This Is About Trust

By Gary Null, PhD

In Whom Do We Trust?

Who can we trust, and who shouldn’t we trust? Consider President Trump’s Easter

Sunday statement to the Iranian people, followed by a second declaration on the

following Monday, in which he essentially warned he would bomb Iran back to the Stone

Ages. In doing so, he asserted not only the power and willingness, but also the presumed

right to destroy a civilization more than 2,500 years old (dating back to the Achaemenid

Empire of 550 BCE), without any mention of the 92 million people who would be

reduced to collateral damage. Meanwhile, as of today, he is signaling a move to take

control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Now think about the ordinary men and women inside Iran—people living normal,

modest lives, raising their children, going to work. Think of those who do not want a

theocracy, who chafe under the rule of an Ayatollah and councils of mullahs, who quietly

dream of more democracy and more freedom. They had trust—trust that the United

States stood for liberation.

But did anyone tell them the price of that liberation? Since the last rounds of American-

led regime change in the region, we have destroyed six hundred schools, two hundred

fifty hospitals, the largest pedestrian bridge in the country, energy infrastructure, and

the basic quality of life of ordinary citizens who asked only to be free. We targeted,

intentionally, the very people who said: we want freedom. And about eighty-five percent

of the country never asked for any of it—they simply wanted to live meaningful lives.

So now we have a nation divided. One group believes everything that Fox News, Sean

Hannity, Senator Lindsey Graham, and their kind continue to spout—that Iran is an

existential threat, that we must do what we have done before to bring freedom and

democracy. But look at the freedom and quality of life we brought to Libya under the

Obama administration. At that time, Libya ranked number one among the fifty-four

nations of Africa in employment, lowest poverty, highest per-capita income, highest

level of education, and had one of the best medical care systems on the continent—all of

it free. There was no crime. It was called the Paris of Africa.

Gaddafi had built the largest human-made freshwater aquifer in the world to give clean

water to neighboring countries. Women ran most of the civic councils. The proceeds

from oil and gas went into each citizen’s account. If you wanted to farm, the government

bought you the land, the equipment, and the seed. But Gaddafi was threatening to

replace the dollar as the standard of exchange for oil with a gold dinar, and he had

persuaded roughly twelve other nations to join him. That was enough. He had to go. And

so an entire civilization was destroyed.

Today, Libya has open slave markets. You can literally purchase a human being in a

marketplace. And not one Western leader—not one American president or secretary of

state—has said: we got that wrong. No one apologized. No one was held accountable.

We did the same in Afghanistan. In Syria. We created and funded terrorist

organizations. There is a photograph of a man holding two severed heads—a man who

caused thousands more heads to be severed, thousands more deaths. Today that same

man wears a tailored suit, has trimmed his beard, and was welcomed into the White

House, where President Trump shook his hand and recognized him as the leader of

Syria. We never learn, because we are never made to.

General Wesley Clark—the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO—recounted in

a public forum that shortly after 9/11, a Pentagon staff officer showed him a classified

memo. The memo identified seven countries to be overthrown in five years: Iraq, Syria,

Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. Clark asked why. The officer said he didn’t

know. The audience laughed. Today we know: it was always about natural resources,

strategic control, and the financial interests of the people who never have to fight the

wars they start.

General Smedley Butler, the most decorated Marine in American history, said it plainly:

“War is a racket.” He had fought in Panama, Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, China—and he

came home and told the truth. We’re doing this for Wall Street, he said. We’re doing this

for corporate interests. We have repeated this pattern in more than one hundred

countries since 1945, and even before that in the 1800s and early 1900s. In the last

century alone, more than one hundred million people have died in conflicts that were

completely preventable.

We, the American people—and the world’s watching audience—were expected to trust

these people’s judgment and motives. We were never given the truth. And when we

asked for it, we were told to sit down.

The Philosophy of Betrayal: When Trust Is Weaponized

Trust is not merely a social nicety. It is the load-bearing column of civilization. Aristotle

understood this when he placed friendship—philia—at the center of his ethics,

recognizing that genuine community is impossible without the bonds of mutual trust.

