MANY of us have been subjected to a day of "trust-building exercises". Teams of two; one person closes their eyes and falls backwards; the other catches them. Trustworthiness proven. This now rather mundane, overused exercise demonstrates the basic t
rustworthiness of humans, and our natural instinct to trust others. With the exception of a handful of mischievous adolescent boys, a human being will, when asked, catch another. When asked to trust another human being to catch us, we invariably do.
This innate instinct to trust is the subject of social and political commentator Professor Anthony Seldon's well-timed assessment of the state of Britain. What with MPs' expenses scandals, high-profile social-work failings, and the inordinate greed of our bankers, he argues, this is a country in which trust has all but evaporated. Can it ever be recovered?
The banking crisis came out because long-term strategy was binned in favour of short-term, bonus-swelling gain – a culture which, as the recent news stories about the return of enormous bonuses make clear, is still with us.
What is it about bankers? Seldon quotes a fellow academic who has observed that while many people instinctively know how to behave, "when they come to work they leave those values and virtues at home and morph into machines from the industrial revolution. The banking sector represents the dark satanic mills."
Seldon believes that humans are betraying their true, trustworthy, trusting selves. Britain has "lost trust". Our politicians, like our bankers and captains of industry, might have fundamentally decent core beliefs, but in such target-driven environments, "their place in the sun is often all too brief and frenetic for them to embody the deeper values and principles they no doubt hold dear". Here Seldon is surely too generous: Sir Fred Goodwin's determination to hang onto his enormous pension even after he brought the RBS to its knees sadly seems more typical behaviour.
But, in many cases, politicians and businessmen disappoint us precisely because we thought they had more conviction. And here Seldon's observations are acute and refreshingly fair. The media, he argues, only makes things worse with a Mock The Week-type cynicism passing as satire and, in newspapers, an obsession with negative stories. Agree with this or not, it is energising to hear a new, more optimistic point of view which is persuasively articulated.
Having said that, Seldon's plan requires such change at root-level that one wonders if it will only ever remain academic. "Top business leaders," he writes, "must … take it upon themselves to build daily time for reflection into their lives … to work with coaches, to ensure that they become more grounded and better able to articulate their core beliefs." Trust would slowly return.
The same goes for politicians. Local government should have more power, taking some of the strain off central government and so creating more time and head-space for the country's leaders to make decisions based on their true nature and values, gradually regaining the public's trust. But who will be the first to take time out of their day to do this? (Incidentally, perhaps a little more time for reflection could have been afforded to the editor who has missed a host of grammatical errors. Attention too was required to smooth out the prose and better disguise the seams between narrative and statistics. Stylistically, there is a feeling of a university essay about what is here – and perhaps a little of the idealism as well.)
Seldon realises how hard it will be to implement his strategy. But in a country which has become so embedded in the "me-first attitude", where our rights are of paramount importance to us, perhaps it is time that we started to accept the responsibilities and duties that go along with those rights. We are merely trustees, and it is our duty to improve what was left to us – politically, financially, environmentally, socially, culturally – and to pass it on in even better nick (or at least intact). Perhaps even those of us outside the City need to consider whether we are gambling too much for short-term, selfish gain.
