Distrust has become a hot topic in the North American media landscape as of late. A cursory online search brings up countless articles urgently pointing to an apparent trend of growing distrust in various public institutions (such as healthcare and policing) across the U.S. and Canada. Some lament the corrosive impact of misinformation and “fake news” on general trust and emphasize the potential dangers that low trust might pose to Western democracies. Others waste no time in calling the present state of affairs a “global crisis” of trust.
Conversations around the “problem” of distrust are often centered on the distrust of marginalized people, especially people of color. For instance, Black and Indigenous people are typically singled out as uniquely mistrusting of the COVID-19 vaccine in North America. Racial minorities have received a similar treatment in Western Europe. There is also a close focus on race with respect to attitudes of distrust against the police in the U.S. and Canada. The COVID-19 pandemic alongside worldwide Black Lives Matter protests have clearly drawn attention to the topic of institutional distrust as felt by marginalized groups.
Yolonda Wilson critiques this lopsided approach to the “problem” of institutional distrust in North America. She argues that questions like “Why don’t Black people trust the U.S. healthcare system?” often pathologize Black people, implying that “there is something wrong with [them] rather than something wrong with the conditions within which they exist.” Wilson shows that the idea that distrust in healthcare systems is unique or inherent to Black people in the U.S. not only serves to further disenfranchise them, but also neatly obfuscates “the role that healthcare institutions have played and continue to play in fostering a climate of distrust.” Moreover, Wilson argues that even attempts to explain Black people’s distrust of the medical system (e.g., with references to the long history of racist medical experimentation and abuse) fail to fully capture the harms that Black people have experienced in these contexts.
Taking this critique seriously, I want to shift gears and talk about distrust from a different direction. I suggest that privileged social locations are liable to predispose us to a kind of distrust that is rarely remarked upon in contemporary social discourse: distrust that is couched in a desire to seek and/or preserve a state of invulnerability. This desire for invulnerability by the privileged is wrapped up in existing power dynamics, and the resulting distrust tends to target those who are comparatively marginalized in society. “Top down” distrust, as I call it, often comes at the cost of the lives and well-being of oppressed people.
Trust and Invulnerability
Feminist philosopher Annette Baier—whose 1986 paper is generally credited for popularizing trust as an area of philosophical inquiry in the West—framed trust as both a response to and a generator of vulnerability: we trust because we are inherently dependent on (and thus vulnerable to) others; in trusting, we render ourselves even more vulnerable to those on whom we depend. While trust and risk seem to go hand-in-hand, Baier argues that without trust, our lives would be far more difficult (if not impossible). As such, at the heart of Baier’s account of trust lies an acceptance of vulnerability. When we trust another, we accept our vulnerabilities along with the risk of betrayal and forgo engaging in behaviors (such as surveillance) that may help to better “secure” our safety.
Following Baier, vulnerability continues to feature prominently in many philosophical works on trust. But the implied connection between distrust and invulnerability remains largely unexplored. While distrust does not presently enjoy the same level of attention in philosophy that its “nicer” counterpart, trust, does, there is some agreement among philosophers that distrust involves a desire to keep another “at arm’s length” as much as possible.
Let us approach distrust as Baier approaches trust: by centering vulnerability. Distrust involves an effort to avoid being vulnerable to another. In distrusting someone, we are denying them (or attempting to deny them) the opportunity to harm or betray us. If this is true, then distrust can also be understood as a way of seeking invulnerability from those we see as suspicious, incompetent, dangerous, threatening, or otherwise hostile to us.
What does the desire for invulnerability have to do with privilege?
Invulnerability and Privilege
Nancy Annaromao has argued that the dominant North American social construction of vulnerability as “weakness” and invulnerability as “strength” validates and perpetuates patriarchal oppression. In her view, privilege situates dominant groups as largely “invulnerable” (e.g., materially) in ways that lead them to aspire to even greater invulnerability (or “strength”) to access greater social power (e.g., via the patriarchy).
Annaromao draws connections between the rejection of vulnerability, privileged social locations, and reactionary violence. The socially sanctioned (and, Annaromao contends, patriarchal) need to secure one’s invulnerability can trigger violence from dominant groups against those who are marked as “weak” in the eyes of the patriarchy (e.g., against women). This is because according to patriarchal myths, “invulnerability […] can be achieved given enough innovation, drive, and if necessary, force.” Annaromao’s work reveals that the desire for invulnerability from “the other” can be a privileged way of seeing the world, maintained by dominant groups via the exertion of violence against those who are comparatively marginalized.
