When Trust Breaks Down In Society & Relationships

Will the fallout be irreparable? And then what?

At a recent conference, Mark Moss was talking about how trust is the glue that holds the global financial system (and society) together. Yet it’s not just about the concept of fiat currencies and our trust in governments that give our paper money value.

Trust affects society and the financial markets more than we might realize because most of us haven’t lived in a place or time where trust in the system collapsed.

We are seeing sudden and alarming signs of collapsing trust in the financial system lately. Moss said, “Trust is the most important ingredient that we have to have in society. We are at this junction right now where I don’t see how the world moves forward without trust.”

Earlier this year, the Canadian government froze the bank accounts of citizens who donated to the truckers’ peaceful protest. After they got people to comply and end the protests, the authorities unfroze the accounts. The choice was to comply with tyranny or loose access to your hard earned savings that you need to live. This was a shocking action from a so-called democratic and “inclusive” society. Naturally many people around the world began questioning the trust they have in their banks and governments.

Trust is further degraded when we see how the politicians, activists and corporations who lecture us about “inclusivity” are the same ones advocating for the exclusion of certain groups of people from society.

In such discrepancies, are we to trust their words or actions?

Actions. Always watch the actions.

Many of us have learned the hard way what happens when there are mixed signals in relationships. Unfortunately, the heart often wants to believe the nice words people are saying instead of seeing the ugly truth of what they’re doing. If we aren’t vigilant of our minds in these cases, we might rationalize and justify to ourselves that they really meant the words so then we don’t pay attention to the actions, which end up causing us to learn these lessons painfully.

A few months ago, around March 2022, we also saw entire countries suddenly shutting out Russians, not just the so-called oligarchs whose yachts were seized by several countries and also the international campaign to “seize and freeze” Russian property and assets abroad. Sanctions affected ordinary Russian people as well.

Mastercard suspended Russian operations. Once the bandwagon got rolling, loads of woke corporations announced suspending their businesses in Russia too. Some of the major Russian banks were excluded from the SWIFT global payment system while ApplePay and GooglePay were also axed for the Russians using those excluded bank cards. Even Upwork.com suspended Russian freelancers and clients from using their site. Citizens in Russia were suddenly denied access to their personal property, international financial systems and services or earning money online simply for being Russian, as the novel russophobia virus spread across the planet.

Imagine if any time a country had an issue with another country, it punished the innocent people of that country. Welcome to the new world order, where you can be cancelled not only for your views that contradict the Official Narrative but also for the sins of your government.

The plague of cancel culture is clearly spreading beyond social media and now into the global financial system.

Some might not care because it doesn’t affect them personally, yet. History, whether personal or collective, shows that the ostrich approach is always a foolish one.

There is already global discussion about launching a Digital ID in which people’s bank accounts, passports, national identity document, social media, credit cards, etc. will all be connected. Canada appears to be on the frontlines of the Digital ID. The Canadian Bankers Association even wrote a white paper to promote the WEF’s agenda to use banks to launch the Digital ID. Of course the new digital slavery system will be promoted as safe and effective… but haven’t we heard that one before?

What happens if we trust the technocrats and give them total control over everything we own, including our individual identities?

The WEF told us that by 2030, we will own nothing and we will be happy.

Just this week the WEF is gathering in a heavily secured and armed location where they’re plotting “government policies and corporate strategies” for the next stages of their plans such as “a recalibration of human rights” including free speech online. They’re also discussing increased surveillance and giving the WHO the power to be on site and bring in whatever globalist teams they want. That reminds me of the nameless militarized force that was flown into Canada on UN planes earlier this year to threaten and brutalize peaceful protestors. Funny timing that WEF meeting, because this week the WHO is also meeting to plot the international pandemic treaty that they want to use to usurp the power of national constitutions if the private global organization chooses to declare an international health issue of concern. These aren’t conspiracy theories. They’re conspiracies in action, subversive acts between two or more persons, right out in the open for all to see.

The mainstream media isn’t covering any of this, of course. The 5 megacorporations that own all the media in America and control the narrative are completely untrustworthy. It’s the same story in other countries. Twitter might now be surpassing the mainstream news media in terms of curating and promoting the version of reality that the globalists are pushing. One of my friends said recently, "the narrative starts on Twitter.” Yet these corporations assure us that they are the only sources we should trust for information so it’s okay that they’re censoring everything else.

