Trust is an important component of what is called social capital. For companies, institutions, even nations to grow, they need more than economic capital. Social capital is the other essential input, of which trust is foremost—trust that allows people to work together and pass on knowledge and skills for the common good.
A World Values Survey has been around for more than two decades now, and one of its surveys looks at trust. On the statement “Most people can be trusted,” the Philippines stands out in ranking among the lowest. In 1998, we were second only to Peru, with 5.5 percent of Filipino respondents agreeing with that statement. In 2004, that figure rose to 8.5 percent, but that still ranked us fifth in the world at not trusting people. In 2014, the latest survey conducted looking at trust, we dropped down to an all-time low for the world, with only 2.8 percent agreeing with that statement.
I thought I should share figures for the most trusting nations in the 2014 survey to dramatize just how much we lack trust. Remember again our figure of 2.8 percent. Now look at the top of the list, the Netherlands, where 66 percent agree that most people can be trusted.
The Dutch are followed by the Swedes (63.8 percent) who have been consistent through the last two decades with their trust levels, even more than the Dutch. The Chinese comes in third with 62.7 percent, then New Zealanders (56.2 percent) and Australians (54.4 percent). I’m skipping a few nations down to the United States with 38.1 percent, and Japan with 36 percent.
In English, a distinction is made between distrust and mistrust, which might help us to better understand our own low trust levels.
Distrust involves a complete lack of trust, based on a person’s earlier experiences. Mistrust, on the other hand, is a general lack of trust or confidence (including toward yourself), based on instinct or intuition.
I tried to fit mistrust and distrust into one column but failed. So, trust me as we discuss distrust today and mistrust on Friday.
Distrust is easier to understand than mistrust. “Napaso na ako, ayoko na” (I’ve been burned, that’s it, no more) is a common and dramatic way of expressing distrust.
What I feel is important for the Philippines is the way we’ve developed distrust based on our experiences as communities, and even as a nation. As a people, we’ve been fooled again and again by colonizing powers, and even after we regained independence, by other nations and by foreign companies. Most painful are the ways we’ve been betrayed by fellow Filipinos and their scams great and small, often victimizing the poorest of the poor.
So it’s not true we forget easily; in fact, it’s worse, because the effect of being betrayed so many times is that our trust levels erode, not necessarily against the tyrants and thieves but against each other.
So many of our institutional practices reflect a collective ethos of distrust. A few examples: our insistence on sending even trivial documents like receipts by registered mail and our stapling checks inside envelopes, which runs the risk of the recipient tearing the check. Then there’s the habit, propagated by our courier services, of mummifying documents: envelopes within envelopes, scotch tape over scotch tape over staples.
It is distrust that requires the need for government documents that certify you are not who you seem to be. There’s the Cenomar (Certificate of No Marriage Record), confirming you have never been married, in the Philippines at least. Then there’s the Certificate of Not the Same Person (NTSP), needed by poor guys like me with a plain common name. To be able to leave the country without too much hassle, you need to get, from the Bureau of Immigration, an NTSP attesting that you are not any of the crooks in the immigration database sharing your name.
Land transactions are the worst when it comes to fraud, which is why you have signs that puzzle foreigners: “This lot is NOT for sale.”
Transferring titles is always a nightmare as you go through the municipal or city level to authenticate documents, then go to the provincial level to authenticate the municipal authentication.
In effect, the government default is distrust, based on centuries of our adverse experiences. And their solution is to create more bureaucratic red tape rather than to get to the root of the problem, like overhauling the land registration system.
The irony is that the more red tape we have, the more distrustful and mistrustful we become, including wondering if the delays are because the government worker is waiting for a bribe.
mtan@inquirer.com.ph