Erinn Gilson further explicates the connection between the desire for invulnerability and privilege. Gilson argues that the unwillingness to experience vulnerability is part and parcel of a “posture of sovereignty,” i.e., a way of seeing the world and others in it that is simultaneously shaped by and perpetuates existing relations of power. This posture of sovereignty rests on a “disavowal” of one’s own ontological and situational vulnerabilities as a social, finite, and embodied being in constant inescapable contact with others. This double disavowal coheres with dominant forms of subjectivity which are privileged in capitalist economic systems: “that of the proto-typical, arrogantly self-sufficient, independent, invulnerable master subject.” Invulnerability is desirable under oppressive systems which run on the notion of a master subject (such as capitalism, White supremacy, misogyny, etc.) because it validates the idea that full control (over oneself and others) is an achievable goal.
Crucially, however, total invulnerability is an impossibility. We cannot avoid our ontological vulnerabilities any more than we can cease to be human and ascend to godhood. Recalling Baier, we also cannot eradicate our vulnerabilities unless we refuse to trust altogether. The posture of sovereignty thus necessitates a continuous and futile quest for invulnerability. This quest involves ignoring or destroying aspects of reality which are disruptive, unsettling, or uncomfortable.
Privilege and Distrust
To be clear, I do not think all distrust perpetuates oppression. Distrust “from the top” works to continually re-stabilize the posture of the sovereign, but distrust “from the bottom” is a justified reaction to communal histories of subjugation. As Meena Krishnamurthy has argued, distrust can also be a strategic tool to safeguard oppressed communities against tyranny. Distrust itself is morally ambivalent: it can resist oppression just as it can perpetuate it. It is the context, direction, and location from which distrust emerges that is worth examining.
As Wilson shows us, focusing solely on diagnosing and explaining “bottom up” distrust runs the risk of pathologizing the distrust of oppressed people. This approach also conveniently renders “top down” distrust invisible by attaching distrust to marginalized groups, diagnosing it as a “problem,” and preventing us from identifying the ways in which the attitude is connected to sites of power and scaffolded by the desire to remain invulnerable. We can see these elements in practice by considering some examples.
The height of the #MeToo movement saw countless women coming forward to talk about their experiences of being raped, assaulted, and harassed, typically by men in positions of power. The public response to these testimonies, while mixed, has been marked by a persistent air of distrust. Despite the outpouring of support from some people (particularly other survivors) and a few high-profile convictions (e.g., Harvey Weinstein), women’s testimonies on sexual/domestic violence are still discounted, ignored, disbelieved, minimized, or framed as attempts to garner fame, money, and attention. Multiply marginalized women bear the brunt of this phenomenon. Testimonial injustice of this sort is a well-documented concept in feminist philosophy and scholarly work on epistemic violence.
If we approach the ongoing distrust of women’s testimonies from an understanding of the connections between privilege, invulnerability, and distrust, we can see the underlying desire at work in men’s distrust of women’s testimonies in particular: namely, the desire to protect the social and political invulnerability of men as a class, especially White and rich men. Importantly, this desire need not be conscious, and it is not limited to men: it can be adopted by others who are invested in maintaining the existing racist, capitalist, and patriarchal order. In the context of sexual violence, this desire can arguably even be found in other survivors if the victim in question is not “likeable” or if their experiences do not strictly cohere with that of other survivors. Nonetheless, the “top down” desire for invulnerability as it manifests across lines of gendered power benefits men as a class and comes at the cost of women’s ability to access justice or be taken seriously as credible witnesses of their own experiences.
The increasing number of women’s public testimonies also threatens to reveal the ubiquity of sexual violence in many women’s lives. This poses a destabilizing threat to the common (misogynistic and racist) notion that violence against women is exaggerated in North America, is a non-issue, is a “Global South issue,” or is otherwise committed by a handful of “evil” people and “criminals.” This way of thinking enables White men in particular—and those who are invested in postures of sovereignty—to preserve their self-conceptions as atomized, independent, and invulnerable individuals who are not as a class implicated or involved in the oppression of women. The risk posed by women’s testimonies goes beyond that of men’s fears relating to past behavior, personal accountability, or the statistically unlikely possibility of false accusations: it is a fundamental challenge to the posture of sovereignty. These testimonies threaten to expose this way of seeing as a deeply inaccurate picture of the world.
