Dataism and Capitalism (IV-B): Capitalism and the Radical Novelty of Trust

Trust rightly conceived completely reverses the hierarchy of what we might call the capitalist pattern of trust.

In Part III of this series, we pointed out the fundamental distrust present in capitalism: a trust in things and a profound distrust of persons. The Smithian “common man”, the homo oeconomicus, the Smithian baker motivated primarily by individual interest, is a notion of man that sees his freedom as directed towards things and not persons. If this freedom regards persons at all, it does so only as a function of things. It is not responsible to other persons, nor does it place any trust in them. This distrust of other persons goes hand in hand with the supremacy of desire and the primacy of wealth accumulation.

In this final part of the series on dataism and capitalism, we draw a rough and inexhaustive outline of an economy properly animated by trust.

Trust, Inseparable from Responsibility

Let me begin by pointing out that it is no easy thing to “trust in persons over things”. The “epistemic trust” discussed in Part IV-A of this series, the tenacious acceptance of the reality of the world, of its truth, and of truth as the standard that should determine one’s life, is a necessary beginning—and even this can be incredibly difficult to accept, precisely because of the nature of the trust and distrust that we have been speaking about in this series. For the trust we speak of is no mere passive attitude, no reckless, childish abandon to the whims of the world and the cunning plots of the astute. The trust we speak of instead means a committed acceptance of the reality of things and persons as they are, because of a fundamental belief that they are valuable, that they are worthwhile, even with their imperfections and their failings and their mistakes, and even their malice. Trust always implies the risk and vulnerability entailed in accepting the truth of the world as it is, the truth of persons as they are, and responding to that truth.

Therefore, trust is inseparable from responsibility. But this responsibility avoids the pitfall of being generated solely from within, with no reference to what lies outside ourselves, like sparks from the cogs of a futile machine. This responsibility is no mere “duty for duty’s sake”, or “duty for manhood’s sake”, with manhood considered apart from the person of the brother, the sister, the father, the mother, the bride, the child. Such “responsibility” cannot, in fact, be “responsible”, because it has nothing to respond to. Nor can there be such a thing as a responsibility that does not go out into the world, a responsibility that does not delve into the depths and into the concrete reality of things with one’s heart and one’s mind and one’s actions—for the one who responds must respond with his or her whole being. This is the responsibility manifested in the one whose contemplation bears fruit in action, and whose actions are rooted in and lead to contemplation, a contemplation that presupposes nothing other than trust.¹

Nevertheless, while trust is not childish, it is childlike. The man or the woman who trusts is the fulfillment of what was only imaged in the filial trust of the little child. The one who trusts receives reality as a gift, a gift from Someone, a gift imaged above all in the relationship of parenthood and filiation. Moreover, the one who trusts receives themselves as a gift, because he accepts his situation as a being among beings that preceded him, a being among gifts destined for him. The one who trusts receives his responsibility, also, as a gift—for he, too, is one who precedes others. And this responsibility, being a response to what is most fundamentally a gift, takes the fundamental form of gratitude to the Creator and, in the Creator, to other created beings, a gratitude that involves his whole being.² Trust is the necessary foundation of responsibility. Gift is the necessary foundation of self-gift. Man’s freedom, then, is fundamentally received from the Creator, a fact that he becomes aware of also through the mediation of other creatures; and his freedom finds its fulfilment when he gives himself in gratitude to the Creator and to other created beings, in the manner proper to each. To take a silly example, we get to know grass by studying it, and we get to know persons by conversing with them. We like grass (perhaps because it is beautiful, or because it is soft and nice to sit on), and we respond to the gift of grass, so to speak, by placing it appropriately in our dwellings and public places. But we respond to the being of other persons in a much deeper way, because there is much more depth to respond to.

In all these ways, trust rightly conceived reverses the hierarchy of what we might call the capitalist pattern of trust. Trust rightly conceived regards persons over things, and when it regards things, it does so relative to the Creator and to other persons. This affects the notions of wealth and poverty and of economic value, the hierarchy between the two functions of money, and finally, the orientation of the economic activities of production, exchange, and possession. We now consider each of these briefly, in outline.

