The Four Corners of Trust
Trust me, I know how to make you care.
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Trust has been a cornerstone of my work and research over the years. There’s a great body of study out there that characterizes trust as an energy, as a language, or as a relationship.
Like any big topic, it’s often best described through metaphors, and the metaphor changes depending on what direction you come at it from. The value lies in the vantage point you choose to take, and for us as futurists and builders, one useful way to look at trust is through systems and platforms.
Today’s trust narratives move along two spectrums.
On one axis, you have Rational vs. Emotional systems of trust: Do people trust these figures and brands because they sound smart and competent, or because they feel emotionally resonant and human?
You may trust food information along the rational side of this axis, and politics on the emotional side, or you might map those two things in reverse.
On the other axis, you have Repair vs. Replace: Are these ideas, figures and movements engendering trust because they can repair the current system, or because they can replace it with something different?
Repair vs. replace narratives are really interesting when it comes to futurism and creation, because both sides can look like chaos, and yet both sides can also look like order. It depends on which platform matches your view of what the future will require.
These axes then present 4 narratives that have risen to the top of our culture, and they all sound familiar when you put them into a plea for trust:
Rational Repair: “Trust me, I know how to fix this.”
Emotional Repair: “Trust me, I care about fixing this.”
Rational Replace: “Trust me, I know how to build something different.”
Emotional Replace: “Trust me, I’m burning it all down.”
There may be other narratives and there may be other axes, but this way of looking at trust is one of the most useful in understanding what drives people and how they organize the world of messages around them.
We’re all drowning in information. It only makes sense that a map of trust would emerge in peoples’ minds, so that they could more easily find the signals they care about in the noise.
Rational Repair
For a long time, western culture has been dominated by Rational Repair in the upper left, which basically says, “Trust me, I know how to fix the system we already have.” Knowledge, expertise, rational and incremental improvement were its hallmark.
That used to be enough, but in many places it’s not enough anymore. It’s a weakening quadrant of trust in a lot of domains because incremental improvement feels meaningless in a time of institutional betrayal.
It may feel terrifying to know we’re moving into a post-rational repair world, but only if we understand this quadrant from a shallow perspective. Rationality may seem innocuous, but it’s also historically weaponized medicine and science against anyone outside its definition of normal, and made poverty a rational outcome of markets. Look into the past and what you’ll find is that “rationality” is in fact quite emotional. It can be many wonderful things, but it can also be bias, pain, ego and hate dressed up in facts. What looks like the rational pole is often just a performance of rationality.
For many, rationality hasn’t lived up to its promise, and it’s too little too late for repair. What has grown in its place are more resonant, more culturally charged alternatives.
Emotional Repair
In the upper right, Emotional Repair says, “Trust me, I care about fixing this.” This is where a lot of modern brands live. It’s emotionally intelligent, often effective, but also increasingly crowded. The reason it works is because of a precondition of trust that I’ve been talking about and quoting on stages for years now.
Trust is:
“The willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other party.”
An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust, Academy of Management Review
We fail to see the paradox in this, that trust requires vulnerability. You must make yourself vulnerable to others in order for trust to emerge.
It’s why the sharing economy apps of the past decade have done little to improve trust. No amount of transparency into your Uber driver’s profile, no amount of insurance on Airbnb, and no amount of posted reviews on Yelp could actually amount to any form of deep trust building. They are the opposite of trust because they erase any form of vulnerability.
That’s why trust is going underground, to the subculture communities where people are embracing vulnerability in radical new ways. When people have permission to make themselves vulnerable, they can naturally create relationships built on trust. I talk about this more in my keynote:
The players in the Emotional Repair quadrant really understand how important vulnerability is.
Vulnerability is how they win. High emotion ideals about fixing our current system, being vulnerable as a measure of showing how much you care, is a highly effective narrative. It creates the precondition missing in the Rational Repair space.
Rational Replace
In the lower left, Rational Replace says, “Trust me, I know how to build something different.” This quadrant has a lot of energy right now because people are hungry for genuinely new systems, not just slightly better versions of the old ones. But the modern arc in this corner is just getting started, and perhaps even has some significant gaps.
We see great thinkers and innovators building new systems, not just from a practical standpoint, but from a theoretical standpoint. All of the rising chatter around matriarchal systems of power, new experiments in co-living and decentering the romantic relationship in family, and even exiting society itself, are people exploring rational replace systems.
From my talk, Gazing Into The Eye of The Monster/ Machine
We may have never had these new curiosities if things didn’t get bad enough. It takes a lot, especially in America, to wake people up and make them willing to abandon the status quo that’s not working.
Replacing systems leads to temporary moments of normlessness, and as cultural psychologist and author Michelle Gelfand says, we can’t live without norms for too long. We tend to welcome the strongmen and showmen who promise to bring order back, and that can be akin to jumping out of the pan and into the fire.
