A matter of trust

It used to be that the leaders of our country, media, police, priests and bankers were the most trusted of all.

We would follow these influencers like sheep.

They would shape our thinking and actions, and control our thoughts and deeds.

This has been true since the dawn of time – money was invented by priests to control their societies – and has held true until now.

Now all has changed.

Our politicians are corrupted easily.  From cash for questions to the expenses scandal – remember the duck pond has now replaced my old saying of remember the Alamo – our  governmental leaders have been playing the system for years.

The media and police cannot be trusted.  You only need to look at the Leveson inquiry to know this is the case:

A report into corruption between police officers and journalists will be made public “imminently”, the Independent Police Complaints Commission told the Leveson Inquiry today.

And now we find various scandals in the Church from associations with the Mafia to the abuse of choir boys.

And yes, we then have the banking scandals hitting us almost daily.

From illegal foreclosures in the States to the LIBOR scandal in London, we have headline after headline almost daily about things that just don’t work as they should: HSBC money launderers, funding the Gaddafi regime (Barclays again), the RBS glitch … the list goes on and on.

Even the Vatican’s bank has been money laundering, and the priests, bankers, politicians, police and media are all in it together.

However, with a banker’s popularity being only slightly lower than stepping into dog poo on the street, the annual Edelman Trust Barometer speaks volumes when it shows that trust in financial services is the lowest it’s ever been:

I blogged a bit about such things in 2009, and yet what is noteworthy here is that technology is the most trusted industry sector.

Why?

Because there are no humans involved?

Maybe.

Or more because technology has put the individual in control.

Thanks to today’s socially enabled tech world, we can build our trust circles through our Google circles and Facebook friends.

We can work out who to trust and not to trust.

But technology has done more than this as it enables the individual to see global transparency of life through their mobile internet.

Every movement of the priests, bankers, politicians, police and media can be monitored by wikileaks and their ilk.

This is the reason why so much scandal is now being reported daily.

It is not that there is more of it – these scandals have always existed in time immemorial – but it used to be that you could keep things hidden and secret.

You can’t anymore, and trust will stay at the bottom of the cesspit pool until priests, bankers, politicians, police and media realise they have to change.

They have to get some morals back into their world and behave better.

As Bob Diamond said: “rebuilding trust requires banks to be better citizens” by changing culture, and “the evidence of culture is how people behave when no-one is watching”.

Exactly.