Frank Ruda Economies of Distrust “What’s my view? Well, how am I supposed to know?” (Maximo Park, Apply Some Pressure) The pandemic brought change to a lot of things. But it also brought to the fore potentially even more. It made visible structural features that previously still had a less tangible form and shape. It thus transformed some phenomena or attitudes, increased the visibility of others and at times these two operated in tandem: an increased visibility was now and then able to intensify or to condense and therefore even to transform what it brought to the fore. At least in the so-called Western societies, the transformations the pandemic brought about were easy to identify. Everyone was facing restrictions to individual freedoms and individual rights that previously one would not have believed to be possible. This was noteworthy, because in the previously prevailing modus experientiae of freedom in most Western and thus richer societies the majority of people were not used to such restrictions. This was experientially true, even though on another level restrictions to everyone’s freedom undoubtedly already existed beforehand, only less visibly to the naked eye. Already Marx had for example extensively analyzed the structural and material restrictions to the practice of freedom in capitalist societies, wherein the worker appears on one level to be certainly as free as anyone else, yet this freedom is solely realized in the form of freely selling her labor-force to the highest bidder; a condition which was certainly never experienced as the result of one’s own free will. But without any doubt, the recent pandemic also generated a dimension of aggravation and increased visibilization of structures that existed beforehand. Structural phenomena that it made even more visible pertained to the prevailing and mostly simply absurd socio-economic differences between the rich and the poor. Under pandemic conditions, these manifested not only as differences of income. The pandemic rather made again apparent how different of a social universe the rich and the poor are living in. One can think of the means of education, the quality and security of live and thereby ultimately the way in which one had to experience the restrictions of freedom as real restrictions (or not). The pandemic made visible that if you are rich – and this brings together the first two aspects – the restrictions, structural or imposed, are effectively no real restrictions. If you were Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, the pandemic was even very good for business. Yet, the pandemic also brought to the fore a phenomenon that seemed either genuinely new or at least genuinely intensified and aggravated. Since the restrictions placed on and experienced by not-rich people in the so-called West – people who were therefore not necessarily poor, even though some were not well off – generated a specific subjective attitude and frame of mind. This frame of mind was present beforehand, but it gained a different, even if maybe not entirely new quality. This attitude was the attitude of distrust. It may not be overly surprising that in times of a pandemic people start distrusting many things. One was able to see them distrust their governments, their respective policies and pandemic strategies, the legitimacy of the imposed restrictions and ultimately even the fact that there was a pandemic in the first place.1 All pandemics – as one can already learn from the previous ones – generated trustissues. The present one did, too. These trust-issues also manifest as a distrust in the previously stable markers of orientation, i.e. markers which one was previously able to trust. Such a marker was for example the distinction between left and right.2 If the left endorses positions that were previously rather identified as conservative or right-wing and vice versa, this cannot but create distrust in the existing modes of supposed political orientation. If two positions that ought to be distinct coalesce, this can hardly be taken as a good sign, unless it is, at least, an expression of strategy – even though these things might sometimes be difficult to distinguish (since sometimes such confusion can be the manifestation of a truly wrong strategy). The present pandemic generated such disorientation. On one side, as some have diagnosed, there was a surge of a trust in state-institutions – a “desire for the state”3 – that was previously difficult to imagine and anticipate. Some positions that were previously identified as antistatist left, now seemed to begin endorsing the state as instrument for protecting civil order as well as the health and survival of the population on a very basic medical level. Those who were previously supposed to embody a far-reaching and even total distrust of the state started to incorporate a new will to trust in it (as provider of the minimum of social structure). They thus started distrusting their previous distrust and started trusting anew. But this did not only come from what one would previously have perceived as the left. It was a desire present on all sides of the political spectrum, even though certainly it can be considered most surprising This is given a further twist, when one considers that for example the American Council on Science and Health diagnosed that there is in the US a problematic pandemic of distrust (https://www.acsh.org/news/2021/05/13/pandemic-distrust-americans-have-little-faith-public-health-agenciessurvey-finds-15550), which, according to the council’s numbers, leads less than 40 percent of the American population to trust existing health institutions. Yet, this statistical finding is itself released by an institution which appears to have a history that could easily create some trust-issues because of its potential bias (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/american-council-science-health-leaked-documentsfundraising/). 2 It must be noted that this distinction was always problematic and in many present political contexts has become almost useless, since often the left does not present anything genuinely “left” anymore and thus is nothing but a parliamentary name. Alain Badiou has elaborated laboriously and extensively how to conceive of the concept of orientation after the disappearance of such objective parliamentary markers. Cf. Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire : S’orienter dans la pensée, s’orienter dans l’existence (Paris : Fayard 2020). 