So even though there may be some great solutions in this space, we are also reticent to adopt them. Moreover, solutions here are harder and more abstract the bigger the problems get. Yes we may have rational replace ideas for healthy eating and alternative finance, but we don’t have compelling solutions for a new social contract or a k-shaped economy.
And sometimes Rational Replace can be a little hard to locate because it exists out of the system by definition. International law and human rights expert León Castellanos-Jankiewicz recently posted about how even in his line of work, he sees the most valuable new thinking coming not from institutions, but from the invisible outskirts:
“Last year I spent a few months in Germany on a visiting fellowship to work on new ideas, but also to find communities "where it's at". I felt that theory in scholarly and academic-adjacent outlets had become memefied, and that conversations in my field were too simplistic, manichaean or basically made of tropes.
What I found is a stunning array of online theory-making. The most alive thinking wasn't in journals or university spaces. It was in Discord servers, networked image boards, paid newsletters, and para-academic institutes that have quietly built serious intellectual communities outside formal university institutions.”
Oftentimes trust in this quadrant means having to build your own spaces on the edges.
Emotional Replace
Finally in the lower right, Emotional Replace shouts, “Trust me, I’m burning it all down.” This is one of the loudest trust signals in culture right now. It’s grievance-fed, highly visible, and often sets the agenda for everything else.
Trust researcher Rachel Botsman says, “Trust is like energy—it doesn't get destroyed; it changes form.” There’s a lot of emotion that shows up in this quadrant, but it’s typically not the vulnerability we see just above in Emotional Repair.
Here, I would argue, it’s about channeling all of the energy that has been typically distributed across the map into a passionate flame. Sometimes there’s a solution underneath it all, sometimes the flame is dazzling enough on its own.
But there’s something else interesting that can happen in this corner. There’s usually a lot of rage in this story. Rage at a group of outsiders, rage at a system, rage at a lie or broken promise.
And that’s what makes it an interesting inverse of Emotional Repair above. Emotional Repair earns trust through vulnerability. Emotional Replace earns it through a shared enemy. But both are intimacy.
Both make you feel close to something or someone. They have the gravitational pull of belonging. As Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer back in 1951 when WWII was still fresh in the collective mind:
“The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not.”
That’s the connection between these two emotional quadrants. Vulnerability and shared enemies look like opposites, but they’re identical in that they gift you the intensity of belonging.
It may be tempting, but don’t fall for the belief that one quadrant is necessarily better than all the others. Revolutions and catastrophes have been born in each one. They’re all differently skewed expressions of trust, and they all have their tradeoffs.
What I know from experience is that the map is alive and always changing. It looked different 5 years ago, and it will look different again 5 years ahead. You’ll have to repopulate and re-weight it each time you return.
If you want to see where the future is headed, see which quadrant is pulling the most energy. If you want to create the future, make sure your actions are consistent with the quadrant your people are moving toward. Trust and its expressions are not static things, and that can be hard for some people to accept (welcome to the study of culture).
But there’s beauty in the aliveness. People are dynamic and they change just as the world changes around them. Sometimes we move across the trust map to protect ourselves. Other times, we move to open ourselves to new possibilities. But it never stays one way forever, so if you don’t like where it’s at, give it some time. And if you do like where it’s at, give it some time, too. We’ll all have the privilege of reorienting ourselves soon enough.
One Last Thought
I've been getting a lot of responses lately from people asking me how I organize all of my notes and ideas. The thing is, I don't actually organize anything, at least not in the conventional way.
Instead, I put every new idea to work the moment I find it interesting.
I'm constantly writing down my mental models of the world, whether that be in my articles, presentations, team conversations, calls and coffees with cool people, community research drops, slack messages, or in one of the now 82 article drafts in my Substack. I don't give notes and ideas time to be forgotten. I'm constantly attaching and reattaching them to a larger web of ideas that show up across all of these artifacts.
I might bookmark things in my MyMind app, but I rarely return to them. I might go there for inspiration or for a statistic I know I stowed away, but otherwise I keep a living construct of words and conversations always going, always alive, always among and between me and other people.
I didn't plan it like that. It just started happening as I began putting more of my work out there and exponentially expanded my surface area across people. I have a small world of thought experiments that I'm always running, and if you meet me, you get to participate in those thought experiments too (whether you want to or not). A thesis isn't done when I write the post about it, or when I make the video. It just grows and weaves in and out of others.
I would encourage anybody that wants to get sharper at their thinking to try and start organizing their ideas this way. Don't park things or save them. Use them the moment they come to you, whether that be in a post, a project, or in a conversation with an unsuspecting cashier at the grocery store.
Ideas start to die when they’re “saved” for later. You have to put them to work right away to really see what you’re meant to make of them.
Yours,
Hi, I’m Jasmine Bina. I’m a cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:
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The graphic is clear. And you make your points. This shall be quoted in an up coming session.
Smart piece! Love the MakeLoveNotPorn shoutout ❤️