The centralization of power is becoming concerning. An ever smaller group of people behind the private global organizations is claiming authority over the entire world and one of their main targets is “misinformation”. They want us to trust what they sanction and only that. A big problem is that they have lied to us and continue to do so while they assert increasing dominance over the world.

A few months ago, Mark Moss interviewed Jeff Booth, talking about how money will never be the same. They discussed some of the cycles through the history of centralization and decentralization in society and how trust impacts that. For example, in the 1930s during the Great Depression, the world was much less globalized. There was international trade but countries weren’t nearly as dependent as they are now on foreign resources and money.

We’ve never seen what happens when trust collapses in an economic and supply system such as we have today.

Unless you have your head under the sand pretending everything is fine, you’re probably noticing that there are escalating issues in the global food and supply chain. In order for the supply chain to function smoothly, there needs to be international trust and peace between nations. We often don’t think about the impact that trust has within a nation as well.

In that same interview, Booth explained this concept of how trust works in a financial system and how that affects each and every one of us:

Let’s say I’m a doctor, someone else is a farmer and someone else is a metal worker. The division of labor, based on trust, allows us to all specialize.

Without that specialization, we would have to live in a tribe with 150 people where we did everything together. So the specialization that allowed humanity to grow, to specialize, and all of the work on top of that, allowed us to gain function where you don’t have to be a farmer just to eat.

But that whole thing is based on trust. So when that thing breaks down, and money and trust is lost, you lose the division of labor.

Most of us alive now have no idea what it’s like to have to be a farmer in order to eat and feed our families.

In America and many other countries, we have taken this division of labor for granted due to the relative trust that has existed over the decades in our nation’s economy and financial system.

As we now watch fuel and food prices soar, as well as the cost of many other things, we keep hearing rumors about inflation and the possibility of hyperinflation. We have a massive national debt and one of the most alarming signs of trouble to come is that almost 80% of all US dollars ever created, were created since 2020.

In early 2020, there were a little over $4 trillion in circulation. By November 2021, there were over $20 trillion in circulation. There’s nothing normal about this.

Such a level of economic uncertainty hasn’t existed in a few generations in America. In fact, the long-term repercussions of our escalating financial crisis will probably make the Great Depression appear Little League in retrospect.

This is not so distant or unfamiliar for people in other places. As recent as the last 20 years, many countries have experienced terrifying currency reforms and the creation of new monetary systems due to out of control hyperinflation.

To put in perspective, for example, in 1994, one 1960 cruzeiro (old Brazilian currency) was worth less than one trillionth of a US cent after adjusting for multiple devaluations and note changes. That site linked contains many more examples of such occurrences.

In 2001, one of my colleagues from Argentina told me about the economic crisis in her country, which was so bad, people were climbing over her grandmother’s property walls to steal vegetables from her garden.

In most of the world in the 21st century, we exchange our time and labor for something (money) that we use to purchase food and pay for other goods, services, home, vehicle, etc. We don’t all have to be farmers to eat. That means we can each contribute something of value to society that we enjoy doing in exchange for money, which we can use to pay for other things we want and need.

In most of the world nowadays, we take for granted that we don’t have to farm animals and vegetables to survive.

Some of us are looking around now, wondering if we need to re-think our perspective of reality as there seems to be an escalating crisis the food and supply chain that will perhaps shatter in the not too distant future.

In that interview, Booth described how we’ve gained trust in money throughout history and how trust has been manipulated through debt cycles. He explains how wars are used to manipulate the monetary system when trust breaks down.

That credit-based system is prone to manipulation because the debt had to keep growing to be able to function. At some point the debt wasn’t able to be paid back. So people would go to war over not being able to pay it back.

It’s easy to see war as the cause of it, but actually war is the end state of money breaking and nation states trying to align in their own best interest, breaking trust with other nation states.