Kant went further: his categorical imperative demands we ask whether our actions could

become a universal law. Could a world in which those in power systematically deceive

and betray those beneath them be universalized? Of course not. Such a world—our

world—collapses in on itself, which is precisely what we are watching happen.

The great Enlightenment philosophers who laid the groundwork for modern

democracy—Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu—all grounded legitimate government in a

social contract. The people grant power to their leaders in exchange for a sacred trust:

that those leaders will protect their rights, serve their interests, and be accountable for

their failures. When leaders violate that contract—when they lie, deceive, exploit, and

then evade all consequences—they do not merely break a law. They shatter the

philosophical foundation upon which democratic society rests.

Hannah Arendt, writing after the Holocaust, introduced the world to what she called the

“banality of evil”—the chilling observation that the most monstrous crimes in history are

not usually committed by monsters. They are carried out by ordinary bureaucrats,

administrators, generals, and politicians who simply follow orders, look the other way,

and never ask the hard questions. The evil is banal because no one takes personal

responsibility. No one is ever truly in charge of the crime, and therefore no one is ever

truly punished for it.

This is where philosophy meets the deepest wound of our contemporary crisis. When a

trusted institution betrays us—when a government lies us into a war, when a religious

organization shields predators from justice, when a financial system loots ordinary

people to enrich a handful of insiders—we do not merely lose money or suffer physically.

We lose something far more difficult to rebuild: our sense of moral order. We lose the

conviction that actions have consequences, that wrongdoing will be punished, that the

universe operates by consistent rules.

Ethicists from every tradition—from Confucius to Immanuel Kant to John Rawls—agree

on this much: a just society requires that the same moral standards apply to everyone,

regardless of wealth or power. What we have instead is something deeply different. And

we feel it. We feel it in our bones, even when we cannot name it precisely. There are two

sets of rules in this country. There is the law that applies to you and me, and there is the

law—or rather the absence of law—that applies to those who hold power.

Two Rules: The Accountability Void

The Epstein Network and the Protected Class

Consider Jeffrey Epstein. Here was a man who, by all accounts, spent decades

trafficking young girls—some barely teenagers—to among the most powerful men in the

world: politicians, financiers, royalty, celebrities, heads of state. He ran a procurement

operation for the elite. His private island, his private jets, his private gatherings—all

documented. His client list ran into the hundreds, possibly thousands.

Epstein died in a federal prison in August 2019 under circumstances that no serious

investigator accepts as simple suicide. The cameras failed. The guards were asleep. The

mechanism of accountability, as if by design, was neutralized at the precise moment it

was needed most.

Ghislaine Maxwell, his alleged chief procurer, was eventually convicted in December

2021 and sentenced to twenty years in prison. She is, to date, the only person of

consequence to have been held legally accountable for crimes that implicated hundreds.

Not a single one of Epstein’s clients—not one of the powerful men whose names appear

in his flight logs and his “black book”—has faced prosecution. The sealed court

documents naming those clients have been fought over for years. When portions were

finally released, the names confirmed what the public already suspected: the highest

echelons of power were involved. And nothing happened. Nothing.

What does this tell us? It tells us that there is a class of people in this society who exist

above the law. Not technically—no one will say it openly—but practically and

demonstrably. When was the last time anyone in that circle was held accountable for

crimes against humanity? The answer, if you are honest with yourself, is: almost never.

Ghislaine Maxwell is the exception that proves the rule. She was sacrificed so that the

system could claim it had done its job while leaving the structure of impunity entirely

intact.

The Four-Year Coup and the Silence That Followed

Tulsi Gabbard—a former Democratic congresswoman, a decorated military officer, a

person who served as a delegate to her party’s national conventions—came forward with

documented evidence that the Biden administration and elements of the intelligence

community engaged in a sustained, four-year effort to undermine a sitting and then

former president. Call it what you will; she called it a coup attempt. The mechanisms

included the weaponization of federal agencies, the manipulation of intelligence

assessments for political purposes, and the systematic targeting of political opponents

through the Justice Department and the FBI.

Whether you voted for Donald Trump, whether you like or dislike him, is entirely beside

the point. The point is constitutional. The point is about the rule of law. The point is

about whether a government can turn its own law-enforcement and intelligence

apparatus against its political opposition without consequence. The answer, thus far,

appears to be: yes, it can. No one has been arrested. No one has been indicted. No one

has faced any meaningful accountability for what, if the evidence holds, is among the

most serious abuses of governmental power in modern American history.

