Mistrust

A Global Perspective

Florian Mühlfried

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030114695
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030114701
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the social practice of mistrust through the lens of social anthropology. In focusing on the citizens of the Caucasus, a region located at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, Mühlfried counters the postcolonial discourse that routinely treats these individuals, known for their mistrust of the state, as "others." Combining ethnographic observations presenting mistrust as an observable reality with socio-political issues from a non-Western region, Mühlfried opens up a non-Eurocentric perspective on an underexplored social practice and a major counterpoint to the well-examined social phenomenon of "trust." This perspective allows for a more profound understanding of pressing issues such as populist movements and post-truth politics.

© The Author(s) 2019

Florian MühlfriedMistrusthttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11470-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Distrusting Mistrust

Florian Mühlfried¹

(1)

Social Anthropology Programme, Ilia State University, Tbilisi, Georgia

Florian Mühlfried

Abstract

How does mistrust manifest and become an observable reality? This is the main topic of this chapter. The answer is in social practice. A mistrustful person acts—in contrast to someone overcome by a fundamental loss of trust, resulting in a paralysing horror. Following the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, mistrust is defined as a relation to the world based on reservations and expressed by ‘defensive arrangements’. Such arrangements are made in order to acquire knowledge and reduce dependencies. Starting from this conceptual approximation, three questions are posed that are addressed in the following chapters. What is special about social practices based on mistrust? Does mistrust necessarily include the reduction of complexity? And where does radical mistrust lead to?

Keywords

PopulismPostcolonialismCrisesTrust

End Abstract

Post-truth

If there is one force that drives European protest voters and supporters of Donald Trump in the US alike, it is mistrust. This mistrust applies to political elites, the established media and scientific experts located in the mainstream. Not only do populists and Trumpists no longer feel represented by them, they question the truthfulness of politicians and experts. Truth is constituted by recourse to facts as objectively tested issues. In their systematic mistrust, however, these facts are no longer recognised by the New Right, because the objectivity of experts and thus their legitimacy is being denied.

As the result of the widespread increase of anti-expert movements throughout the West, a political constitution has emerged that is designated as ‘post-truth ’. This term aims at expressing an attitude characterised by the growing mistrust of facts offered by established institutions as truths. In this world of mistrust, politicians located outside the establishment present themselves as saviours. Trump , for instance, promised to overcome ‘chasms of distrust’ with ‘bridges of opportunity’.¹

At the centre of the current crisis of truth, then, lies the phenomenon of mistrust. In order to overcome the crisis, one might conclude, this mistrust needs to be resolved. And, indeed, the appeal to regain civic trust has become a political battle cry. Mistrust has become the epitome of a false consciousness that prevents rational governance. Even regime-critical and pro-protest leftists call for a suspension of ‘anti-mainstream rhetoric’ in post-truth times (Walter 2017) in order to avoid a closing of the ranks with New Right protest voters.

Crises of Confidence

Mistrust plays a major role not only in the crisis of truth, but also in other current crises. Triggered by the international banking crisis, confidence in the validity of banks eroded in such a way that the plundering of accounts could only be prevented by means of state guarantees for the savings deposits of its citizens. Confidence in the banks could only be restored by the state throwing its trustworthiness into the balance (Beckert 2010: 2). During the banking crisis, not only did savers distrust the banks, but banks distrusted each other too. They no longer lent each other money or only did so at exorbitant interest rates. Here too, the state intervened by taking out bad loans from banks and by providing money at a modest rate of interest.

But even in the state, trust erodes, or at least this is frequently claimed. The reason for this is to be sought in the revelations of Edward Snowden in 2013, who triggered the NSA crisis by publishing classified documents that testify how massively people are surveilled by US intelligence agencies worldwide. According to Snowden’s revelations, around five million digital communications are intercepted monthly by the US security agency NSA, millions of people are classified as suspicious and tens of thousands of computers are infected with NSA Trojans.² German and British intelligence agencies also utilise NSA spy programs and monitor their citizens, politicians and business enterprises, at times mutually.³ The interactions of Western intelligence services create a close-meshed network of intelligence control of the virtual space beyond legal control. Before this backdrop, Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the EU Council, warned of a ‘crisis of confidence of our citizens against the state’.⁴ Mistrust is implicitly considered a danger.