Trust and the Radical Redefinition of Wealth

The one who trusts, in the sense that I have tried to explain, relates with things as they are, in all their depth. For this reason, he is capable of interacting with things deeply. His world, so to speak, has more density of being than the world of the person who reduces things solely to the dimension of profitability, for he relates with the things and persons in the world around him as a being among beings, a creature among creatures, a son among other sons and daughters of the Creator. For this reason, his world is richer. He is wealthier. This leads us to a redefinition of wealth: wealth, in its deepest and most proper meaning, signifies being in relation. Therefore, poverty, in its deepest and most proper meaning, signifies not being in relation.

But the one who trusts is wealthy for a different reason as well. I mentioned earlier that the one who trusts responds to the reality of the world with his whole being, including his mind. Here, we can now add that this includes not only a contemplative gaze upon the world in its personal dimension (though this is certainly fundamental) but also, and precisely because of the movement that generates contemplation, an ever deeper and more extensive knowledge of the nature of things, of what they are and what they can be. This is an important part of what is often referred to as “human capital”: the knowledge that “liberates” the value of things, that reveals their potential and opens it up for actualization. Yet we now see that this knowledge that forms part of “human capital” must be based on this contemplative gaze of the world, if we are to act on and interact with the material world in a way that is consonant with a responsibility that engages the entire person.

Unfortunately, the value of knowing what things are seems to be valued only little in many places in Africa, with education being reduced to a matter of grades and certificates that aren’t necessarily connected with knowledge, accompanied by the belief that these grades and certificates will lead to employment, to a livelihood, to a future of relative abundance.³ In this attitude, we see that there is a trust in things over persons, however well-motivated it might be by a fear, not at all groundless, of failing to enter the job market. However, this trust in things over persons, this seeking of security in things apart from their personal dimension, works against its own objectives. More importantly, it prioritizes a limited security in a world of reduced horizons over the risk entailed in responding to the world as it is, of letting oneself be encountered by the Creator in and through the world and other persons, and over the responsibility of each person to live a life of self-giving.

In what we have just said about “the knowledge that ‘liberates’ the value of things”, we also uncover a connection between trust and abundance. On the one hand, the cognitive dimension of trust explained above makes it possible to use things for the production of more and more things, and of more and more economic value. It makes abundance possible—and this is one of the criteria that leads many proponents of capitalism to vouch for it. For instance, they argue, it is the primacy of the motivation of profitable self-interest that has drastically reduced poverty—understood as the lack of possessions. On the other hand, however, as we have also seen, the personal dimension of trust qualifies the true meaning of wealth and, therefore, of abundance. Abundance is not merely the quantitative abounding of things but is primarily the qualitative depth of things, a qualitative depth that then may be expressed in a certain kind of quantitative abounding. But this quantitative dimension is always determined by the qualitative dimension. The fundamental question is not just “How much is there?” Production is not the primary economic metric. Rather, the fundamental question is this: What sort of abundance is both necessary and truly enhancing of man’s dignity as an embodied person, relative to his here-and-now creaturely call to love and glorify God, to love others, and to value the world itself intrinsically in relation to God? This second kind of abundance will at times clash with the first kind of abundance and its consequent notion of “productivity”. In fact, although the second kind of abundance sometimes means extravagance (as in the abundance of a meal that a mother prepares for her family on a day of celebration), at other times this second kind of abundance will tend in the direction of “poverty” as conceived by the paradigm of the first kind of abundance.

Trust and a Novel Meaning of Money

In Part II and Part III of this series, we saw that money, when considered exclusively or primarily as a store of value, tends to encourage the accumulation of things (limitless, in principle) and then to reduce the reality of the world to the quantifiable dimension of things—after all, we know whether we are accumulating things by counting them. In short, money so conceived encourages us to abstract the personal dimension of the world, other persons, and ourselves. “Value” has little to do with “being in relation”. Rather, it has to do with the number of things that we have—even if only in the abstract, symbolized mode of money.