Compare that to what happens to an ordinary citizen who lies to a federal investigator,

who withholds documents, who obstructs a congressional inquiry. They go to prison.

The contrast is not subtle. It is the defining feature of a two-tiered justice system, and it

is in plain sight for anyone willing to look.

A Pattern Without Punishment

This is not an isolated phenomenon. It is a pattern. The architects of the Iraq War—men

who fabricated intelligence, who lied to Congress and the United Nations, who caused

the deaths of over a million Iraqi civilians and the displacement of twenty million

more—are today respected elder statesmen. They give speeches. They sit on corporate

boards. They are welcomed at state funerals. George W. Bush paints portraits in his

retirement. Dick Cheney receives lifetime achievement awards from partisan

foundations.

The bankers who crashed the global economy in 2008 through deliberate, systemic

fraud—who sold toxic mortgage-backed securities they privately called “junk” and “dog

food” while publicly rating them as safe investments—received government bailouts and

then paid themselves record bonuses with the money. Not a single senior Wall Street

executive went to prison. Not one.

The CIA ran MK-Ultra—a covert program that subjected American and Canadian

citizens to nonconsensual drug experiments, electroshock therapy, and psychological

torture for over a decade. When it was exposed, the director of the CIA destroyed the

files. No one was prosecuted. The Iran-Contra scandal revealed that senior officials of

the Reagan administration secretly and illegally sold weapons to Iran and used the

proceeds to fund Nicaraguan death squads, in direct defiance of Congressional law.

Oliver North was convicted on three counts, and all three were overturned on appeal.

Everyone else walked free.

The question that philosophy demands we ask—the question that Aristotle and Kant and

Rawls would all insist upon—is this: What kind of moral order, what kind of civilization,

survives when accountability is permanently reserved for the powerless? When the

people we have trusted to lead us, to protect us, to administer justice for us, operate

under an entirely different set of rules than the rest of us? The answer, I am afraid, is:

not ours. Not for much longer.

How Trust Was Built—and What We Have Lost

I grew up like most baby boomers, children of parents who had lived through the Great

Depression and World War II. They had built strong, solid communities. Even in the

most economically depressed areas of America, people still genuinely cared for one

another. There were food cooperatives where farmers would donate portions of their

crop. There were collective workshops where people who had skills—mechanics,

electricians, carpenters—would repair discarded items donated by wealthier neighbors

and resell them, splitting the proceeds equally.

On my mother’s family’s farm in West Virginia, during the Great Depression, she was

responsible, starting at age five, for helping to feed the hobos who came off the trains.

The engineer would give them five minutes. These were decent people who had almost

nothing—sometimes just a kerchief tied on the end of a stick. They still had their faith.

They still had their dignity. They were looking for work anywhere they could find it. And

so my family shared whatever they had baked that day—sometimes three hundred

loaves of bread—because, as my mother said, how can you sit at a table and eat while the

person across from you has nothing? You would be ashamed of yourself.

This is the world in which trust was built not through legal contracts or institutional

guarantees, but through the lived experience of daily mutual obligation. People gave

their word, and that was sufficient. Mr. Zolder, the electrician who lived across the street

from where I was born, was probably the best-known electrician in our town. He spent

every Saturday fixing people’s electrical problems—and never asked for a penny. Not

once. That was expected. If you had a skill, you gave the gift of that skill to your

community. My mother told me: if you have a gift, give the gift. I trusted her judgment.

She was right.

We revered our elders because they were our teachers, the custodians of accumulated

wisdom. Our teachers in school—many of whom had taught for their entire adult lives,

in an era before mandatory retirement—genuinely cared whether every single student

succeeded. They stayed after school. They set up summer programs. They sat with you

individually. When we graduated, we were equipped with critical thinking, common

sense, reason, and the kind of practical intuition that comes from being educated by

people who knew you by name.

We had a shared moral vocabulary. You did not disrespect a teacher. You did not

demean a neighbor. You did not steal from a store. And if someone in the community

began to stray, the community itself would close in around them—not with punishment

but with conversation and care. The never-do-wells existed, as they always will, but they

were known, and people talked with them. That is how it worked. That is what a genuine

community does.

