How can loss of trust be a catastrophe that destroys societies?

The accidents that we go through as a nation or society, and we are tested at every stage, from fires, floods and earthquakes – which are inevitable in the world – but the most important and dangerous of these are the social disasters that may accompany or come as a result; that is, the way we view each other after the disaster, and the attitudes and behaviors that accompany it, and how they affect us in our closeness and togetherness, or how they come with the opposite effect, contributing to our alienation from each other.

Physical wounds caused by natural disasters heal, but psychological and societal wounds, disintegration, and the breakdown of relationships and trust that can occur can only be healed decades and decades later. It is true that the dead cannot be brought back and this in itself is an irreparable loss, but we must realize that we live in a mortal world anyway; everyone is destined to dust, and we cannot prevent God's destiny when someone's time comes.

We are talking about the loss of trust that emerges after these major disasters, when the foundation of society disintegrates, a lack of trust is produced, which in turn indicates all signs of social erosion.

Demolishing dilapidated buildings and rebuilding them is achievable, albeit daunting, but what should we do with the dilapidated social structure?

The most important reason for this expected erosion after disasters is the loss of trust between people and the escalation of feelings of betrayal, and the elimination of this can only be achieved by investing in everything that would rebuild this trust. Trust, like honesty, is one of the most indispensable elements in any definition of friendship, whether between people and each other, or between people and their state institutions that have won their trust and are still keen to do so.

A friend is above all someone you are fully confident will be with you in difficult times, and you can easily share your secrets with him and you are confident that he will not reveal them to the public, he is someone to whom you can entrust your life, possessions and what you love without ever thinking that he will betray you.

Why can't we continue to live without the principle of trust?

Trust is not always limited to friends or friendship; it is in fact present and present even in the minimum of our social life, even if we do not invoke it in every situation, but in fact it is present throughout our movement in society, in every social situation we go through we find that requires us to have a degree of trust that we must feel otherwise we will be unable to interact normally in society. For example, every morning we are confident that the tire of the car we are riding in will not explode, that the driver we do not know is a skilled and specialized person, that the car is equipped to meet the road conditions while starting when we press the accelerator pedal, so that we are confident that the drivers of oncoming cars know the traffic rules and will not suddenly collide with the car we are riding, and we are also confident that the elevator rope we are riding will not break, and therefore will not drop us to the ground.

In fact, we are not fully aware of any of these things, and the driver driving us may not have a license, may have a license, but did not sleep or dizzy that day, and the car's brakes may have failed. However, we act on the assumption that everything is going well, without knowing or even thinking that it is not, and we do not try to make sure of it before any social interaction we do, but rather we go about our daily lives without having to question this apprehension of any of the options presented to us.

Thus, the idea of trust is embedded within an interactive system, deriving its importance from its historical depth, where the social and economic relations in the traditional society, which is characterized by simplicity and homogeneity, were based mainly on trust and ended with its loss, as trust was another concept of the society's customs, traditions and solid values, and individuals and groups adhered to it either in harmony with the culture of society, or out of fear of social exile, and it has always represented the basic tool for social cohesion and the return from it to the individual and society has always been great. By complacence, people with their differences gain a place in society with this trust that they involuntarily give each other every day.

The calculation of the "trust coefficient between people" in any society has long been considered one of the indicators of the strength of that society

Trust between people makes people look at each other in a noble way, and they prevail over the interests of others and public interests over the private, which achieves social harmony, improves public mood, reduces tensions and anxiety that have become a feature of the phenomenon with the complexity of modern societies, and reduces the burden on social control institutions such as security, the judiciary, municipal, commercial, health and food control, which in turn makes these institutions able to achieve more well-being and safety for their communities.

Trust can be considered the first clause of the contract between any two parties, whether these parties are ordinary people in their daily interactions with each other, contractors in business, or between people and their governments. This means that trust exists in a complex web of ethics and economic and social values at individual or institutional levels; therefore, the ability of individuals to communicate and sustain depends on the extent to which they share agreement on moral values and standards and the extent to which they are able to subordinate narrow personal benefits to broader collective interests.

