“Earn Trust” Tenet is Toxic

The earn trust tenet, a pillar at Amazon, and an implied or otherwise important idea at most other large companies, fuels toxicity and group delusion. Allow me to explain. Western culture became a dominant force in the world due largely to their effective societal organization. I’m focusing here on the concept of trusting your acquaintances as the default, as opposed to many other areas of the world where strangers and acquaintances are considered dangerous. Defaulting to trust spread in large part by English common law, granting their society large freedoms for individuals to work together and engage in prosperous discourse. America took this concept to an even greater extreme, exalting it within their fundamental constitution. What happens if defaulting to trust does not exist? Upon meeting, strangers must expense great effort into safeguarding themselves. This effort comes at enormous every-day cost, and minimizes the opportunity for collaboration in general. In contemporary companies the tenet “earn trust” surely is making an attempt to embrace a trusting social system. However, in practice “earn trust” does not encourage defaulting to trust, at all. Instead it sets up an unfavorable power dynamic between acquaintances, where one group must earn the trust of the other group. This installs a deep sense of superiority in one group over another, and the result is a large stifling of the other group. Their opportunities for collaboration are initially stifled by the onus of building trust. Trust should not be earned, trust should be given by default, in general. If trust is given by default it frees up competent individuals to make better contributions to the company without being stifled. Of course, defaulting to trust requires a competition! Since people will surely break one another’s trust at key moments, companies need a robust system to either fire or rotate incompetence and malice out of positions of influence. In contemporary companies, the system is largely frozen in fear of political lawsuits, or expensive severance allowances. Instead, we all operate where the fundamental assumption is: you aren’t trustworthy. You are guilty until proven innocent. Entire groups and entire orgs are able to justify group delusions, simply because “the other group didn’t earn enough trust”. It is easy to blame the “poor performers” because they “didn’t earn trust”, regardless of any large problems within a company, that might have nothing to do with the victims who are blamed. Earning trust is easily abused, and undermines basic western cultural practice. The people who originally installed this tenet lacked foresight and wisdom.