Reimagining Trust: not as a product but as a medium

Field Notes #003, Rethinking in Progress, Essay

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Why we must reimagine Trust, not as a product but a medium.

I am from Burma, a country long suffered from the frictions of institutions due to the lack of trust between them. Some would argue and point to a small group of people and their decisions for all the problems and perhaps I personally will not dismiss their feeling empathetically. However it is also undeniable that fractured "institutional trust" significantly contributed to all the human suffering in this country.

This led me to work on examining trust from a fresh perspective.

Since the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, human agency has steadily become a dominant force in shaping history. Societies were increasingly reshaped by purposeful human actions — through the invention of machines, the rise of science, and later, the creation of governance systems and representative institutions throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

As these architectures matured, our world grew more complex, driven by cascading decisions, policies, innovations, and reforms. This shift toward an active, self-directed future demands well-grounded trust in leaders, systems, and fellow co-creators.

With this rise in human agency, our interdependence — both within and across societies –has deepened exponentially. From the division of labor to globalized networks, humans now live in systems that are vast, opaque, and impersonal. We rely daily on strangers, on processes we cannot see, and on institutions we barely understand — yet we must still act, decide, and live.

Global economic growth — despite recurring wars and recessions — multiplied our choices, often beyond our ability to assess. Trust became the cognitive and emotional shortcut through complexity, but one that remained scarce and fragile. The arrival of the Internet promised to democratize information and strengthen trust, but its later entanglement with misinformation, disinformation, and algorithmic manipulation only deepened social fracture.

In parallel, the liberal expansion of individual rights in advanced democracies, while empowering, also led to an overextension of identity boundaries — producing a proliferation of roles, values, and conflicting worldviews. Social life grew fluid, unpredictable, and often tense. Trust, once embedded in tradition or proximity, now had to stretch across difference and discontinuity.

Even before we could resolve the epistemic crises of the digital age, the rise of artificial intelligence has further blurred the line between signal and noise, knowledge and simulation — placing renewed pressure on the social trust we depend on.

These overlapping conditions signal the need for a new perspective on trust — not just as a moral virtue or psychological state, but as infrastructure: the invisible, often unacknowledged system that sustains cooperation, stabilizes meaning, and underpins the very possibility of societal coherence.

We must understand that Trust does not arise from information alone. Trust emerges from interactional patterns over time — embedded in how people behave, how institutions signal, how power is exercised, and how care is received. We must reimagine Trust as it flows through Patterns of reliability, Rituals of cooperation and Spaces of shared meaning.

In this sense, trust is relational before it is rational.

We must also be open to view that Trust operates through the social and symbolic:

• In governance: trust underwrites legitimacy

• In food systems: trust assures safety and care

• In conflict recovery: trust is the only viable path to peace

  
  

Hence, it is crucially important to see trust not as an input or an output, but as a medium — a shared, often invisible infrastructure enabling systems to carry weight without collapse. Like a bridge that quietly bears tension, trust can hold complexity — if it is intentionally designed.

As I keep working in food systems, notably through the upcoming Food Systems Forum, a tri-sector dialogue as an initiative to find collective solutions for the most urgent issues in climate-nutrition nexus, I continue to reimagine trust beyond food systems, understand what fractures trust, design methods to assess the its integrity and ways to scale it across different domains — starting from Myanmar.

Join hands with me if you feel this urgency, not only for Myanmar but for global community.