3 Cf. Alberto Toscano, “Beyond the Plague State”, at: https://socialistproject.ca/2020/05/beyond-the-plaguestate/. 1 coming from the former. In this sense, the present pandemic solved some prior trust-issues, because it made people renew their trust in the capacity of anonymous and rather abstract structures to solve their problems. It is obviously not always and necessarily problematic to trust in and rely on the operativity and functionality of anonymous structures. But such trust can easily appear rather problematic if is seems to be accompanied by a far-reaching oblivion of the all the good reasons that one once had for not trusting the state. That the state can protect its population does, obviously, not at all exclude that it remains, as some have forcefully argued before the pandemic, an apparatus that allows one class of people to dominate and oppress others in all kinds of ways; or if anonymous structures were previously per se identified with such an oppressive apparatus. And it certainly also does not exclude at all that the state while protecting its population – on some level at least – will also operate in the interest of the present economic-political system. Quite the contrary. But this desire to trust was not the only effect of the pandemic. There was also – and maybe less surprisingly – an immediate surge of a will, a desire to distrust that also, surprisingly, reinforced trust on another level. It came with a certain type of enjoyment that is not simply the pleasure of distrusting but that is a peculiar surplus generated by it. Similar to the feeling of creating pleasure in and through pain, the there was a new surge of a trust only in distrust. Under the conditions of the pandemic, distrust started to become the material from which to sculpture and form a specific type of social bond. This already allows for two very trivial observations. 1. Distrust does not always function in the same way. Often, maybe always, it is what allows for social relations to remain operative in times of crisis. But sometimes too much distrust breaks down existing social relations. It thus might be a question of quantity. 2. Distrust does not always appear in the same form. This does not only mean that distrust does not always have the same object (of distrust). Rather, the crucial point is that there are more or less reflexive forms of distrust. There can be a form of distrust by means of which we ultimately form a trust in all those who distrust someone or something. But this does not imply any self-application. Distrust thereby simply helps endorsing the trust in something else and this is what has clearly been increased and multiplied by the pandemic. This is why trusting often works by means of distrust. But there is also a distrust that even distrusts the very way in which distrust operates. A distrusting of distrust. This might also be productive of another form of trust, but one that operates differently. To elucidate this distinction, one can note is that distrust is often the very material from which to build, create and form new collective modes of social cohesion. A group of people distrust big pharma, Apple, the market, morality, etc. is what makes them into a group. This is a form of negative cohesion. Negative cohesion is introduced when distrust appears to be the only thing one can trust. This is clearly what the pandemic reinforced. Such distrust can, because it suspends all objective relation to the world, create forms of trust that seem to be only producible through distrust, notably trust in all kinds of entirely unverifiable assumptions. The pandemic has taught us that such distrust can operate as infectious as the virus itself. This is no surprise since all apparently great ideas can capture and operate on the masses like an infection. Already Hegel diagnosed that one of the reasons why the Enlightenment spread in Europe like a pandemic, like a pandemic of ideas, that it was able to reproduce itself in surprisingly infectious and this is to say non-rational ways.4 The reason for this was that one cannot simply overcome religious beliefs without also offering something that speaks to what made them appealing in the first place. This is a lesson that needs to be learnt and which elucidates why even before the pandemic there existed an already, almost universally operative form of distrust that was a constitutive part of what the social bond was made of. But the pandemic brought about a transformation of its status and functioning. Distrust before the pandemic ensured the well-functioning of the current political and economic systems, as well as of all social systems. It was able to do this because it was part of a larger functioning of the mechanism of trust, as Niklas Luhmann has shown a long time ago in his examination of trust as mechanism that allows to reduce complex social structuring and interactions.5 No one, for example, and at least not for too long would have believed that any politician with a major career is really and could entirely be honest. This has even become the explicit theme of endless movies and series. It is obvious to everyone that one should never fully trust any professional politician, even though and especially because their careers run on trust. No one would also really have believed that advertisements do not lie or that bankers are not mainly acting on behalf of their own gains. This is to say that constitutive areas of the existing system relied on us knowing that we should and cannot trust, but we acted as if we could. We knew very well, we could not trust X but we nevertheless trusted him or her. This is a suspension of the practical effectivity of knowledge that psychoanalysis calls fetishistic disavowal.6 Everyday trust worked by operationalizing a distrust that was based on a knowledge whose practical effectivity was suspended. Trust was implicitly suspended distrust. This distrust maintained and did therefore not shatter the social bond. Rather and to Marx and Engels claimed that what they ironically called “true socialism” also “spread like an epidemic.” https://www.marxists.org/admin/books/manifesto/Manifesto.pdf. For a ldiscussion of Hegel on distrust, cf. http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-r-files-5-0-f-ruda-on-hegels-last-jena-philosophy-of-spirit/. 5 Cf. Niklas Luhmann, Vertrauen. Ein Mechanismus zur Reduktion von Komplexität (Stuttgart: UTB 1989). 6 For this see the influential essay: Octave Mannoni, “Je sais bien, mais quand-même”, in: Clefs pour l’imaginaire ou l’autre scène (Paris : Seuil 1969), pp. 9-33. 