We can also analyze recent anti-trans narratives through this lens. Alexis Shotwell and Trevor Sangrey have argued that trans and gender non-conforming people pose a challenge to the self-conceptions of cis people. They argue that the mere existence of trans and GNC people who visibly transgress hegemonic ideas of “womanhood” and “manhood” often threatens to destabilize these identities and presentations, exposing them as not only exclusionary social constructions, but also as vulnerable to being challenged in the first place. We can thus interpret the recent push to legislate trans and GNC people out of existence in the U.S. in part as a manifestation of the sovereign desire to maintain the invulnerability of cis- and hetero- normative ideas of gender and sex. Once again, this posture is not strictly limited to heterosexual or even cis people. However, persistent “top down” distrust shores up the status quo in relation to the gender binary, benefits cis people, and comes at the cost of trans and GNC people’s lives and well-being.
Finally, we can take up typical pro-police narratives that have re-emerged with a vengeance as a response to Black Lives Matter protests in recent years: namely, that the police are generally “good people” with “a few bad apples,” that the police are generally trustworthy because they “protect” citizens from “threats,” or, at the most extreme, that Black, Indigenous and other people of color are lying or exaggerating their experiences or that those who have been killed by the police “deserved it” due to their so-called “criminality.” If we accept the connections between privileged social locations (i.e., Whiteness in North America), distrust, and the desire for invulnerability, we can see such arguments as manifestations of the desire to protect White people’s perceptions of the world and of themselves from the threat of destabilization that is posed by testimonies regarding systemic police violence. What is at “risk” here is not only an imaginary, racist, material threat (i.e., from an implicitly raced and classed “criminality” which is “held at bay” by the police), but also a real threat of identity destabilization in relation to Whiteness. There is a conflict between an accurate picture of the U.S. as a country operating on the logic of White supremacy vs. a fictional picture of the U.S. as a just meritocracy in which White people are afforded no advantages for being White and are not implicated in White supremacy as a class.
Thus, White people’s distrust of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color’s accounts of police brutality is not only a problem of testimonial injustice that is shaped by racist prejudice and undue credibility deficits afforded to people of color. It is also a manifestation of the sovereign desire to be (or remain) invulnerable with respect to unequal material privileges and to maintain Whiteness as an invisible, individualized, and apolitical identity in North America.
Ultimately, this kind of “top down” distrust protects the myriad privileges afforded to Whiteness while simultaneously protecting White people from identity friction, discomfort, instability, and crisis. The cost of the desire to remain invulnerable on the part of White people (as well as those who have thrown in their lot with White supremacy) is the murder of people of color at the hands of the police.
Rendering “Top Down” Distrust Visible
Of course, I am not arguing that all men, all cis people, or all White people always hold such attitudes of distrust towards women, trans/GNC people, or Black people and other people of color. Nor am I suggesting that distrust and the desire for invulnerability is strictly preordained and unchangeable (although distrust itself can be very resistant to change and counter-evidence). Privileged social locations nonetheless seem to predispose us to develop attitudes of distrust towards those who are comparatively marginalized. In contrast to how “bottom up” distrust develops (i.e., as a self-protective measure that responds to real conditions of systemic subjugation), “top down” distrust is both a function and vanguard of domination.
The desire for invulnerability which I have argued undergirds “top down” distrust should not be erased or ignored. Not only does it offer another way to think about “prejudicial” distrust that goes beyond the basic claim that our (dis)trust is openly being “corrupted” by racism, misogyny, or transphobia, but it also suggests that our trust and distrust are themselves fundamentally contextual attitudes, tangled up in our collective and competing interests. Our social locations and attendant proximities or investments in existing structures of power can shape our desires (i.e., for invulnerability). The desire for invulnerability—or for maintaining and protecting privileging webs of power from challenge, scrutiny, and disruption—can, in turn, shape the contours of our distrust.
I think those of us who are interested in dissecting the operations of power with the goal of ultimately dismantling intersecting systems of oppression would do well to continue exploring how the desire for invulnerability, privilege, and distrust are connected.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or the Associate Editor Alida Liberman.
Hale Demir-Doğuoğlu
Hale Demir-Doğuoğlu (she/her) is a PhD student at the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies department at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She holds an MA in Philosophy from the same institution. Her doctoral work focuses on dynamics of interpersonal and institutional distrust in societies that are shaped by historical and ongoing forces of oppression.