Today, that world is largely gone. The community bonds that transmitted trust across

generations have been severed, one institution at a time. The schools now teach ideology

instead of reason. The media is captured by corporate and ideological interests. The

churches—in too many cases—protected predators instead of the faithful. The banks

care about one thing: profiting from your debt. The pharmaceutical industry profits

from your illness. The political class profits from your fear. And the intelligence

community, as we have seen, is not above using its power against the very citizens it was

created to protect.

Everywhere You Look: The Systemic Failure of

Accountability

The betrayal of trust is not confined to Washington or Wall Street. It runs through every

level of American institutional life. In California, state government has become a case

study in dysfunction uncoupled from accountability. Billions of taxpayer dollars are

simply stolen—not metaphorically stolen, but actually diverted, misappropriated,

laundered through politically connected contractors and friends of politicians who know

in advance which land to buy and at what price to sell it back to the government. The

high-speed rail project that was supposed to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco has

consumed over twelve billion dollars and laid not a single mile of track. Someone took

that money. No one has been arrested. The projected cost has now surpassed one

hundred and thirteen billion dollars.

And yet California voters re-elect their incumbent legislators at a rate of approximately

ninety-four percent. Simultaneously, polls show that the public’s trust in politicians

hovers around twelve percent. Think about that contradiction for a moment. You do not

trust them. You believe they are corrupt. And then you keep them in power. This is not

stupidity—it is the symptom of a population that has become so exhausted by

institutional betrayal that it no longer believes its own choices matter.

Our judicial system cannot be trusted when career criminals are arrested more than a

hundred times and released within hours, while a working-class person with a first

offense spends months awaiting trial they cannot afford to fight. Our legislative system

is run amok. Not a single one of our presidents—of either party, across the last several

decades—can be fully trusted, because the decisions they made—personal, financial,

geopolitical—consistently prioritized their own interests, their donors’ interests, and

their legacy above the welfare of the people they were elected to serve.

Our banking system exists not to serve communities but to exploit them, to trap

ordinary people in cycles of debt from which the only exit is poverty. Our intelligence

agencies have never, in their modern history, been fully accountable to the public they

claim to protect. The FBI has been weaponized against domestic political opposition.

The CIA’s history is a catalogue of coups, assassinations, drug trafficking, and the

systematic destruction of democratic governments abroad. None of this is conspiracy

theory. All of it is documented history. And not one senior official has ever faced

meaningful accountability for any of it.

You cannot trust the mainstream media—not the liberal press, not the conservative

press. Both have been captured. Both serve the narrative needs of their corporate

owners and ideological patrons. You cannot trust most influencers, who are paid to

appear trustworthy. You cannot trust most celebrities, who are performers—gifted at

portraying emotions they may not feel, advocating positions they may not hold, for

audiences they have been taught to manage rather than inform.

Every single major institution in American life has, at some point and in some way,

betrayed the trust of the people it was meant to serve. The banks. The schools. The

churches. The courts. The hospitals. The government. The press. Every one.

The Wound Within: What Betrayal Does to the Soul

We need to understand what this accumulated institutional betrayal does to the human

psyche, because it is not abstract. When a child grows up watching adults in positions of

authority lie, evade, and escape consequences—when the message being transmitted is

that power exempts you from accountability—that child learns a corrosive lesson. They

learn that the rules they are taught do not actually apply. They learn that trust is a form

of vulnerability—and that vulnerability will be exploited.

Think of the people who were trusted to be good parents, and who fed their children the

wrong food, the wrong information, the wrong ethics. Think of the parents who did this

not out of malice but out of their own wounds—because they, too, were betrayed by

parents who were betrayed before them, a chain of broken trust stretching back through

generations. Good people pass on wrong emotions, wrong guidance, wrong beliefs all

the time, not because they are bad people but because no one ever told them the truth.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote extensively on what he called the “hermeneutics of

suspicion”—the idea that the modern condition is one in which we can no longer take

anything at face value, because the hidden interests behind every claim have been

revealed one too many times. Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche each, in their different ways,

showed us that what we are told is almost never the whole story. This is not cynicism—it

is wisdom. The problem comes when the appropriate caution born of experience

hardens into an inability to trust anything or anyone at all.