Trust therefore appears to be a form of mutual sacrifice in order to restrict selfish behavior that corrupts the cohesion of societies.

Without this sense of confidence, we can't really even live our normal lives. Of course, as we go through our social lives we somehow trust many people we meet and don't know, but that trust is really trust within a certain relationship.

In things that require a little more involvement, and in situations where the distance is slightly more closed, we expect the people we take into our indoor spaces a little more reliability, choosing people who seem to deserve this form of trust, as if we are taking them to a higher level in our social lives.

There are those who like to play in everything that can destroy people's trust in each other, making them in a constant state of lurking; which in turn makes life unbearable, and they do so through the media and constant statements that all revolve around treason and the inability to let go of that selfishness.

Maintaining trust can only be achieved by preserving resources and channels that will repair the lost relationship of trust. These channels and sources of trust building are voluntary collective actions and activities that create close acquaintances and social networks, such as: family, groups, associations, endowments and foundations.

The calculation of the "trust coefficient between people" in any society has long been considered one of the indicators of the strength of society. More recently, there has been talk among American sociologists of a growing social catastrophe in the last century: a sense of loss of confidence.

These scholars linked trust to what they called "social capital" through the life cycle of trust, starting with the concept of human capital, which is based on the premise that capital has become embodied in the knowledge and skills possessed by humans, not in land, factories, tools and machines as in traditional economics. The sociologist James Coleman, one of the main theorists of social capital, asserts that an important part of social capital is present in the network of social relations and is linked to the ability of people to communicate with each other, which is crucial and critical to every aspect of social existence, not just economic life, and therefore the ability of individuals to communicate depends on the extent to which they agree on moral values and standards and their ability to subordinate narrow personal benefits to broader collective interests, and these shared values do not take place. Only with the element of trust.

In his book "The Tunisian Personality", the Tunisian sociologist "Moncef Ouanas" monitors the phenomenon of the disintegration of trust between the Tunisian individual and institutions, which resulted in the phenomenon of the spread of "paralysis" within institutions that exchange private benefits among themselves, and seek to dominate material, social and symbolic resources, and thus the values of wasta and nepotism prevail, and the phenomenon of adopting insults in the face of the opponent instead of dialogue, and preferring the method of circumventing problems in illegal ways.

Thus, maintaining trust can only be achieved by preserving resources and channels that will repair the lost relationship of trust. These channels and sources of trust building are voluntary collective actions, activities that create close acquaintances and social networks such as family, groups, associations, endowments and foundations. The decline in these activities dries up trust in society; hence friendship, and society becomes made up of very isolated and lonely individuals who do not trust each other; and no energy for initiative will emerge from such a society that would benefit humanity and create hope.

When the thought that anyone entering a relationship can deceive you at any moment, that the person talking to you is probably lying, that everyone who is doing badly and cheating is widely circulated, everyone who has that thought creates an excuse for repeating the same deceptions, lies and tricks;

In this society, everyone starts keeping bad files for others, and when you open the files that everyone keeps from everyone when the time comes, it's like competing for which of the contenders will bottom.

When mutual accusations begin, it makes no sense to determine who is right and who is wrong, who is dirtier and who is less dirty. Everyone's conscience begins to be polluted once allegations of corruption are used as a brutal political tool without scrutinizing their origin.

The ears of those who hear these rumors, the eyes of those who see them, the hearts of those who feel them, and the minds of those who think about them are contaminated. An accusation seen as a simple way to beat an opponent turns after a while and hits the whole society.

Unfortunately, evil within a mediocrity society has the advantage of spreading and contagion, so there is a difference between evil that is committed and remains within the boundaries of the individual and evil that is committed openly (in the public sphere) to harm everyone.

The evil that can be tolerated in the individual sphere when it occurs in public becomes normal, awakens dormant strife, and after a while a large number of people see it as normal and do it openly and shamelessly.

This trend leads to a corrosion that is difficult to repair, as not only do your enemies live in the corroded structure, but you are there as well, and when it collapses everyone is under the building, and everyone dies.