While the war in Ukraine seemed like such a shock, it shouldn’t be surprising when we look at America’s recent history of manipulating, funding and further corrupting that same country, plus the USA’s $30 trillion national debt and the fact that 80% of all US dollars ever created were created since 2020. That kind of debt isn’t going to be paid back in our lifetime or your kids’ lifetime, and “printing” (which mostly just means adding numbers on a computer screen nowadays) so much currency is going to cause a tsunami of disturbance in the value of our money and what it can buy.

The collapse of a monetary system requires several elements like those happening now with the massive debt and drastic increase in monetary supply, yet what actually causes the tipping point of hyperinflation, is the loss of trust and public confidence.

In that same interview with Booth, Moss said:

A lot of people see that the system doesn’t work and the central bankers are creating too much money. It’s been corrupted and government has been corrupted, but they think the answer is more government. If we could just get a different government, if we could just get a different set of people, if we could just create more rules to hold them back as opposed to seeing that the real problem is man. History shows that they’ve always done that.

It’s true that if people and nations could get away with changing the rules to benefit themselves, they would manipulate the system. Greedy and immoral people do that sort of thing to manipulate the cards in their favor, not just in governments but also in personal and professional relationships.

One of the main obstacles currently preventing people from seeing reality, is not wanting to see that such evil exists in the world and some of the very people they trust, are untrustworthy.

Regarding the end of the cycle, where nation states manipulate for control through war at the expense of others, Booth said that throughout time, it always turns into “a coercion through force…. caused by a breaking of trust in money, which is our time.”

When you give your time to a person, relationship or job, you probably expect for your time to be valued, respected and honored. There are, however, some people who are takers and manipulators any chance they get. They don’t care about creating a win-win balance in giving and receiving, a mutual collaboration. Takers, cheaters, betrayers and manipulators don’t participate in mutual investment because they don’t value you or your time.

It’s interesting to see the parallels of trust in the monetary system (which is based on the value and velocity of money) and trust in interpersonal relationships (which is based on values like honesty, loyalty, communication and atunement).

If our global collective system of trust is collapsing, that’s a cumulative result of what has been happening on the interpersonal level between individuals.

The breakdown in trust at the micro level has become so normalized, that it’s another major reason why the current events aren’t alarming to more people in society. Many people have become so accustomed and desensitized to betrayal and corruption that they prefer to just look the other way, hoping it gets better without any action of their own.

Our personal integrity and the relationships we choose (intimate, friendships, community) will determine how we move through these challenging times ahead.

In the financial system, we exchange products or services to which we assign value.

In interpersonal relationships, we exchange the products or services of our values.

Our personal values, what matters to us as individuals, drive us to behave in certain ways that express these values in action, producing something tangible or intangible that we exchange with others.

Relationships aren’t about a tit-for-tat kind of balance ledger but rather the trust and confidence that build over time like a good investment, as one contributes something of value to the other, and the other is also contributing something of value in return.

A healthy relationship based on trust can add a lot of value to a person’s life for many reasons, one of which is the division of labor.

For example, maybe one person is good at cooking and enjoys this activity while the other person appreciates eating food that others prepare because it’s not something they’re good at or enjoy doing but they do need to eat. Maybe that person really loves landscaping and is good at yard work so they mow, weed, water and tend to the gardens of the home, which the other person appreciates because they love to sit on the patio to sunbathe, meditate or contemplate, enjoying the beautiful natural space outdoors.

Those are just mundane things, yet they require time and energy to produce something of value. Of course, some people could do such tasks for themselves or hire someone to do the rest but either way, they are paying with their time.

The benefit of trust in relationships means that two people can contribute their personal values to a household, so that both people end up with more free time. Time is one of those things you can’t buy or make more of. It is, however, a beautiful and valuable gift we can offer and share.

There are also deeper exchanges of value in relationships such as physical and emotional intimacy, heartfelt support during difficult times, mutual witnessing of the joy and celebration during great times. These are valuable resources that benefit both people beyond what one can give oneself. Both people thrive more than they could alone when they exchange the products and services of their values.

In the rarest and most valuable types of relationships, there’s an additional layer of values exchange that leads to mutual healing of life traumas, spiritual development, motivation and inspiration for learning, personal growth and prosperity, as well as the actualization of greater meaning and purpose.

Trust is the glue that holds relationships together.

A lot of cliche signs, graffiti and artwork say, “love is all you need” but that’s a lie.