Even the crisis into which the Western automobile industry has manoeuvred itself by manipulating exhaust gas emissions is being referred to as a crisis of confidence. In October 2015, Volkswagen headlined an ad: ‘We’ve broken the most important part of our cars: your confidence.’⁵ Mea culpa, says one of Germany’s largest car manufacturers—guilty of having circumvented legal regulations through the targeted manipulation of exhaust gas emissions and of having damaged the ‘customer’s trust in our vehicles’, as another ad reads.⁶ The German Federal Government also considers trust in the brand ‘Made in Germany’ an essential asset and thus holds the automobile companies accountable for the rehabilitation of the brand’s reputation, which has been damaged due to their wrongdoing (although without exerting too much pressure).⁷

All these crises have one thing in common: by appealing to trust and implicitly conjuring up the dangers of mistrust, the focus of debate is shifted. It is no longer the business of banks, the spying of secret services or the manipulation of automobile manufacturers that are the centre of attention, but their reception. The normative setting of trust—if not as a normality, then as an absolute necessity for the polity—turns mistrust into the main problem that must be made to disappear. At the same time, the object that ignited mistrust in the first place falls into oblivion.

Works of Mistrust

Although mistrust features prominently in contemporary crises, it has to date received little attention in scholarship. This comes in sharp contrast to publications on trust , which have flooded the academic market in recent decades. Fundamental work on this has been provided by the sociologist Niklas Luhmann , who placed trust at the heart of theory building in his eponymous study of 1968. According to Luhmann, trust facilitates the reduction of social complexity and thus serves to master one’s live. Without trust, ‘indefinite fear and paralyzing horror’ would prevent even the most quotidian form of action (Luhmann 2014 [1968]). Hence, for Luhmann, trust is a prerequisite for individual existence. The same holds true for the existence of society, Anthony Giddens (1990) argues, especially for modern society, which no longer can only rely on personalised trust , but requires institutional trust. Following Giddens, trust is not only, as for the classical sociologist Georg Simmel (1908: 264), the glue of all societies, but a basic condition of the modernity project. Jürgen Habermas (1981) transposed trust to acts of successful communication—in this case, trust in the truthfulness of the opponent—as the basis for social understanding and consensus.

Consequently, one might assume, the success of the modernity project can be measured by the presence of trust. Based on this assumption, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama (1995) mapped the world at large: on the one side, there are ‘high-trust societies’ such as Germany, the US and Japan; on the other, ‘low-trust societies’ like France, Italy and Russia. Trust, according to Fukuyama , translates directly into political stability and economic success. In this sense, the core task of politics is to cultivate the trust of its citizens and of the economy to capitalise on this trust.

Mistrust, by contrast, is hardly seen as having constructive potential. Nietzsche was one of the few to regard mistrust as an asset. He advised philosophers not to seek wisdom, but to perfect their mistrust: ‘so much mistrust, so much philosophy’ (Nietzsche 2009–: FW-364). In Nietzsche’s view, mistrust is a ‘source of truthfulness’ (NF-1885, 40) because it ‘necessitates ‘tension, observation, reflection’ (NF-1886, 7). These remarks, however, have largely remained without consequences. Mistrust has not yet been accepted as a means of acquiring knowledge or established as a full-fledged object of scientific inquiry.

In recent years, a number of attempts have been made to change this, but so far, their impact has been limited. The first study to no longer reduce mistrust to the evil twin of trust was the anthology Distrust, edited by Russell Hardin (2004). This was followed in 2016 by Sinje Hörlin’s ‘Figuren des Misstrauens’ [Figures of Mistrust], a special issue on ‘Méfiance’ [Mistrust] of the French journal Tracés edited by Olivier Allard et al. (2016), Matthew Carey’s book Mistrust: An Ethnographic Theory (2017) and an edited volume by the present author entitled Mistrust: Ethnographic Approximations (Mühlfried 2018). This book is an attempt to take this endeavour further and to counter the still-dominant perception of mistrust as an absence and a problem.

As an absence, mistrust is located where trust is missing. One reason for this allocation lies in the semantics of the term. The English prefix ‘mis’ in ‘mistrust’ or ‘dis’ in ‘distrust’ expresses a contrast, an opposite or defect. However, as Luhmann (2014 [1968]) has shown, lack of trust leads to fear or indifference and thus to passive attitudes that have nothing to do with mistrust. Mistrust is a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Distrusting Mistrust
• 2. Mistrusting the System
• 3. Mistrust and Complexity
• 4. Radical Forms of Mistrust
• 5. Mistrusting the Obvious
• 6. Crisis of Mistrust
• Back Matter