Trust (and Batman)
I’ve been thinking about the word trust especially in the sense of what it means.
Trust means a firm belief in the reliability, truth or ability of someone of something. The definition is troubling because like belief or faith the moment you start to unpick it it starts to become a meaningless word.
When I think of the word “trust” I almost immediately think of the the 1989 Batman when Jack Nicolson’s Joker rides through the streets on a float throwing money at the crowd with the song “Trust” by Prince playing jauntily in the foreground.
The clown prince of crime jams out to the last chords and addresses the crowd:
“And now folks its time for who do you trust? hubba hubba hubba, money money money, who do you trust? Me? I’m giving away free money. And where is the Batman? He’s at home, washing his tights!”
The implication is that the crowd trusts the Joker because despite his anarcist and genocidal intentions he is catering to their greed and desperation. The crowd distrusts the Batman because, instead of throwing away his money he wears a cape and cowl and is trying to bring order to the criminal underworld. Batman threatens not just the criminals but the people who consider being criminals, the corrupt, the empowered menaces, the people that want revenge and to destroy society. Batman does not trust that everything will find a balance or that justice will be done. He feels a strong sense of agency. Batman is a tragic superhero. Haunted by the death of his parents and in some stories by the death of his sidekick (by the Joker), he can’t sleep at nights and instead prowls the rooftops of Gotham tracking down and foiling villains who would otherwise be creating more orphans. The Joker wants to kill people and they trust him. The Batman wants to prevent crime and they don’t trust him.
I next think of the official motto on the great seal of the US America. “In God We Trust”. The paradox. A pyramid capped off by the eye of providence on the world’s fiat currency. Money is a system of trust. I trust that when I hand over a money you will hand over its equivalent in goods and you can exchange that same money over to get goods and services which you value at the sum of that money. I and many economists, politicians, social commentators know that as of this month (April 2020) the United States owes debtors, many of them in China, many of them with no regard for human life, 24 trillion dollars. Not to be outdone by its former colony, post imperial Britain owes its debtors 2.3 trillion pounds as of today. The truth however is much worse, factoring in all liabilities including state and public sector pensions, the real national debt is closer to £4.8 trillion,which means that debtors could walk up to me and demand £78,000. And because half of the people in the UK down work, They would expect another 78K for the unknown person that I’ve been financially supporting my entire career here in the UK. We should “trust” the government to pay back its debtors and keep civil society from devolving into anarchy. We should trust the government to give us something valuable for all of the taxes we pay.
Lastly I think of Season Three of Westworld. In this season, the “badguy” Serac, is trying to fix the algorythim of his supercomputer by identifying and removing the anomolies that will lead to the destruction of mankind. The supercomputer that is able to predict (pretty much) everything is named Rehoboam after the first king of the southern part of the divided kingdom of Israel. After the death of Solomon, Israel broke in two and as we know eventually became a vassal of Babylon and Rome until Israel was destroyed and its people scattered. Israel faced its apocalypse about 100 years after Jesus came and went and not until the 20th Century did some of its lost people attempt to reforge a country. We all know how that is going! Serac and the computer, like Rehoboam in Israel, is desperately trying to maintain order in the world and prevent it from destruction. Like Batman, Serac uses surveillance and technology and money to stop criminals and control the anarchic tendencies of people. Between Serac and the computer, they proactively change the world to make it more orderly and predictable and they do not second guess themselves or the nature of man.
Like Batman, and Rehoboam, Serac has a tragic past and he feels compelled to prevent this from happening again. They knows that, left to itself, Gotham, Israel and the world will fall off the edge of a cliff and all will become chaos. They do not trust that people will work it out or find a way or that truth and justice will prevail. “Truth” and “Justice” and “Trust” are all just ideas which do not survive the brutality of reality. Superman the flag carrier of Truth and Justice for all intents and purposes, is God and the son of God. He is alien to this world in the same way that ideas are alien to reality. Many essays summarise this far more eloquently than I can. The entire world could end and Superman’s Kryptonian body would survive. That is why he trusts people because he can never be hurt. Mentally, he can trust because physically there is no need to trust. For Batman and for me, there are statistics and probablilities. We can die, we can be enslaved, we can have the things we value taken away, we can watch our loved ones be killed. So we trust only as far as the calculations allow us, whatever trust means, we trust but never blindly.
