The New York Times' website has a number of interesting blog discussions going on at any one time, but over the weekend Dick Cavett and David Brooks posted a back-and-forth discussion on the erosion of trust in our society - speaking about what Brooks suggested might be a lack of "social trust" that could account for people's lack of support for any positive solution to our country's current problems (like overspending).
Cavett referred to Martha's and my book Rules to Break & Laws to Follow, pointing out that Chapter 7 was all about trust, and doing a very serviceable job of linking this problem to the political issues involved. He even surmised that our advice to Toyota, at this time of stress, would be "to do more to re-woo disaffected customers than just customary apologies and reform -- to do something 'extra' and original. Something like five years of free maintenance, a paid vacation, school tuition? Maybe fun-designed safety helmets?"
In fact, that is indeed what we would advise a company in Toyota's situation - to create a policy or offer to customers that recommits the brand to unrivaled quality, no matter what. Our advice to Toyota would be to do something analogous to JetBlue's "Customer Bill of Rights," a promise they adopted to reassure customers in the wake of the disastrous Valentines Day 2007 ice storm and service interruption (Chapter 9 of the book). Comcast - a company afflicted with its own set of nagging service problems - has recently adopted exactly this kind of policy, creating a seven-point Comcast Customer Guarantee and advertising it heavily with television commercials.
With respect to recovering trust in our social and political discussions, however we would circle back first to the two different requirements for earning someone else's trust: intent and competence. First, the person whose trust you want has to believe you intend them no harm - that is, that you intend to act in their interest, not just your own. In social or political terms, this might mean that you and the other party both have the same objective (to better society) - although you may differ in the means to achieve it. But second, the person has to believe you are actually competent to act in an effective way - that you have the ability, in other words, to carry out this intent.
In political discussions, confusing intent and competence is the surest way to radicalize a debate over policy, because questioning someone's political intent is like casting doubt on their moral worth. Conservatives who charge Obama with being a socialist, for example, or liberals who charge that Bush actually lied about WMD - these are extreme views that tend to cast the actors on the opposite side of a political discussion as evil. In fact, however, at least in this country and most other civilized democracies, we all have very similar desires to better ourselves and our societies. We differ, mostly, in our assessment of which policies will show the most competence at achieving these objectives. For example, in economic terms liberals often think a social safety net will be more effective at meeting the goal of improving our society, while conservatives often think self-reliance will be more effective. These are questions of which policy is most competent to carry out our common intent; they don't require anyone to assert that one objective is good and the other is evil. When we question the actual intent of our political opponents, we are ourselves contributing to the erosion of trust we all sense.
Readers who want to make their own contribution to an improved level of trust in our political debate could do this: In a political discussion, rather than seeking out people they already agree with and then enjoying this self-affirming conversation about a common point of view, they should seek out someone they don't agree with, politically, and try to understand what it would really be like to be that person - to see the world the way that person sees it, and to think the way that person thinks.
The most trustworthy businesses are those that can actually take their customer's perspective. And trust will only be restored to our political system when discussions involve serious efforts to understand other citizens' legitimate views - views that are every bit as morally justified as yours or mine are.