Hello

Over the last few hundred years, we human beings have built an incredible global civilization.  And I reckon we have only been able to build it because we have been able to do two simple things: trust other people and cooperate with other people.

 

Trust

There can be no question that we do trust others.  We even trust complete strangers, and our societies couldn’t function if we stopped trusting them.  Let me give one example.  When we drive up to a set of traffic lights and see the lights are green, we don’t stop the car, get out, and check that the lights on the crossroad are red (we would be very unpopular if we did).  If the lights are green, and it is safe to do so, we just drive straight through.  In doing so, we show that we trust the many, many people who have been involved in designing, building, and maintaining that traffic light system.  These people are, almost certainly, people we’ve never met.  But we trust them.  We trust that they are doing their jobs.  And we trust them at the deepest possible level – we put our safety, wellbeing, and our very lives, into the care of these people.

It’s not just traffic light engineers.  Our society is incredibly complex, and it works.  But it only works because we trust an extraordinary number of individual strangers to just do their jobs.  We do it all the time and our society could not function if large numbers of us stopped trusting our fellow citizens, to do their jobs.  Why would we?  The evidence is clear that we can, and do, trust others to do their jobs.

Because so much of our lives depends on trusting others, we need to be very wary of people who tell us to stop trusting.  Unfortunately, over many years, politicians have developed the practice of telling us that we cannot trust other politicians.  In recent years some political leaders have taken this practice to new and dangerous levels, by telling citizens to stop trusting certain groups of people, such as all politicians of a particular party, or all journalists from a particular news service.  Yes, of course, there will be some people within any group who are corrupt, but most are just doing their jobs.  So, suggesting that all people in a particular group are corrupt is misleading and could be very dangerous, because we need to trust other people to just do their jobs or our societies could be at risk of chaos.  Of course, sometimes we will come across individuals who turn out not to be trustworthy, but we should not live our lives assuming that every member of a particular group of people cannot be trusted.

One group of people we need to trust are public servants who count votes after an election and oversee the counting of those votes.  After the Presidential election in 2020, US citizens were being told that some of their fellow citizens who had counted the votes and overseen the counts, were corrupt and could not be trusted.  Things got heated.  I’m not an American but, while watching the coverage of that election, I was just so impressed with what happened in Georgia.  I was so impressed with officials who were prepared to stand up and say that, while they did not like the outcome of the election, they had counted and recounted the ballots and audited them carefully.  They had done everything they were supposed to do – and the result was that a candidate (who they, personally, did not support) had unexpectedly won Georgia by a few thousand votes.  They were prepared to say openly that they didn’t like the results of their work, but they’d done their jobs, and this was the result.  Here were excellent examples of public officials just doing their jobs and doing them well.  I trust such people.  If I was an American, I would be proud of them.  As a former public servant, I am proud of them.

Every day, we trust the thousands upon thousands of citizens who just do their jobs.  We must keep doing so because our civilization depends on it.  However, as I said above, there will always be some cases where individuals are shown to be corrupt.  Wherever there are opportunities for individuals to gain wealth or power, corruption is inevitable.  Individuals suspected of being corrupt must be investigated, charged and, if found guilty, they must be punished.  (This means that whistleblowers, if they are found to be telling the truth, must be protected and rewarded: not punished.  They are putting themselves at risk to serve the rest of us.)  We know there will always be some corrupt officials, but we need to keep trusting that most citizens are not corrupt.  They are just doing their jobs.  You might like to read the article “What did Jesus say about corruption, abuse and conflict in our churches?”  Link below.)

 

Cooperation

Many years ago, I came to the conclusion that the only thing that creates long-term change in our world is people sharing ideas. Think about it.  If a person has an idea but doesn’t tell anyone else about it, nothing changes.  If we humans had never developed the ability to share ideas, we would still be living in caves.

Sharing ideas has enabled us to cooperate, and cooperation has given us the incredible world we live in now.  And, importantly, this cooperation is international.  Governments, corporations and individuals cooperate to make our international systems work.  Air travel is one of the best examples.  If we have the means, we can board an aircraft and fly to any city on our planet.  The system that enables us to do that is very complicated and thousands upon thousands of people are employed to make the system work, and they come from hundreds of different nations, cultures and language groups.  Yet they cooperate with each other, successfully, to ensure that we reach our destinations safely.  The system works.  Air travel remains the most certain and safe way of travel.  But the system only works because all those people cooperate with each other.  Another example of international cooperation would be international trade.  Those containers that we are all so familiar with, seeing them on ships, trains and trucks, are identical all over the world.  This saves enormous amounts of money and time in handling goods.  Those containers exist because people from different nations have cooperated in their design and manufacture, and, of course, in the design, manufacture and maintenance of all the cranes, computers and other stuff that make the whole, incredibly complex, system work.  Other examples would be the internet, the international telecommunication system…

All these systems work because we cooperate, and trust others to do their jobs.

The Russian philosopher Peter Kropotkin summed it up beautifully when he said:

“Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization.”

 

What did Jesus say about trust and cooperation?

When Jesus told his listeners to love their neighbors, one person said “who is my neighbor” and Jesus told him the story of the good Samaritan and told him to act the same way (Luke 10:25-37).  So Jesus just wants us to love all others, not just those closest to us or most like us.  Loving others must mean trusting others, and it also must mean cooperating with others.

 

May our loving, heavenly Father bless us and encourage us to trust our sisters and brothers and cooperate with them as we work for the coming of his Kingdom.

Jesus is Lord.

Peter O

 

Related Articles

“What did Jesus say about dealing with corruption, abuse and conflict in our churches?”

“What does Jesus want his followers to do?”

“What did Jesus say about loving others?”

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