Thinking of “wealth” as “being in relation”, however, calls for a radical change. What is primary is not the reduced possession of reduced things implied in all that comes with the contemporary primacy on the function of money as a store of value, but rather a deep relationship with the world that transforms the very meaning of value and implies that money itself receives its proper meaning in the context of interpersonal relations. In other words, money becomes primarily a means of exchange: a symbol of the world understood as being, first and foremost, created, and that thereby elevates the world and brings it into the realm of relations between persons understood, first and foremost, as sons and daughters of their Creator and brothers and sisters of each other. What is primary, then, is not a logic of accumulation, but rather a logic of gift and responsibility.

Though it merits deeper study, I will say in passing that the logic of gift poses a radical challenge to the political culture of many African countries. Both governors and governed often perceive political leadership as an opportunity for self-enrichment. In fact, accumulation of resources is often both the end of and a fundamental prerequisite for holding political office.

Trust and the Transformation of Economic Life

Finally, trust radically transforms the main activities of economic life: producing, exchanging, and possessing.

Trust radically transforms production by transforming the meaning of things, the meaning of the working person, and the nature of the relationship between them established in labor. Labor animated primarily by self-interest reduces the process of working, the product of work, and the worker himself, to realities-primarily-for-profit. We can take the example of the famous Smithian baker to illustrate the difference. The best possible situation for the baker motivated primarily by self-interest is that he finds a way to reduce his costs in a way which, however much it might entail reducing the qualities proper to good bread-making, would see to it that both the bread and bread-making nevertheless remain effectively the same. The differences introduced by the responsibility we have spoken about are overlooked: the time a baker puts in when he is working for people who matter to him, the care he takes to ensure that everything in the environment in which he works is appropriate to the making of bread befitting the dignity of these people, and indeed the way he invests himself in the process of making the bread, a process that is meaningful not only because of whom he is giving himself to in his work, but also because of the intrinsic value of the realities involved—the feel of the flour, the strength he has to exert to knead the dough, the smell of the dough as it rises, the pains of fatigue, etc.

Both the process of production itself and the artifact itself produced are of higher quality when formed in the logic of gift and indeed as gift, than when they are formed primarily in profitable self-interest. Moreover, the person of the self is enhanced more fully and truly in the former case than in the latter. And because of this, because the process and product of work are a gift, then the one who comes to possess these things receives them as a gift from another, a gift that demands a fitting response even in the very manner of possession: savoring the bread and responding with gratitude.

This gratitude has implications for the act of exchange. Exchange would not primarily be an attempt to reduce one’s costs as much as possible, even at the expense of the other. Rather, the value placed on things in the act of exchange would depend on the dignity of the other as well as on one’s own personal responsibilities, and the “personal” value of the artifact involved, all ultimately regarded from the perspective of one’s relationship with the Creator.

1. See Part IV-A of this series.

2. What we refer to here is “creaturely filiation”, the condition of being a creature that is proper to the created person, and which is shared analogously by beings at lower levels—animals, plants, etc. Divine filiation, i.e., the filiation of the baptized Christian who shares in the divine nature, in the very filiation of God the Son, immeasurably deepens the considerations made in this article, but without altering the fundamental structure of “gift and self-gift”, “trust and responsibility/gratitude”, and of the freedom of man—grace divinizes nature, and it is the same Creative Love that is the cause of both creation and redemption. Rather, divine filiation deepens and enriches the content of each of these terms: the gift of created humanity is deepened immeasurably and becomes the gift of divinized humanity; self-gift becomes the gratitude of God the Son Himself manifested in the sacrifice of the Cross which is made present in the Eucharist; freedom becomes what St. Paul refers to as “the glorious freedom of the children of God”; and so on.

3. See also an article from the archives of The AfroDiscourse, “The Vocation of Kenyan University Education”.