4 the contrary, it was such tamed distrust that allowed for a different form of trust to remain socially effective. It was in this sense that a certain shared system of implicit distrust kept everyone steadily trusting that ultimately all was going well, or as well as things can go. Things changed with the pandemic. They changed, not because now the already implicit forms of distrust became practically effective, but because something happened to the suspension of knowledge. This is to say, that we did not move from a distrust that was unable to become practically effective to one that was. Rather the new form of distrust took seriously that previously the translation of knowledge into practice did not work. Because nothing seemed to follow from knowing that one could not but distrust (an institution or system, etc.), now a general distrust regarding knowledge came to the fore. The distrust generated by the fact ineffectivity of implicit distrust led to an intensification of the latter. It led to a general distrust in knowledge, more specifically in knowledge-production and presentation (by science, the government, the media, etc.). The practical ineffectivity of distrust based on knowledge produced a distrust of (the practical effectivity of) knowledge itself. This dialectical maneuver was performed not simply contra knowledge but was a symptom of a desperate attempt to reinstate its function. It was thus the expression of a desire to know, of a belief to be able to know. The pandemic did thus not generate a reassertion of knowledge against its practical effectivity. Rather the source of knowledge’s prior ineffectivity was identified as a sign that it was not knowledge proper, and it was pitted against another type of knowledge. Knowledge was split into two: into a form of epistemic knowledge – that remains helpless vis-à-vis the world – and into a knowledge that knows epistemic knowledge is ineffective as it is not really knowledge. This split of knowledge into an epistemic notknowledge and a knowledge of a different kind, was mediated by another specific twist on the dialectic of distrust and trust. There emerged an intensified desire to distrust official knowledge(-production) and to be able to trust a type of knowledge that appeared neither believable nor verifiable. This reassertion of a trust in knowledge against the very form of knowledge, as it were, is what manifested in the spread of conspiracy narratives and theories. In them, the desire to know even in opposition to what it means to know something, the belief to know manifested as a trust in what seemed entirely untrustworthy. There appeared a trust in what one could not but distrust. But because this attitude did not start with distrust, but against all appearance by trusting, it operated side by side with a distrust in everything that we seemed to be able to identify as knowledge. It is as if here the distinction between truth and knowledge that was so crucial for the philosophies of the 20th century was itself strangely reified by means of a distrust of knowledge and by a trust in what could not appear to be untrustworthy, as which often was addressed as truth. So, if previously the implicit rule was to distrust, so that you could keep on trusting, the pandemic changed the coordinates. The universally available condition was neither following the assertation “to trust what you know” nor that of a fetishistic disavowal of one’s distrust for the reproduction of trust (and the existing social bond(s)). Rather what appeared was a form of “trust what you can only believe and could never know and distrust all you can know.” A dis-trust. This created an intensified and universally available condition of possibility for a spontaneous paranoia of everyday life. Was it all – the pandemic – just a massive scam? Was it all just the plan of a few individuals who sought to consolidate their power? Is this all a charade to smoothen over the transition into a new age of surveillance and state-control? Conspiracy theories were at the same time the most refined and most regressive expression of this dis-trust in knowledge. The dis-trust that was represented in them, is a form in which a – quite derailed and literally perverse – belief in reason manifested: since they all indicated that there must be something behind the pandemic, a meaning to be deciphered, without trusting the official explanations. One should remember that paranoia is not the obverse of rational behavior, but one of its specific (pathological) forms. There was thus reason even in the weirdest and most unsustainable belief-systems. Not in their content, but in their form. This does not turn them into a form of justified belief – but it can be rationally conceived of why they exist. Thus one ought not to simply condemn them. They are symptoms, indexes of an experience of impotence. They are expression of a belief, of a trust in rationality even at the prize of endorsing utter nonsense; a belief in rationality at the prize of distrusting all types of rationality. But the pandemic intensified the coordinates of an age, where orientation can appear so impossible, the stupidest orientation appears better than none. If the pandemic made the already harsh reality that is capitalism worse and intensified the already existing contradictions as well as the structural breakdowns, perpetuated corruption, mass-sufferings and unsustainable injustices, it produced the dis-trust in knowledge and reason for the sake of knowing and reason, a distrust that manifested in the rational form of irrational beliefs in the reason of irrational theories; a trust in reason by means of practical madness. If these, as I suggest were an attempt to cope with the inherent irrationality and meaningless not only the pandemic but also of capitalism – the latter being the main reason why there is a pandemic in the first place –, it might now be the right time, to rethink the current trust-issues and start distrusting all the economies of distrust that is capitalism. Fighting fire with fire, distrust with distrust, creating an absolute distrust, which is no longer trusting just other narratives or some objective form of rationality. Breaking and distrusting the economies of distrust, creating an absolute distrust whose other side is that we can rely on nothing, trust nothing and believe in nothing but ourselves. The truth is not in the dirty secrets nor behind some invisible curtain. It lies only in what we put there ourselves. And this is what we should start confiding in.