There are people who have closed every door because of what is behind it. They are

guarded. They are not open. They are not vulnerable. And yet without vulnerability,

there is no genuine connection, no real friendship, no love, no community. You cannot

live a full human life inside a fortress, even a fortress built for perfectly understandable

reasons.

Trust, But Be Diligent

So what do we do? We cannot go back to the world of 1950s West Virginia, where the

electrician came over on Saturday and fixed your wiring for free, where a man’s word

was his bond because the entire community would remember if he broke it. That world,

for better and for worse, is gone.

But we also cannot simply abandon the idea of trust, because if we do, we abandon each

other. We become a nation of isolated individuals, each behind our own wall, each

convinced that the next person’s hand extended in friendship is merely the prelude to a

betrayal. That is not life. That is imprisonment.

What I am proposing is something harder than either naïve faith or cynical withdrawal.

I am proposing diligent trust. Trust that is earned, not given. Trust that is extended

incrementally, based on observed behavior over time, not on title, credential, or charm.

Trust that watches what people do, not merely what they say. Trust that holds people

accountable—gently but firmly, consistently—so that the breaking of trust has actual

consequences, and the honoring of it is recognized and valued.

We must demand the same diligence from our institutions. We must stop accepting the

two-tier justice system as an immutable fact of life. We must name it, loudly and

publicly, every time a powerful person escapes accountability for actions that would

destroy an ordinary citizen. We must stop re-electing politicians who betray our trust

simply because we cannot imagine the alternative. We must stop consuming media that

lies to us and then hiding behind the excuse that everyone lies. Not everyone does.

When was the last time anyone in power was held accountable for crimes against

humanity? Not Ghislaine Maxwell’s clients. Not the architects of the Iraq War. Not the

bankers of 2008. Not the officials who ran a four-year operation to undermine a

presidency through the weaponization of federal agencies. Not the CIA directors who

destroyed evidence of illegal programs. The list is long. The silence is deafening.

But history tells us that this silence is not permanent. Smedley Butler came forward.

Wesley Clark came forward. Tulsi Gabbard came forward. The courageous

journalists—Abby Martin, Chris Hedges, and others who have put their careers and

sometimes their lives at risk to tell the truth—they came forward. The whistleblowers

come forward. And when enough people are listening, when enough people have

stopped pretending that what they see is not what they see, something shifts.

We must trust—but we must be smarter. We must be more diligent. We must look

deeper into who deserves our trust and who does not, whether they are individuals,

institutions, corporations, or governments. Has this person shown by their history that

they are trustworthy? Have they told the truth even when it cost them? Have they stood

by someone weaker than themselves when it would have been easier to look away? Have

they been consistent in private and in public?

If someone has lied repeatedly throughout their history, why would I believe they are

telling the truth today? If an institution has betrayed its mandate decade after decade,

why would I assume it has reformed itself without evidence of that reform?

And most importantly: do not lose trust in humanity because institutions have failed

you. The institutions are not humanity. They are the structures that humanity

builds—and what humanity builds, humanity can rebuild. The electrician who spent his

Saturdays repairing his neighbors’ wiring without asking for payment was not following

a government program. He was acting from a moral conviction that had been handed

down to him by people who understood something essential: that what makes a

community is not its institutions, but the daily choices of the people within it.

My mother said: if you have a gift, give the gift. She did not mean only talent. She meant

time. She meant honesty. She meant showing up when you said you would, meaning

what you said, and standing by the people you said you would stand by. That is the

foundation of trust. It cannot be legislated. It cannot be institutional. It lives in the

choices we make, one at a time, every day.

We are in a crisis of trust the likes of which this country has not seen before, because

never before have all of our major institutions failed simultaneously and in plain sight.

But crises, as every philosopher worth reading has observed, are also the conditions

under which transformation becomes possible. The old structures collapse, and in the

rubble something new has to be built—by people who have decided that this time, they

will hold themselves and each other to a higher standard.

We must trust—and we must deserve to be trusted. Anything less is a

surrender to the worst of what we have been shown. Anything more is the

civilization we were promised and have not yet built.