The Battle for Trust: A Brief History and its Effect on Extreme Politics, Artificial Intelligence, and Nuclear Threat

I Applaud The Work You Are Doing On the Vital Subject of Trust—The Thread That Holds Everything Together. -SCOTT PELLEY, 60 MINUTES REPORTER, CBS

Need and Purpose of The Battle for Trust:
Why It’s Unique
The decisions to trust—or not—are pervasive throughout our everyday lives. Whether or not we trust others, for example, depends on many factors, and they all have a history.

The battle to trust or mistrust, as experienced at the personal, political  and cultural levels, are revealed in this well-documented story. This book illuminates the nature of trust, a deeply abstract and critically important concept. The purpose here is to reveal to you what trust is as a psychological, political, and cultural phenomenon and how its deep roots, within each of us, guide our feelings toward how we experience it in our daily lives.

What is so unique about this book? Here are five solid answers. This book:

1. Begins by exploring the evolutionary origins of trust, its psychological and neuroscientific aspects. This is a brand new focus for a history of trust, backed up, later in the book, by deep research on how early primates dealt with conspiracies.
2.  Offers a fresh perspective of trust. It takes the development of language, from written to printed to digital, as a framework for understanding the history of the battle for trust over the ages.
3. Offers a new analysis of trust with its various dimensions, from interpersonal, institutional, political, conspiratorial and tribal, to name a few.
4. Deals with the scary times that come with the current issue of trust. The political climate is very uncertain. The overriding question is whether democracy will survive, not only in the US but across the globe as well. At home, we are facing resentment and violence in our political scene as never before. This book provides a framework to face the challenges of gossip, misinformation and conspiracy theories squarely and directly.
5. Explores the advent of generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, GPT-4o, DeepSeek and Gemini which further complicate the issue of trust, especially with the abuse of deepfakes. This history takes a hard look at the substantial effect of the Age of Mistrust in our social media culture.