Have you ever loved someone who betrayed you, rejected you, abused you or didn’t value you? Trust, not love, is the foundation of relationships. Trust is where love grows and when it’s destroyed, the whole thing collapses.

Trust can be powerful and strong, yet it’s also so fragile. Trust is built slowly over time, yet it can be destroyed in an instant. When divergent values emerge and a debt occurs in relationships, war breaks out there too.

Once trust collapses, there’s nothing left but an empty abyss between people.

Sometimes people try to keep making it work, thinking that love is enough to keep it all together but the emptiness grows and the love rots over time into hatred through doubts, suspicions, memories, resentments, jealousy and even paranoia.

Have you ever tried to stay with someone after they cheated on you or betrayed you in some way? Probably not a day went by that you weren’t thinking they could do it again. And they probably did.

Behavioral scientists say, “Past behavior is usually the best predictor of future behavior.”

Sometimes people choose to grow and change, but that requires work, self-awareness and the humility to admit and repair mistakes. A very small percentage of people is actually willing to venture into the territory of self-healing and personal growth because it’s not the easy path.

The relationships we choose will either lead to a frustrating and painful repetition of the past stories or they will be an opportunity for a more positive form of mutual growth and healing, the creation of a new future.

One way or the other, we often learn the most about ourselves through the mirror of our relationships, a perspective we can’t always see in solitude. Our relationships have the power to elevate us or destroy us.

Everything depends on the trust factor.

It’s the same in society. As we watch layer by layer of the chaos unfold in the world, we are each being shown the areas where we could heal and grow based on our response to what’s happening. Undoubtedly, we are all going to learn a lot through this process in the coming months and years.

Where we are triggered and emotionally provoked to hyperreact, that means there’s something unresolved from the past to heal.

Where we are numb and shutdown, unable to really feel what’s happening, that means there’s something even bigger and unresolved hiding beneath the surface there.

Thomas Hübl taught me to recognize the mute pain in trauma, the absencing or numbness. He says, “What’s really hurt is silent and frozen. The thing that’s hardest to find has the highest healing impact.”

Valuable wisdom is frozen in the trauma of the past and this is stored in the nervous system.

When we are unable to feel and witness the pain in ourselves and in the world, we are unable to access the information that leads to learning and healing.

Where we are unable to feel the other, we cannot feel ourselves. What we are unable to feel in the world, we are unable to feel inside ourselves.

Part of the individual level of trauma recovery involves the inner witnessing of feelings that emerge as well as processing these parts of the past that have been fragmented and frozen.

The same is true in the collective level of trauma in society. Somewhere in our collective consciousness is the frozen, unintegrated wisdom of our ancestors who survived difficult times before.

If the trauma is frozen in the body like ice, then our awareness is like the sunlight that restores movement to the water and liberation to the soul.

Hübl describes the mutual witnessing that can take place between two people in a relationship and in the collective society through healing communities as part of the relational repair. He also says that there is a layer of our nervous system that energetically stores individual trauma, another layer for our ancestral trauma, and a third layer for our collective trauma.

When trust is broken, the repair takes place through truth and safety.

When we don’t feel each other through the atunement of our nervous systems, then we are unable to truly connect or feel emotionally safe. We can feel misunderstood, unmet or unseen. Trust cannot not grow there.

Our ability to atune with others only happens when we are present and not triggered into defense mechanisms.

Our defensive reactions come from the unprocessed pain of the past. These become our maladaptive relational dynamics, which cause disconnection and distrust between people instead of connection. When the nervous system perceives danger (whether that danger is real or perceived based on the past experiences), that triggers the subcortical part of the brain to react according to the past survival programming, taking us out of the part of the brain that’s used to socially connect. Essentially, it takes us out of the present and into the past. So the past keeps repeating.

The unresolved trauma creates subconscious defense mechanisms and beliefs that helped us survive stressful times, yet later on these can misguide us away from trust and connection. When we aren’t aware of these dynamics, we keep repeating the past and suffer more because we are getting in the way of what we really want.

Trust involves feeling self and other. It is the backbone of all social relationships.

