Trust is a small word with big implications. It cannot be manufactured. Nor can it be conjured up at will. Trust has to be earned. It is the critical ingredient in any good relationship and, you don’t need me to tell you, very few relationships survive long without it. On the other hand, with trust much can be achieved.

Okay, already, I hear you: enough with the preaching. So here’s the point: politics too, are ultimately about relationships and trust is no less important in this sphere; arguably more so when it comes to having to make difficult decisions that are going to impact people’s lives, possibly for years to come.

My thoughts on the subject of trust are not prompted by problems that have come to beset the previously unblemished Big Boy of Jersey, although you might think them relevant to his plight. Nor are they prompted by recent events here in Bermuda, although again you may or may not think them relevant.

What actually got me thinking on this was a reader who stopped me in the street and wondered, with some heartfelt angst and concern, why politics and politicians seem to be so focused on the little things, the unimportant things, and why as a consequence an inordinate amount of time and space is spent on nitpicking and attacking one another.

I could have said “welcome to Bermuda and Bermuda politics”. I did not. The man was trying to make a point. For example, and this was his example, he thought time and energy could be spent more wisely and more productively in examining far more closely what has really happened to our Government pension funds and what steps can and should be taken to right what is wrong. The SAGE Commission was on to this in part and on the report and its recommendations we may be hearing more shortly’: Government did promise us an action plan and public meetings.

But as for the nitpicking and the personal attacks, these have been a staple of politics for some time, and not just here but elsewhere, and likely will be for some time to come. The latter are a commonplace strategy or tactic (if you prefer) to distinguish “them” from “us”, sometimes expressed explicitly, sometimes implicitly. It goes something like this: you cannot trust (there’s that word) so and so with your life or your future. They do not really know you. They are not one of ours. They do not have your back. It plays and it plays well; and, let’s face it folks, in some cases it has a ring of truth.

This brings me to what also prompted this week’s column, a recent opinion piece in The New York Times, written by Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia University and Nobel laureate, entitled “In No One We Trust”.

It is his view that trust facilitates the democratic process, from voting to making laws, and that it is vital to sustaining social stability. In fact, he even goes further and argues that the currency of trust is more important than money when it comes to making us tick, or click for that matter.

Unfortunately however, according to Professor Stiglitz, trust is becoming yet another casualty of America’s staggering inequality. He maintains that as the gap between Americans widens, the bonds that hold society together weakens. So too, he goes on, as more and more people start to lose faith in a system that seems stacked against them, trust becomes a casualty. The emergence of a trust deficit, the professor contends, has dire consequences.

For our economy and society to function, participants must trust that the system is reasonably fair and that trust is reciprocal, say, between those governed and those governing, and where trust begins to fail, attitudes and norms start to change for the worse.

“When no one is trustworthy”, he writes, “it will be only fools who trust. The concept of fairness itself is eroded.” No one — I repeat no one — likes to be played for a fool.

Strong stuff — which you may or may not think relevant to what’s going on here in Bermuda, or at all. I happen to think it is, poised as we are at the crossroads of any number of pressing and potentially politically explosive issues like:

* The SAGE report and its far-reaching recommendations;

* So-called “Commercial Immigration” and the lengths to which we are prepared to go for foreign cash or job creation or both; and,

* Government’s about face on a promised referendum and the push instead for ‘integrated resort gaming casinos’ now being urged upon us.

The manner in which these matters are each approached, and the way in which decisions are reached, is critical and ultimately key to success or not.

One final thought: trust once lost is often irretrievable. It takes much time and effort to rebuild and restore. The best approach as far as I am aware, and the best antidote to criticism, whether fair or unfair, as far as I know, is and always has been honest and open discourse.

Share your views, either on The Royal Gazette website or by writing jbarritt@ibl.bm.