TRUST

The crisis and opportunity of our age

When you read the following statements, what do you feel in your body?

• I trust that the institutions of my country are run in the interests of the people.

• I trust in the personal integrity and competence of the leader(s) of my country.

• I trust that the information broadcast by state media and large corporate media is unbiased and that the journalists are animated by a spirit of inquiry and a quest for truth.

• I trust that science is uncorrupted and conducted in the interests of humanity.

• I am able to trust what I see and hear on social media.

• I trust artificial intelligence.

I feel a pressure in the upper chest, around the breastbone and a tightening around the eyes, and I notice my nostrils slightly flare. It’s grief, I know that’s a strong word, but I once did believe all of these things and I mourn the loss of that faith. There’s also anxiety, so what can I do? What can we do? I don’t know. And finally a mix of disgust and anger, what ruin, what waste!

Marina Abramovitch 1980

The hollowing

There are signs that we are in the terminal phase of something I’m going to call the hollowing. This is the withdrawal of the emotional and spiritual investment that people make in an idea and that gives it life and power. Without it, whatever structure built to house the belief will crumble. The ancients maintained a temple flame because they understood this. When the flame is burnt out and the rituals become empty gestures, people notice. There is often an immune response, where some will try to cling to and revive the lost belief because their personal identity depends upon it. Opposing them are groups ready to accelerate the destruction of the idea, and whose own personal identity is bound up in righteous opposition and revolutionary fervour. The division between members of the community works further damage on what were once shared and living belief systems.

Invisible Men

None of this is new. Systems reach the end of their relevance and expire, or find that the abuses they practised in order to maintain control and perpetuate themselves become too extreme, too visible and they are ultimately overthrown.

What may be new is the totalising, all invasive nature of the control system. We observed how the Covid response modelled lockstep governance, with diverse and geographically remote nations coordinating and implementing variations of the same policies, in the same way that brands may tweak their recipe and pricing for local markets, yet still everyone everywhere is drinking coca-cola.

The hollowing, however, may also be totalising and what the control systems may be facing is total loss of power. What is less familiar is that the passionately invested far left and far right are surrounded by a larger number of people that are turning their backs on the whole game. Their energy is no longer invested in the fabricated mainstream media squabbles, or even serious international conflicts, Israel and Palestine, Russia and Ukraine. There is fatigue, cynicism, even disgust. Dry-eyed millions looking at politics without the comfort of conviction in any ideological framework - International socialism will save us! Free market capitalism always emerges triumphant! The New Jerusalem is being built with the faith of ages!

Empty slogans, just another face of the dice being rolled by the same hands.

The hollowing is the equivalent on the personal level of the end stage of a relationship. There is no heat left between you. The ashes cannot be rekindled. The promises of change, growth and devotion that once sounded sweet no longer sound convincing. You live together but split has already occurred and it’s only a matter of time before your ability to go through the motions fails you.

During Covid, Emmanuel Macron told the people of France that those who had not patriotically rolled up their sleeves for the miraculous, ‘100% safe and effective’ big pharma product, were not citizens. Did he imagine that he could publicly rip up the social contract and that it would only affect the other party? He made a grave error. A divorce is never unilateral. For the unvaccinated, the non-citizens, he had made the announcement that he was not their president. His government is currently heavy handedly going up against the farmers, those, as French comment sections point out who are the most necessary among us, who feed us and sustain us, not drain us of our revenues.

According to Statista.com “As of October 2025, Emmanuel Macron has an approval rating of just 13%, making him the least popular among the 24 democratically elected leaders surveyed. His disapproval rating stands at 79%”.

PR and Marketing were really smart, until they weren’t. They functioned along the lines of, it doesn’t matter what something actually is - highly sugared, carbonated brown coloured water in a can, but what it appears as - the life blood of our glory days, something drunk by healthy attractive teenagers sitting in the Californian sun and smiling at one another with bright white teeth. Even when you see the can crushed in the gutter outside the chipshop in the rain, a little of the shine should remain and overlay, even deny, the reality. Behavioural units, Comms agencies, vast campaigns engineered to influence different demographics have been at work for decades. This ‘it doesn’t matter what something is, only what we can make it appear to you’ idea has gone too far. It feels as if that’s all there is, layers and layers of appearance with either nothing at the core or worse a coal black core. The performance is identified as a performance, and most people are tired of living among actors, bots, puff pieces, false flags, fake hype and filters.

And this is the opportunity.

Trust is the gold of our age.

We desire gold backed currencies, not virtual digital currencies that can vanish from a screen. We are thirsting for trust and reality. I’ve avoided the word authentic so far because Marketeers cottoned on to the fact that this was what people wanted and in their efforts to mimic it cast a doubt upon the word itself.

Faith, trust, belief, love, these precious human emotions can only be manipulated for so long and when they become unmoored from the usual structures, the state, the economy, international cooperation, scientific endeavour, technological development, the church, etc… they don’t die, they are freed. Nothing is ever created or destroyed, it only changes form.

They can be returned to the individual, the family and to small communities.

Just before sitting down to write this article, a video came up on my YouTube feed by the Holistic Psychologist about how procrastination is a trauma response because for some people action doesn’t feel safe.

She says “It forms in childhood when chaos or criticism taught us ‘I can’t trust myself, and I can’t trust others to show up.’ So instead of moving forward we shut down to stay safe.

Self trust is the alchemical gold that we need to survive the age. As the systems become oppressive, or dilapidated, or malfunction, the withdrawal of energy from the totalising systems should be consciously returned to the self. Withdrawal can easily turn into apathy and self neglect. Why try if everything is rigged against us? But I see this moment has all the power of a death and rebirth. Energy must leave behind its old form and rise into something new. A conscious collective arises from conscious individuals coming together. It isn’t enough to build another ideological scaffold and invite everyone to get on board, where we can outsource our thinking to some wise experts who can be trusted to take care of all the big picture stuff. The responsibility lies with every single one of us. And that is empowering.

The Wheel of Fortune

The body is the source of self trust. I’m typing this on a screen with my phone next to me. Part of me is in my machine, partially merged. A way into self trust has to start with physical presence, decoupling with all the interfaces that mimic consciousness as much as possible, being physically present with yourself, or rather, being aware of your own body as an energy system. I’ve never for a moment confused myself with an energy healer but after years of meditation, I can feel inner subtle movement. The body is an instrument of truth. We know when someone is lying to us or misrepresenting the truth but sometimes we’re too divided from our own intuition or instincts so that we don’t know that we know.

This is ongoing work for me but I think it’s useful to share the process. We can confirm one another’s signals. “I feel that way too”. “I’m not alone thinking this”. Sharing ideas in a way that, even if there is an echo chamber and overlap effect, there will be fragments that can only come from the unique perspective of each of us communicating as honestly as we can. With time, presence and clarity we will rebuild a web of reality and overwrite the simulacra-infested cyber space currently masquerading as our societies.

If you’ve reached this far, thank you for reading. In part two I will delve into the more esoteric and spiritual aspects to self trust, and how the individual path, when fully embodied, is the vital spark that others may recognise and trust…