Atunement is a form of mutual witnessing that creates resonance between people. This process is part of what builds trust in relationships. It’s a form of energetic communication that doesn’t require words but rather sensing at a deeper level. It’s often happening (or not happening) without our conscious awareness. We feel it, or we feel the lack of it, often without understanding what exactly we are sensing.

When a baby feels the mother feeling the baby (imagine an infinity symbol), the baby feels a sense of safety and connection, which gets wired into its nervous system.

A mother whose nervous system is overloaded with her own fears, anxiety, undigested experiences and unresolved traumas won’t be able to share this atunement with her baby and instead she will be transmitting her stress to the baby’s neurological system.

In the worst cases, the non-atuned mother could use the baby to meet her own emotional needs, neglecting, abusing or abandoning the baby, because she can’t feel what she’s doing and how that’s affecting her baby. She can only feel her own undigested pain and unmet needs so she uses the baby to numb her pain. In these cases where the baby cannot trust that the mother will notice or meet its needs, the baby’s nervous system gets wired to feel unsafe and disconnected.

Our childhood pain can become obstacles to trust in our adult relationships. When we process and integrate our traumas, we can reprogram our defense mechanisms in order to create new opportunities for atunement and connection.

When a man comes home in a tense or spiky mood from work, a woman who is in tune with him could sense that he needs some space and it’s not the moment for him to listen to her talk about her day. So instead, she’ll let him have some solitude and quiet time to himself where he can decompress before he comes back out to connect with her. A woman who isn’t atuned to that man will start talking at him non-stop the moment he enters the door without noticing that this is the last thing he wants and needs in that moment because she can only feel her own pain and what she wants. Atunement gives her the awareness of his needs. Prudence allows her to put on hold what she wants in order to give him the space he needs. The trust built over time together allows her to temporarily defer what she wants because she knows there is mutual reciprocity in the relationship. She knows the man will appreciate her willingness to give him time to decompress first and then he will want to honor her needs as well.

When a woman is feeling unsafe and disconnected due to some days or weeks of distance or silence that a man created at some point during the relationship in order to deal with something going on in his life, the man who is atuned to her will sense that her body is shut down and afraid. So if he wants to re-connect with her after this time apart, he will initiate open communication and emotional intimacy, being forthright about what happened and owning his behavior. This will help the woman to feel safe and connected in order to open up and receive him again. A man who isn’t atuned to that woman will forgo that conversation and instead make small talk then initiate sex in order to get what he wants, without noticing that genital stimulation is not what she needs in that moment when she feels unsafe and disconnected. Prudence allows him to put on hold what he wants in order to give her a sense of safety first. The trust built over time together allows him to know that he can temporarily defer what he wants because there is mutual reciprocity in the relationship. He knows the woman will appreciate his willingness to be honest and transparent in communicating about what happened in order to repair the trust so she can feel safe and connected again and then she will want to honor his needs as well.

When trust breaks down in relationships it’s because one or both parties have produced something that subtracted value from the relationship instead of adding to it.

Sometimes it might be a minor breach of trust that can be repaired through communication and right behavior. These minor losses of trust and safety could be the result of a mistake due to ignorance or a missed opportunity for atunement (a blindspot) where one person was unable to feel the other and maybe also viceversa.

Other times it could be a much bigger damage to the trust due to a transgression that can’t be repaired. Without honest, direct communication, there can be no repair. Even still, those words need to be put into action so the trust becomes built on something real, not just an admission of fault, an empty promise or a potential.

So the question is, can the trust be repaired or not after it collapses?

Trust is being destroyed between the people and corrupt governments, media, corporations, medical systems, civil institutions and global organizations.

More people are realizing that we’ve been lied to, deceived, mislead, silenced, coerced and in some cases even injured or forced against our will to comply with something that violates our personal values.

We the People have also lost trust amongst ourselves because we are becoming aware of everyone’s true values now more than ever. We are learning who we can really trust and who we cannot, both in our personal lives and in society.

When two people have opposing values, that will inevitably lead to betrayal for both parties. When one person values liberty and another person values control, each will act according to their values, leaving the trust in a state of irreparability because both parties will experience transgressions of their personal values.

The path to the repair and restoration of trust involves returning to the truth.

This hasn’t happened in society. We can’t even agree on what the truth and reality is. We are also realizing that we have incompatible values. This would be the moment to get a divorce in a marriage. But how does that work in society?

