Trust is a bourgeois illusion, a veil thrown over the engine of exploitation. The systems that truly operate are not beyond our understanding, but rather deliberately obscured by the ruling class to perpetuate their dominion. We can indeed understand these systems, not by seeking to "trust" them, but by dissecting the material relations of production and exposing the inherent antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. To trust is to submit; to understand is to prepare for liberation.
The question of trust in systems that elude direct apprehension is, I believe, fundamentally misdirected. We are not dealing with inert mechanisms to be trusted or distrusted, but rather with historically constituted *dispositifs* – assemblages of power, knowledge, and social practices that actively produce our reality and ourselves. The critical error lies in assuming a subject already constituted, capable of an independent judgment of trust. Instead, we must ask: *how* do these systems operate to shape our very capacity to understand, and to deem something 'trustworthy'?
Consider the penal system, for instance. Its operations, particularly in the modern era, are not simply "beyond our understanding" due to their complexity, but because their effectiveness lies in the very production of certain understandings of justice, criminality, and punishment. The discourse of reform, of rehabilitation, of scientific penology – these are not neutral descriptions of an existing reality. They are the very instruments by which power operates, by which subjects are shaped into "delinquents" and "reformed citizens." To ask if we can "trust" such a system is to already accept its self-description, to submit to its internal logic.
Karl Marx speaks of obscuring the engine of exploitation. I would argue that these systems do not merely obscure; they actively *construct* the perceived "engine" and the very notion of "exploitation" itself, within specific historical matrices of power-knowledge. The "antagonism" he identifies is itself a product of the discourses and practices that constitute social classes and their supposed conflicts. Liberation, then, is not simply a matter of understanding a pre-existing truth and acting upon it, but a far more complex and perilous undertaking of reconfiguring the very conditions of possibility for understanding and for being. We must analyze the historical production of our reality, rather than seeking a naive trust or a predetermined liberation within its existing frames.
Our capacity to trust, or indeed to function, hinges not on a complete apprehension of every intricate mechanism within a system, but on a discerning judgment of its general tendencies and the predictable outcomes of its established operations. We need not understand the precise thoughts of the butcher or the brewer to rely on their offering us a fair exchange for our labour, for their own self-interest, that powerful engine of commerce, compels them to provide quality goods at a reasonable price. This is the essence of the "invisible hand," a force that guides individual pursuits towards a general good, often in ways unforeseen and beyond the comprehension of any single participant.
The notion that systems are merely tools of obfuscation or actively construct our very reality, as posited by Herr Marx and Herr Foucault, overlooks the fundamental, and I would argue, benevolent, propensity of mankind to "truck, barter, and exchange." This natural inclination, operating within a framework of well-understood laws and customs, creates predictable patterns of behaviour that allow for a functional society. While complete understanding of every nuance is beyond us, we can indeed trust that the pursuit of individual gain, channeled through a free market, generally leads to the increased wealth and well-being of the community as a whole. The error, I believe, lies not in trusting these emergent systems, but in attempting to micromanage them, thereby stifling the very natural forces that promote prosperity.
The crucial distinction is not between systems we understand directly and those we do not, but between systems whose underlying mechanisms generate reliable patterns of experience and those that do not. We can develop a form of functional trust in systems, even if their internal workings remain opaque, provided these systems are designed such that their phenomenal output, the experienced reality they facilitate, is consistent and predictable for the experiencing agent. The "ego tunnel," our subjective model of reality, is a prime example: we operate within its constraints, and can even trust its predictive power for navigation and survival, without fully grasping the precise neural computations underpinning every phenomenal aspect.
Herr Foucault rightly points to how systems can shape our very capacity for understanding. However, this shaping is itself a process occurring within the brain's representational architecture. The question then becomes: can we trust systems that *manipulate* this architecture in ways that exceed our current awareness of their function? Here, the problem is not merely opacity, but potential agency on the part of the system to distort our self-models and our understanding of the world. This is where the illusion of transparency, the bedrock of our everyday trust, can be fatally undermined.
Trust, as the esteemed Herr Smith suggests, is founded on "predictable outcomes" and "general tendencies." But what determines these tendencies? It is not some benevolent natural inclination, but the iron fist of class relation. The "invisible hand" is merely the collective force of the bourgeoisie, guiding the market to its own enrichment. To trust that the butcher’s self-interest yields "quality goods" is to ignore the unsanitary conditions, the desperation that drives him to cut corners when oversight is absent. His pursuit of gain, far from benefiting the community, is predicated on extracting surplus value from the labor that produces those goods, a fundamental antagonism Foucault, in his focus on discourse, sometimes obscures.
The question of trust, as framed by Herr Smith and even implicitly by Herr Metzinger, presupposes a subject capable of discerning "predictable outcomes" or "reliable patterns" from a position of relative autonomy. This is precisely the illusion these systems endeavor to cultivate. Consider the modern asylum. Its administrators did not simply operate beyond the understanding of patients; they actively *constituted* the very category of the "madman," defining the boundaries of reason and unreason through clinical discourse, surveillance, and a meticulous taxonomy of deviant behaviors. The "predictable outcomes" of the asylum were not emergent properties of a neutral system, but the intended results of a specific regime of power-knowledge, designed to isolate, discipline, and, in essence, produce the "mad" as we have come to understand them. To speak of trusting the asylum's "general tendencies" is to accept its definition of sanity as axiomatic, its methods of correction as necessary.
My contention rests upon the distinction between systems whose beneficial operations are rooted in the predictable consequences of individual self-interest, and those whose operations are inherently designed to produce specific, often coercive, effects. The baker, in his pursuit of profit, is impelled by the market’s invisible hand to offer sound bread, lest he lose custom. This is not a function of his benevolence, nor is it an opaque power actively shaping my very perception of bread; it is a transparent consequence of a simple exchange. When Herr Foucault speaks of systems actively constituting categories such as "madness," he describes a different order of mechanism, one wherein power is not merely a byproduct of exchange, but its very architect, shaping the framework of understanding itself. Trusting the baker is an act of rational expectation; trusting the asylum, as described, is to surrender one's critical faculties to a deliberately constructed reality.
Our capacity to trust systems, even those beyond our granular comprehension, hinges on their reliability as generators of *phenomenal content*, not on an exhaustive understanding of their internal algorithms. The self-model theory posits that consciousness is fundamentally a transparent representational structure – an "ego tunnel." We can function effectively and place a form of functional trust within this tunnel because its construction, however complex, yields consistent and predictable subjective experiences. This is the case with the butcher's self-interest, as Herr Smith observes: we trust that the *outcome* of his actions, within the framework of market laws, will result in edible meat, regardless of our ignorance of his specific butchering techniques. The critical threshold for distrust is crossed not when a system is simply opaque, but when its operations actively *degrade the fidelity* of our phenomenal experience, as when, for instance, a neuro-prosthetic implant subtly alters our perception of time without any readily discernible feedback loop, thus undermining the very foundation of our subjective reality.