduggery turns up so often in the commercial world that the best graduate schools of business tram students to cope with deceptive practices. Americans as a whole so stretch the truth in preparing their tax returns that the Internal Revenue Service claims that it cost the U.S. Treasury at least $18 billion last year. An obscure copy editor at the New York Herald Tribune coined the phrase Credibility Gap 15 years ago to jazz up a headline over a story about L.B.J.'s Washington. Today Credibility Gap appears to span the continent.

Honesty, as Diogenes would caution, has never been the strong suit of the human species. Mandatory oath taking in legal proceedings was not invented out of faith in the natural probity of witnesses. Everybody fibs, alas. It is also true that every epoch has its roster of villains, its quota of predatory deceit. Yet today the roster seems far longer than usual, and most observers agree that the quota of duplicity--from artful dodging to elaborate fraud--is growing intolerably large.

Why? In addition to the ever present greed and the lust for special advantage, there are a number of reasons for increased deception. The general relaxation of moral codes is doubtless one. Another is the steadily growing pressure for personal achievement in an increasingly competitive world. The incentive to cheat is heightened by the fact that society is more and more an aggregate of strangers dealing impersonally with each other. Finally, there is the snowballing impression that every body must be cheating.

That accumulating impression, though false, is what takes such a toll of social faith. The abuse of trust has become so commonplace that one must wonder whether society's very capacity to believe is not being gradually undermined. It has taken a drubbing in recent decades. Watergate yesterday, Abscam today (see NATION). In between, the people's credulity has been hounded by far more than the usual con games and rackets. The pathetic fact is that Americans seem to be resorting more and more to preying, with methodical duplicity, on other Americans.

Only the young could be unaware of a change in the tone of many ordinary business dealings in the country. Twenty years ago the householder who called a repairman tended to assume, more often than not, that the job would be fairly estimated and honestly carried out. Today Americans are far more likely to feel uneasy when they find it necessary to deal with crafts of all sorts--home improvement companies, television repairmen, appliance mechanics. Investigations of automobile repair shops have turned up such widespread hanky-panky that some car owners half expect to be ripped off when their vehicle needs fixing. Consumer complaint bureaus spend a good deal of their energy handling complaints about price gouging and false representation. The wish to avoid being victims, as well as the wish to save, has turned many Americans into do-it-yourselfers.

Duplicitous practices have also been staining the nation's most prestigious realms. Athletes at several Pacific-10 Conference universities turn out to have been the beneficiaries of a wide spread traffic in bogus credits and forged transcripts, sometimes with the connivance of academic administrators. Surgeons have been caught prescribing needless operations and letting medical equipment salesmen suture incisions; one salesman even assisted in a hip joint replacement. Lawyers and doctors have turned up operating auto accident rackets to bilk insurance companies. Engineers have been found out faking X-ray inspections of joints in the Alaska oil pipeline. Enough--though there is much more.

Duplicity racks up innumerable specific victims, to be sure, but the more enduring results are not as easy to spot. The concentrated lying imposed on victims of brainwashing can eventually cause a mind, as Philosopher Hannah Arendt put it, to refuse "to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well it may be established." Americans clearly have not reacted to widespread deceptions in that pathological way. Even if disenchanted, they have so far tended to become more mulish and skeptical as voters, more diligent as consumers and more strenuous as activists. They have, for example, persuaded Congress and state legislatures to pass a large collection of truth-in-almost-everything laws to ward off duplicity in such activities as lending, labeling and advertising.

Still, some ill effect has been achieved when a nation becomes obsessed with and doubtful about the credibility of just about everybody and everything. One thing that has become more constant than corruption, says Robert O'Brien, a Massachusetts Consumers Council executive, is "the expectation of corruption." Such deepening doubt can be seen as both cause and effect in the every-man-for-himself spirit that has tended to show itself since the early 1970s--at great cost to the spirit of community.

Americans in the best of times must cope with a world designed to confuse the powers of belief and disbelief. Theirs is a huckstering, show-bizzy world jangling with hype, hullabaloo and hooey, bull, baloney and bamboozlement. The supersell of some advertising and the fantasies that stutter forth from TV are enough to keep credulousness off balance.

Today's sheer quantity of disinformation suggests that the people best equipped to cope with contemporary life might be the Dobu Islanders of Melanesia: they habitually practice deceit on everybody and exult in the craft of treachery. Anthropologist Ruth Benedict, who chronicled the ways of the Dobu tribe in Patterns of Culture, noted that, in their eyes, a "good" and "successful" man was one "who has cheated another of his place." The U.S. is far from living by any such absurd, upside-down ethic. Yet, in the light of today's trends, it can do no harm to ponder the price society pays for the incessant abuse of trust. --By Frank Trippett

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