For the most part, we have no idea what’s the truth about what’s really going on except for some clear evidence that has seeped out of that festering boil in the dregs of society, which appears ready to explode at any moment. While some people turn a blind eye from it because it doesn’t affect them, yet, others intentionally hide the truth or willfully turn away from it when it’s presented to them. There is still much more that we don’t know yet and may never find out. None of this leads to the restoration of truth and trust in the world.

This current path is also not leading to social cohesion, in fact just the opposite. It appears we are at an impasse in society, much like in a relationship where there was betrayal, secrets and lying, yet the person who committed those transgressions (or did the bidding of those who transgressed) won’t admit it and insists on another version of reality, perhaps even flipping it around and playing the victim. When two people don’t share the same values, that sort of situation inevitably leads to the end of the relationship because nothing can be resolved or repaired.

Without accountability, there is no path to rebuild trust.

So how does this play out in society from here? How do we ever move forward if we are living in such vastly different reality paradigms leading to the collapse of trust?

When trust is broken in relationships, a person could stay and volunteer to continue to be a victim of ongoing transgressions or a person could choose to stop being a victim by setting boundaries and no longer extending trust to those who have proven to be untrustworthy.

It becomes masochistic to keep trusting a person who has broken the trust and not taken accountability or repaired the damage. Are we being masochistic to keep trusting our corrupt system and indulging in the toxic hope that it will change for the better? Are we being naive to believe that we can somehow merge opposing values across the great divide in society?

On an interpersonal level, a person could end such a relationship in order to protect themselves from further frustrations, loss, betrayal and harm. That will be a very difficult decision if there’s a dependency on the other person for money, sex, emotional support, housing or other resources.

In order to make healthy decisions around trust, it’s important to first return to self-reliance and then align with trustworthy people who are on the same page.

This is true in our interpersonal relationships and also in society. We have become so dependent on the system for survival (like going to the grocery to buy food) that most of us don’t know how to be more self-reliant if things fall apart. But we also can’t do everything ourselves. So we ought to know who to trust and how to connect with those people so we can share value and divide the labor.

Trusting another person is like making an investment in their future behavior.

Sometimes we make good investments and other times we suffer losses. Whether in the markets or in relationships, when we realize we’ve made a poor investment, the best option is usually to cut our losses and pull out before more loss is incurred.

A relationship becomes dysfunctional when trust is gone. So does a society.

When trust collapses, the social cohesion disintegrates and people no longer want to work together because that means trusting others who they don’t trust and often have no reason to trust due to past behavior.

The absence of trust also entices people to look for false gurus who play savior and preach promises of safety and unity.

So what can one do to prepare for the collapse of trust in the global system?

Well, we haven’t been through this before so your guess is as good as mine and please do feel free to comment and contribute ideas.

Extracting insights from the micro level and applying them to the macro, I would suggest the following.

Define reality and what’s important to you. Also be willing to adjust your perspective when reality changes or new information becomes available.

Speak the truth with courage. Be willing to listen too.

Find those who resonate with you and want to share value in order to divide the labor so you don’t have to do it all. Choose your close allies wisely. If you surround yourself with people stuck in the victimhood and entitlement, guess who’s going to be the only responsible adult in the room? Our relationships will be one of our greatest assets (or worst liabilities) in the coming times of instability in our world.

Internally, and through our connections with those we trust, we can also face and process the loss that comes with knowing that things aren’t ever going back to normal as we knew it before 2020. We can also share ideas to prepare and hedge for the fallout so we have the best chances of surviving, and even thriving, through the chaos and culling.

It’s important to also plant seeds of hope in our hearts and communities that eventually we can create something better, based on the wisdom we integrate from the past and the new choices we make for the future, if each of us contributes something of value to the whole, collaborating with those we trust.

Transformation is scary yet a necessary part of life. When things aren’t working, it usually has to collapse for something better to be created. Don’t let yourself get lost in the darkness when you can’t yet see the light at the end of the tunnel. Imagine the innate faith that a seed must have, buried in the dark soil yet driven, by some unexplainable force, to sprout and grow into the light where it can bear the fruits of its labor.