According to this week’s FT, even carbon trusts aren’t trustworthy. People are buying carbon credits that turn out to be meaningless and fraudulent. The bankruptcy of trust is truly pandemic. Alex says that folks have habituated, that we aren’t hurting enough to constitute new markets of trust. But these nascent markets are already ubiquitously exploited. Companies tout their trustworthiness in ads and marketing that anyone with a brain cell knows is fraudulent. Life in the straight commercial world is a perpetual cycle of longing, seduction, and abandonment. Last week, preparing for a European trip, I decided to see if my Platinum Amex was worth the annual fee. I needed two of the benefits they market–travelers cheques and a car rental.

arly on, I realized that none of it was going to work. I decided to follow it through, in a kind of hypnosis, now fascinated with finding out just how outrageous the experience could become. Altogether, I spent about four hours on the phone, and got nothing. They wouldn’t sell me cheques and charge them to my card. The platinum agents kept telling me they would, then they connected me with the “right person” who said they couldn’t. I repeated the cycle several times with the exact same result.

Barack Obama’s campaign stunned the country, and anyone else on the planet who was paying attention, when they announced last Friday that they had already raised $25 million. This apparently miraculous achievement shouldn’t surprise anyone who has read The Support Economy or is familiar with its argument.

The biggest market in the political or commercial world today is the market for trust.

People are starved for trust. THere is a desperate need to find leaders and companies that offer true trustworthiness– as measured by truthfullness, authenticity, accountability, and responsibility. Both politics and commerce have been engulfed by lies, corruption, narcissism, and indifference. This has accelerated the growing chasm between individuals and organizations.

THis crisis of trust is now epidemic. But this crisis has a flipside. All civilized humans need trust to feel sane. The crisis has therefore precipitated vast new markets for trust. If anyone in business or politics can find their way toward real trustworthiness, they will encounter an unlimited market ready to support them with money and allegiance.

Are you a dialectical thinker? That means, you don’t think in a straight line. Instead, you think in a zig-zag. The further one line of reasoning, trend, or development stretches in one direction, the greater the energy that will drive a new trend, development, or line of inquiry in the opposite direction.

We began The Support Economy with one simple proposition: People have changed more than the organizations and institutions they must depend upon–as consumers, employees, and citizens. We saw a chasm developing between the two sides. Life was becoming painful in that chasm.If you think in a straight line, you just see things getting worse, ad infinitum. Companies get bigger, more remote, and more outrageous in their treatment of the individual. Public institutions get more bloated, more inwardly focused, more indifferent. On the inside, everyone is on the take. On the outside, we are left to fend for ourselves.