Between 2020 and 2021, COVID-19 killed an estimated 18 million people around the world and sickened many more. Beyond the sheer loss of life and health, it transformed people’s experiences of the world in less obvious ways. In a 2021 article written in the midst of the chaos of the pandemic, philosopher Marcelo Vieira Lopes argues that one way to discuss these changes is as loss of trust.
For Lopes, trust isn’t a matter of believing intellectually in the honesty or goodwill of another individual or institution. Instead, he describes it as a “peculiar type of background existential feeling” that structures our thoughts and actions even if we rarely think about it.
Some researchers argue that this background sense of trust is developed in childhood as a person interacts with caretakers. An individual’s bodily, non-conceptual feeling of trust underlies more specific intentional forms of trust such as a belief in one’s own abilities or a faith that someone else will do as they say.
“Trust thus emerges as a general sense of confidence that enables our being at home in the world,” Lopes writes.
Trust is such a baseline part of our existence that it’s most obvious when it’s lost. And Lopes argues that that’s just what happened when COVID struck. People lost the ability to casually interact with others without considering the risk of infection and adopted new daily rituals such as masking and social distancing. Many experienced doubts about everyday experiences, wondering if they had washed their hands well enough or if a slight soreness in their throat was a sign of a potentially life-threatening illness. All this manifested as an uncanny feeling caused by missing the trust in daily life of which we were never consciously aware.
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Importantly, these changes affected whole communities at once. To understand the significance of this fact, Lopes draws on extended mind theory, and, specifically, the idea that our background emotions depend on proximity to other people and a sense that we share the same feelings.
“I somehow feel that my fellow human beings are also feeling suspicious, or have lost some level of global trust, because of the spread of the virus,” he writes.
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At the same time, the modes in which people encounter each other and share their feelings changed as social distancing encouraged the increasing adoption of internet-based communication. In general, the internet makes other people’s emotions more consistently and visibly present in our lives. Reading and watching news about infections, social media posts on failed public health responses, and conspiracy theories reinforced the felt sense of widespread social distrust.
Combined with a lack of in-person social supports, widespread unemployment, collective mourning, and other disruptions to people’s mental health, these changes to our baseline feeling of trust disrupted our mental and emotional lives. Lopes ends his paper by suggesting that the task going forward is to “rebuild measures that foster trust, and, as a result, hope.”
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